Gario

Hello OCR, I'm a big fan of all of the music that gets put on display on the site, and have always enjoyed good remixes of some of my favorite tracks from game's past. With that being said, some time ago I had submitted my take on the Zelda Ocarina of Time's Sheik theme, and was graciously turned down. With much more experience under my belt, and a deeper understanding of music theory, and sound quality/mastering, I hope to see my name amongst the great composers of some of my favorite remixes on this site. I decided to do a bit of a clean hip hop style to this track, and I am pleased to see it turn out as well as it did, as short as it is. It might be a little too close to the original, as I didn't do much to rearrange the track, but hopefully with the way it sounds - its repetition - and the smooth flavor of the flute/koto I decided to use, I hope it is still at least considered to be added to the robust library of music on here.Thanks for everything guys!Tony "Dasaki Kasanagi" Elliott

AJ DiSpirito (ReMixer and real name are the same) youtube.com/ajdispirito userid: 33841 Super Paper Mario Memory: Night Memory (all versions) Original Song

This is definitely an interesting approach. For what it is, it's definitely clean and interesting. The only catch is that I've got to make sure it has enough source in it - I hear plenty toward the end, but there's a lot of open space, as well. I'll be getting back to this soon.

Gaius Christianus Canorus https://gaiuschristianuscanorus.com/ Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time From These Trees—Blooming Forevermore Forest Temple Koji Kondo, N64 Youtube Everything is available already on the game page on the website. _____________________________________________________________ "no more composing with notes but rather with tones" - Gerard Grisey Don't think about the notes, think about the sounds. Tuned to a Pythagorean temperament with thirds tempered by a schisma C 1/1 C#/Db 2187/2048 D 9/8 D#/Eb 19683/16384 E 8192/6561 F 4/3 F#/Gb 1024/729 G 3/2 G#/Ab 6561/4096 A 32768/19683 A#/Bb 59049/32768 B 4096/2187 C 2/1

Man, a nice, quick response and I don't post it up here for two months. Sorry 'bout that. I didn't comment the first time around, but I compared the two files and it seems the clipping issues were addressed. It's also a pinch louder, which is a nice touch. Considering it was a pretty strong arrangement before, I think it's an easy pass for me. Nice work! EDIT (11/07): Okay, I can hear some crackling too at 0:44-0:46 and 3:22. Most of the prior deal-breaking crackling was decreased, though (like the really bad portion at 1:34 from the old version), and at the other sections listed it was almost imperceptible. I hear it, but I don't at all consider it deal-breaking - I'm sticking to my YES on this. YES

Previous Decision Greetings, I've just seen the judges decision topic on my remix of Dark Souls 3 Iudex Gundyr "the Ashes Judge". Thanks a lot for the appreciations and compliments on the writings and orchestration techniques I used in ! I spend so much time to remix it in an original way. I'm sorry for the production issues, I don't know what happened with the 8Dio Requiem VST, so I've corrected it by a simple reloading. And then I added a limiter to increase the volume of the track. (I've changed some details on staccato trumpets too, nothing important) I Hope it's ok to submit it again, I don't want to overstrain you. Regards

Man, I really think this is a cool track; the performances are pretty solid, and the arrangement is just smooth as hell. I have two issues with it: first, the vocals sound like they were recorded in a different room. They sound like they have a different mastering job than the rest of the arrangement, which comes off strange. The ending also has a rather unsatisfying fade-out ending - I think this would've benefitted from a proper ending. I can't deny this track otherwise, though. It's not perfect, but what is there is certainly postable in my book. Great work! YES Edit (02/19): New update, so some more commentary from me. The vocals have less of an echo effect which does help them blend a bit better, and the track has an end to it now (nothing special, just a crash, really), which while not the BEST ending it's probably the best they can do without a rewrite. It does sound better than the strange two second F/O it had last time, at least. It does have about 9 seconds of silence at the end now, which is odd but not the biggest deal in the world. I was good with it before, and this doesn't change that. Here's hoping for the best with the rest of the panel!

Link to ReMix (Attachment is there in case Dropbox acts up): Contact Information ReMixer Name: GCJ Real Name: Caleb Email: Website: https://soundcloud.com/gcjofficial or https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4gkFBO9_FKEr_GRezitg6w Forum userid: 34256 Submission Information Games Arranged: Sonic CD Name of Arrangement: The Jazzy Cosmos Name of Song Arranged: "Cosmic Eternity - Believe In Yourself" Link to Original Song Used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvef7waXCxY Comments on Mix: I thought some of the chords in this song were really jazzy so I made a jazz remix. It's my first time mixing vocals that aren't super heavily processed, and basically my first time mixing in this genre. It was made in anticipation for Sonic CD's anniversary on September 23, and I hope this is submitted early enough to get it judged by then. If it gets passed, but before September 23, I would appreciate it if it was held to release until then.

