Gario

Hey everyone! I haven't posted anything on the WIP boards in a while (and I find myself writing on here often enough), so I decided to throw something out there for you guys to tear up . Jurassic Park - Hot Steppin' Dinosaurs http://www.box.net/shared/f3mn1049ky Source Yeah, it's a techno/trance mix of the already heavily remixed Mountain theme from Jurassic Park snes game. The drums are weak and repetitive, as I've just copy/pasted the same beat throughout, but they're unfinished... if you know of any good Reason bass drum samples I'm listening - I never seem to find anything that works well for this genre. I'm also not satisfied with the intro and there is no work with any of the velocities or dynamics. It's also unfinished, as I'm sure you can tell . Feedback is appreciated!

Well, thanks! I'm glad you enjoyed it - and I hope it encourages people to write more music and analyze more VG music on their free time (it's always fun to read other people's interpretations of music - often they catch something you'd never think about).

True. In any case, I doubt anyone would get a remix that they're working on as a challenge - the odds of that happening are pretty slim.

Pathetic excuse, in my opinion. What, did he think that his mother was an alien (like the enemies in Halo 3), and decided to shoot her? Are people seriously going to blame video games on the death of someone? No, it's the fact that the parents didn't take the possibility of addiction seriously that got the mother killed. It's still sad, though.

Blizzard is a master of holding things up so this patch delay is absolutely no surprise... Even still, I did go all out and practice like crazy for it. Yeah, another practice run would be good for all of us when they finally give the two week notice .

Reading that again, it makes me lol... Needless to say I'm pretty sad that it isn't out yet ...

I think it would be reasonable to request another challenge, as it wouldn't necessarily be a 'challenge' if your already working on it.

I'm pretty pumped about this - it'll certainly be interesting to see what I can put out now and compare it to the crap I was doing last year .

Ah, but no matter what you say it'll always be interpreted differently based on the temperament of those that read it. If you write something in as neutral of a fashion as possible, if someone is really pissed off they'll read it as an attack, or if someone is really happy they'll take it as a compliment. Thus, your neutrality will be in vain .

Alright, if the private gateway works I'll check it out and see if I can still be in this (Here's hoping ).