Interesting approach; I think with a nice, soft jazz drummer this would really shine. Gotta work with what you got, but that drum machine is very... drum machine-ish. The acoustic guitar work is a really cool interpretation of this source. J-pop often has some really great themes hidden behind their bombastic arrangements, which this arrangement capitalizes on nicely. Enjoyed it quite a bit!

Oh shoot, forgot to give some disclosure here: As far as this convo is concerned, I'm speaking strictly on when I do mod reviews and judgments, here, who's sole purpose is to direct people on how to get posted on OCR. I give other feedback on tracks that I listen to, as well, since often getting posted isn't the goal. Kind of a dick move to tell someone that they need better samples to get posted when they just wanted to show their stuff to people, or publish it elsewhere where such requirements don't exist. I don't want to give the wrong idea on here; if I'm not careful people will be scared to show me their stuff because they'll think I'm gonna look at it forever in the eyes of OCR standards, lol. Nope, I just critique like that when it's my job to do so. Might explain Hoboka's concern about me earlier, too.

I've already quoted this once, but I've got more thoughts on it after sitting on it for a day. Yes, I do my best to avoid telling people to "get better samples" in their music, but one does need to be careful not to step on the intention of the artist, either. On the one hand it sucks to be told "You can't make it without forkin' the money!", but on the flip side people don't like being told "You can't do something with the tools you've got, but perhaps this different idea you didn't envision would work", either; most people don't like being told how to compose something. There does come a point where you do either need to pay or have some solid musician connections to achieve your artistic vision, unfortunately, so I'd be doing people no favors to pretend otherwise. More or less just thinking aloud on here, but telling people what they should be composing is definitely overstepping my bounds, too, though in a different way than telling them they need to spend money does. Curious what a good compromise is for something like this - perhaps acknowledging you understand what they want to achieve, explain what would be necessary and give an alternative if the necessary method proves out of reach? Food for thought.

Mmm, this is a tasty arrangement. I do like the subdue'd effect the whole track has with the low-pass over most of it (though perhaps the guitar lead could've let some highs through). The opening is definitely atmospheric, and throughout I can hear the source. I like it quite a lot - nice work on this.

I agree 100% on that. I personally try to avoid telling people to use better samples when eval'ing and judging and instead focus on how to use the sample they have to get the most out of it, but perhaps I can try harder on that front.

I don't write purely symphonic/orchestral music because my computer is so terrible that my program shuts down when I try (it's a very poor computer nowadays) and I don't play guitar well enough to make metal music. I'm not withholding these genres for other's sake - I made this choice because I recognize these current limits. Being unable to make certain music due to what you have access to is a part of life for us poor peoples.

Bustling with activity, on here. I'm not going to make as long a response, but I'll drop a few more thoughts in here on the more fresh items. - The judgment process won't go faster with more judges. It sounds counter-intuitive, but the items where it takes time (split yes/no votes) take much longer when there are more people. Nine judges could have a track max out at nine votes (4/5 split), while in a crazy case thirteen judges could require thirteen votes (a 6/7 split!). If anything, judge replacement would be the route to go, but that is not something I'll discuss on a public forum. - On artist intention, I'm going to be honest: I avoid reading them when possible. They're great to have, and wonderful for Dave's write-ups, but it's bad to have something other than the music itself influence a judge's evaluation. It's harsh, but if quality control was affected by what an artist said or the experience level of a submitter then it would bring down the quality of what was posted on OCR. - On the topic of "If we told you it was supposed to be like a PS1 style track and not realistic orchestra" in a write-up, it shouldn't be relevant in theory (if the judges are any good at their job :P). Here's why: if you're writing something in the style of PS1 soundtracks, you'd have to really dedicate the arrangement (or part of the arrangement) to sounding like it was on a tracker with decent quality samples. If you make alterations in order to make the samples sound more realistic you've failed in making it a PS1 style arrangement, but if it's not realistic enough you also fail at making it sound like an actual performance. If you go for one thing rarely can you pass it off as another - the uncanny valley of "almost good enough" sounds worse than going all out in one direction or another. If you're not yet able to sound realistic with your tools, it's far better to sound stylistically fake with what you've got. Jorito's motto of "If you don't have the tools then don't make that kind of music" is where I sit. Darkesword said we've posted tracks using free soundfont samples, and he's right - it's not impossible to get something posted with free samples. AngelCityOutlaw said the trailer style arrangement is impossible without major bucks invested in equipment, and he's absolutely right - if you try with free samples it will likely fall in that uncanny valley that'll make it just sound not right. No one is forcing anyone to make epic trailor music without the proper tools; it's why you see so much synth music from me personally and relatively little orchestral or metal music, even though I'm an orchestra lover and a bit of a metal head. - On putting in links on the judges decisions, it's a matter of privacy; it's better for the judges to remove information and let the artist decide for themselves if they want to make it public than it is to assume they want to have everyone hear their rejection and cause uproar when someone DIDN'T want that. There is a cool workaround, though, that I used for some time before getting posted (and will continue to do so in the future): if you specify that you want the link to remain upon rejection, OCR will let the link remain. For example: This old chestnut. I would in fact love to see more people do this, since it certainly would be helpful. Keepin' myself involved in this thread, go me.

Stating for the record, genre is taken into consideration when evaluating a track. Repetitiveness in a trance track would be handled differently than repetitiveness in a j-pop remix. I'd rather make that point clear than leave it to speculation.

A fair point on that. For a while (beginning of this year, I think) it was being updated pretty regularly, but that's definitely slowed dow... Holy shit, last updated in JUNE?! Jesus. Okay, we should fix that like... right now. Sir_nutS was really on it for a while, but it seems to have stopped recently. I'm sure we'll update it soon. If not, I'll update it if necessary.

Oh boy, this might be my first experience with being a jdgfgt on the forums. Almost makes me feel like I'm a legit judge now. I'm so happy this day has come. Considering the circumstances, I would like a moment to address a few topics that came up on here. Wasn't able to do much yesterday other than snipe one or two points on the FB thread due to work, so consider this a more overarching response. I don't hand these walls of text out too often anymore, so enjoy! First and foremost, OCR is most certainly not the end all, be all of video game remixes; the kind of music posted on here is clearly stated on DjP's mission statement. There is great music that can't be posted on OCR due to his personal vision for the site, so if someone says that something amazing didn't get posted on OCR I will absolutely believe you. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, either; it's his site, and great things certainly has come from it. I feel sometimes people forget this point on both sides of the aisle; a few more passionate members sometimes say something isn't good if it doesn't pass OCR's muster while others state OCR judges hate good music when a song doesn't pass. Neither of these things are true, and on my word I can say I've known the current staff long enough to say they understand that, as well. At the risk of sounding like I'm strawmanning, if anyone makes these bad faith assumptions about the staff they should reconsider their opinion. Okay, just wanted to get that out there on full display. Second, I've seen a few posts on here upset at the time it takes to judge a track. While last month was admittedly slow likely due to more than one album being evaluated and posted on here (Sinphony and Candy Corn II, baby - we actually do have to judge every track on albums, which takes time), overall I'm a bit hurt that no one really acknowledges the process has sped up over the last year, with the topic of this thread being a great example. Y'all know that the time between submission (as in, he sent it to the inbox) and judgement was literally eight days at most, right? Like, he posted in the thread that he was submitting it soon on May 26th, and the judgment was completed on June 3rd, right? I'm calling bologna on this complaint; I've personally worked my ass off to get the inbox and panel to the point that the wait for judgment is on average three months at the moment (again, slow down happened last month due to an influx of albums - it used to be closer to two months from submission to judgment on average, save for tough tracks on the panel), so I take particular offense to this blindness on the improved judgment speed, here. There's likely no better time to put your music on OCR to get more timely feedback, so please stop saying it takes over a year to get evaluated on average on here. Everything that was submitted in 2016 or earlier has been judged (with a single exception, for those astute enough to check). We're in a pretty good spot as far as inbox and judgment speed goes; it'd be nice for people to start recognizing that. Thirdly, specifically on this submission... I can see why some may be upset at my judgment, but there's another half to the story that'd be missed if you didn't know I was personally involved in the WIP thread helping him out. Being that I act as both a judge and a somewhat active workshop evaluator (less so nowadays, much to Rozo's chagrin, I bet) I sometimes make reference to what I've said in my evaluation in my judgments. Whether or not that's bad practice is debatable (the confusion in this thread being a decent case against this), but in my view the artist is the most important one to understand the feedback; generally no one else has easy access to the music so no one else needs to understand it. I've seen a complaint or two on this discussion saying that I shouldn't consider the flute at all in my judgment, and you're absolutely correct - I shouldn't. If you feel judges should never consider personal taste in music when judging something then be vindicated in the fact that you're correct! The catch is that I made absolutely clear in my WIP evaluation that this was personal taste and would in no way impact the judgment; Brynolf actually requested comments specifically on the flute, so I gave him my opinion on it. In the judgment I acknowledge that his track overall improved from when I eval'd it, even while teasing that he didn't make any changes to the flute. My vote had nothing to do with the flute in his track, and everything to do with the copy/paste of about a third of his track (which I missed when I eval'd it - that was a mistake on my part, and I still feel bad about that). You can disagree that the copy/paste is a problem, but I stick by this decision. Anyone can feel free to argue this point either via PM, FB or Discord with me if they'd like since I don't want to crowd this thread too much on my reasoning (in fact I'd love to do that; there's some interesting reasoning behind why this is an issue). That's not to say I dislike that song at all - far from it. I personally really enjoyed this track in every other aspect, and still hope that he resubmits it with some minor changes made to address the issue as it would be a wonderful addition to OCR's front page. I can't drop the QC aspect of my judgments just because I like a track, though; it's one of the larger downsides of the job, to be honest. Finally, on the consistency in judgment brought up in here... yeah, it can be a little inconsistent from time to time. That's because of two aspects: we're humans on the panel, and there's nine of us on there with varying experiences and opinions. On the first point, humans ain't perfect, and with anything that involves judgment of anything our imperfections will play into it. This applies to literally everything, not just OCR; for example, apparently you never want to be judged in court prior to lunch, because when everyone is hungry they're more likely to rush the verdict against the accused. To mitigate this aspect, there are many of us on there to cover one another's mistakes; more people means there's more chance that judges will catch each other's mistakes. Of course, this also means that different people will vote on different tracks, which unfortunately means there will be some variation in judgments due to different people voting on different tracks; that can't be helped. Those are my $0.50 on the topic at hand; hopefully it's a somewhat informative wall o' text. No hate to Hoboka for the thread or anyone else involved, either - we coo'.