Hey OCR! Time to give you all another dose of music theory goodness! In honor of the new TMNT IV arcade 3d remake that is coming out I've decided to analyse that exact soundtrack (the SNES version, of course ). Sweet game (in fact, the first I ever played on my own home console, and it was epic, let me tell you - best christmas ever). However, it's made even more sweet because of it's memorable soundtrack - made memorable due to it really sounding like the turtles through and through. How did they achieve this uniformity in sound? How did they make it sound like 'Turtles' even with only one listening of the music (like it did for me)? That's right, that took their musical ideas straight from the source, baby! What a source, might I add - this is a very interesting game in that it's one of the very few that had an outside source to derive their music from and actually took artistic advantage of it. Other games have music from movies and such in the soundtrack (Terminator, Star wars, etc.), but they more often than not actually arranged the original for the videogame port almost note for note (imagine doing a remix of the SNES starwars (doesn't matter which episode) for OCR... what do you think their response (insertion needed) would be?). TMNT IV, however, wouldn't have that problem (link to OCR remixes), yet it is heavily related to the original soundtrack... why? Because the video game has taken apart the original theme and taken multiple motives out of it and rearranged them in order to create new and interesting music out of it. Take a look at the theme music (piano reduction done by me for the sake of this analysis)... If one studies it closely, they'll realize there is not much going on in it, motivically. In fact, there are only five significantly different motives throughout the whole thing (three melodic ideas and two bass ideas)... and one of them is only significant in the TMNT IV game soundtrack (the one highlighted in blue in the score). Hey, wait a minute, isn't there more to the song other than these five ideas? No, everything in the music is a variation of some sort or another of these very basic ideas - for example, the verse (mm 9 - 10 & 13 - 14) is the first melodic motive when it is inverted (flipped) and retrograded (backwards). The bass motion from mm17 - 20 is the second bass motive inverted and using a different rhythm. Reusing motives keeps a piece of music unified and connected. By the way, the singers for each of the verses is a different turtle... Don sings the first part of the verse, Leo sings the second, Raph the third and final part of the verse (Mickey actually doubles Raph at the end). This has nothing to do with what I'm going to talk about, but I just heard that last night, and it was so cool and brilliant that I had to mention it somewhere . Seriously, listen to it with that in mind - the different timbres of each voice part fits that explanation perfectly. Now, back to TMNT IV - TIT... maybe the acronym isn't so good, I'll should probably just write Turtles in Time... The music written for this game takes the motives I mentioned above and creates new, unique music based off of it. A few tracks make this more obvious than others, but the influence is always there. The first track I'm looking at is the 'Roof' track (I'm using the ingame naming method, for better or worse). Now, I hope this is an obvious relationship to the original theme song (intro, theme chorus, theme verse... yeah, nearly the same, in fact). However, I would like to point out that they are, in fact, not the same. There are variations that make this a song in it's own right (the style is very different from the original, for example - funk vs straight 80's rock), not to mention an intro that actually makes the chorus function as a sort of 'verse' - quite different from how the original treated that material (in the original theme it's more like an intro and outro to the song). In fact, I'd say it takes a considerable amount of liberty with the harmonic structure and texture - taking advantage of the openess of the original (notice that most of the harmonies are not complete in the original theme, even if the harmonies are implied) and incorporating some of their own riffs and lines to fill in some gaps. I feel that if OCR was around back then, this would be considered a perfect remix of the source tune (it has enough source, yet it varies enough to create interest, as well)... other than the sample quality. In contrast to the last song, Sewerage (yes, that's what it's called ingame - the beauty of Engrish) doesn't repeat the theme nearly as clearly... yet it's still easy to recognize that it's certainly a Turtles tune, right there. Quite a bit of complex motivic usage is going on here, but it is very clear that most of the ideas generated from the original theme. The intro theme (0:00 - 0:08 ), for example, is a variation of the bass motive 2 - except instead of using it as a bass, they use it as a melodic idea (who says that you have to use motives the same as they were originally used?). Even more interesting is that the second melodic motivic idea is integrated into the bass motive, adding the leap up into the descending line (like that motive does), only it leaps into the bass motive's notes. The texture of that part also has the first melodic motive playing, although it isn't nearly as salient. After establishing itself as the theme of the song, it plays with a variation of that newly created theme (0:09 - 0:18 ). After that it plays the notes (in scale degrees) 1-3-1-4-3-1-b7-1 (the 3rd being major, not minor). What is significant about that? The first bass motive's first three notes are 1-3-4 (the third is flat in the original, I know - but the impact is still there), so this melody is dancing around the original harmonic motion very quickly. The relationship to the original is very salient, there, if you listen for it, and it leads back up to the theme that it introduced earlier. Finally at the end of the song (0:37 - 0:47), it has a very prominent neighboring motion that rings like the first melodic motive of the original theme - that steps down. Notice that that theme in the original actually is an inverse of what is here - and in the original it tends to step up. Thus, this ending part is an inverse of that original motivic idea in the theme. Pretty heavy relationship, eh? The level after that, Fortress, derives from a similar vein - after the intro material (which is an inversion of the first melodic motive) it uses the second bass motive as the theme of the song (0:09 - 0:11). However, it does not integrate the melodic idea into that theme at all - instead just descending without any leaps to break it up. It does follow the idea (0:11 - 0:13) with a rhythmic variant of the first melodic idea, though (the group of neighbors). The solos that occur after the melody use the bass motive again (actually in a similar fashion as it's used in the original at mm 17 - 20, although it's missing one measure of it). After repeating that, it solos over a variation of that bass motion again (It isn't very clear, though - I'm shooting from the hip for 0:26 - 0:35). From 0:35 - 0:52 the music harmonizes over the first bass motive (incomplete, but still that motive, note for note) with a melody that follows the rhythm of the first melodic motive (along with a small neighbor motion that keeps it melodically in line with it), followed by a melodic version of the bass motion that was just played (actually, it's similar to the noodling notes from Sewerage in that it plays around with the notes 1-3-4, but it's shape is much more similar to the shape in the original motive, here). Of course, at 0:50 it plays melodic motive 3, which basically sets any song as a Turtles song . By the way, why the hell hasn't anyone remixed this track yet!? It really rocks. I can't go through every song on the track (well, I could, but I don't know if anyone would want to read it then, lol), but before I close this analysis I want to look at Star Base (as it's always been my favorite track on the game). The melody is, almost note for note, the second melodic motive, and it's a powerful rendition of it, let me tell you. Instead of having the note leap quickly up (like in the original) Harumi Ueko and Kazuhiko Uehara extended the rhythm so each note has a sense of importance. After that great opening it leads into a variation of the original theme (the first melodic motive and first bass motive together). In fact, other than the opening it plays something very close to the original theme music - but that opening really changes the mood from TMNT to something heroic, and has always stuck in my heart as such. Take a look at the soundtrack yourself - you'll find it oozes with TMNT goodness everywhere you turn. The techniques used to expand and reuse the motives are also things that many remixers here do in order to vary their own interpretations of the music when they remix and want to incorporate original material that doesn't sound too detached from the original sources. Listen to a few remixes on this site and try to derive where the variations came from - you'll learn that they often do very clever things to the source in order to make it their own music (and I commend every one of you for this). Until next week!

I got it from Blizzard's site, but the update doesn't install. It tells me the key is bad and I need to reinstall.

Um...what? You didn't get that mixed up or anything, right? I told her that I forfeited the match because my key isn't working on Bnet anymore, and I can't find the keys to reinstall it. You know that I'm unable to participate without a proper key (it won't even let me install updates, so I can't play with other people due to that ), right?

To the man that's made one of my favorite mixes on this site, Happy Birthday... ...now keep on trucking the music!

lol, wow - I didn't even know you responded to what I said, Rama... this thread grew too quickly for me to notice. I feel obligated to respond to that (even though it was over two weeks ago...). I was really addressing Hoboka (and a few others I've seen) very specifically in that thread, so alas it came out as 'everyone' in an overgeneralization. Your quite right with what you said to me (hell, I affirm it in other posts in this thread), so... yeah. Umm... yeah, they have, except they don't say it won't be accepted on OCR ever specifically. I'd have to say - this thread's brought out a little bit of hostility with everyone (but at the same time it is very interesting to follow). OCR would be boring without these little tidbits of humanity sprinkled here and there, though.

Nah - I'm a hack remixer who really loves the raising standards of this site (as it prevents me from embarrassing myself with old music that was really crap-tastic). Go OCR!

Clearly not... but you do know who Chuck Norris is, right? Only a god among men...

Orchestrating a midi isn't orchestration. You need to know the limits of the instruments and why they are limited in such a fashion - with midi you don't have any limitations, so you lose some central elements to orchestration (it's funny looking at a score from midi compositions - believe me, most of them show a complete lack of understanding the limitations of instruments). For the sake of the sound, I agree with this. If your in your school band or orchestra, one of the best things you can do is talk with your classmates about how they play their instrument, what's hard for them and what's not, etc., and listen to what every instrument is doing in the music you play (if your not in band or orchestra, then shame on you ). That'll help more than anything. ...and don't forget to listen to other classics thoroughly - that's 'instrumental' to your success (sorry, bad pun ).

Wow, this fulfills two things that I've been waiting for a long time for... 1.) Another Mazedude mix 2.) A remix of MM2 Wily stage 3-4 3.) A remix using clipping as a musical element Wait, that's three things... Anyhow, once again Mazedude is here to show us what the full potential of remixing is. I'm amazed that you could make the fuzz as musical as you did, and you have my thanks for doing it. I salute him, too... but I doubt he could roundhouse Chuck Norris.

Hopefully there will be more people who finish this time around - I'll do what I can to get something finished for this project (as long as I don't have the Donkey Kong 'Hammer Theme' or something ).

Yeah, I've been using the ISO for some time now... but without the keys on the CD case I can't reinstall it... ... and how the HELL did you make your CD explode?!

I can't get on Bnet, at the moment (or for a while, by the looks of it). I'm afraid I've got to forfeit the match. Sorry - I'll enjoy watching what you guys got, though. Thus, Elesarana would be winner by default... Gah! I wish I could find my original CDs to reinstall the damn thing so I could fix this, but I lost them (I wouldn't have this problem if I had them ).

It was in the WIP forums not long ago... you'd probably be able to find it with the search bar, in fact. I agree that I'd like to see the final product, though.

Finding this request has made my day. There's really only one song in Wrecking Crew, though... and whoever remixes it would be my hero .

2008 contest... Wait, you didn't sign up for it last year? Then how is that... nevermind, not important.EDIT: Oh shit, it was just explained - my bad