Well, there may be a few choice tracks from the Material Collective Undertale album that could catch your attention. In particular, there's a chamber orchestra track for CORE (it's track #8), with some jazz flute in there for good measure. It's not as fast paced as you're requesting, but it's definitely something to sink your teeth into. The alum has some great tracks on there, so don't stop with just that one if you're an Undertale junkie.

Mmm, I really enjoyed this on the album - a power ballade is a great way to send off the SoM album. Let's see how well it stands on it's own, too. The arrangement is really cool, opening with a clean acoustic guitar over some new-age pads before getting to the distorted guitar. The opening section does feel like it drags, though; while I appreciate the atmosphere being set up, it could've easily been half as long. The pads, while great, could've been dropped from time to time. They're great, but when they're there for nearly 100% of the track they end up sounding stale and uninteresting. Dropping them when, say, the distorted guitar comes in and bringing them in later would've had them sounding fresh and interesting rather than stale and overused. I'm really enjoying the flourishes and changes made to the source in this, though; the arrangement does a great job keeping the short source interesting over the 5+ minute span. The harmony changes were effective, and the guitar improv was great. I think this is certainly good enough for the front page, despite my criticisms; it's not only a good send-off for the album, it also works well as a stand-alone track. Nice work. YES

Don't worry - we're all old farts on here, by now. Here's hoping for some solid ambient VG remixes coming from you in the future! It's not an easy feat, but seeing the Mario Airport remix posted recently shows that it can not only be done, it can be done really well. Continue the trend, make good ambient music, and hopefully we can help you out on our WIP boards if you need any guidance.

Seeing that I've had to study this track for earlier reasons, I may as well give my vote on it, too. The arrangement works quite well, in my book - it's an old school trance track, and it presents the material with a solid building progression. The synths are a little cheezy, but I think for something oldschool like this cheezy works great. Injury's vocals are great (as they damn well should be), though I think they're overprocessed to the point of taking away their appeal a bit. The effects on the piano don't work well in this. Nothing wrong with the piano carrying the themes or anything, but compared against the wet background the piano is too dry. I'm aware of the delay that should be giving it some depth and wetness, but a long delay only makes it sound like a dry piano sample being echoed. More room reverb would help it blend with the arrangement better. The strings at 2:18 are pretty mechanical. When they're layered against the other synths they sound great, but when they're exposed their lack of dynamics and unrealistic attacks make them sound fake. Making them sound more realistic would improve this, but layering some synths over them like before would also make this work well (and would be more consistent with what you have prior). I agree with the others that the upper end of the EQ spectrum is pretty crowded. While I love the textures being as dense as they are it's hard to hear them all when everything takes that same range. Lowpassing some of the instruments and decreasing the wetness of a few other instruments would help give you more space to work with. It's a tough call, but I think I agree with the NO's on this one. Fixing the piano part is the most important part since it's so pervasive, as well as cleaning up the soundscape. Nice work, and I hope this gets cleaned up and resubmit. NO

Hahahaha... Very nice indeed. What arrangement was this comment from?

Damn man, you really get this track for all it's worth. Great idea using that base as the foundation of a jazz improve; I never would've thought of that, but in hindsight it makes tons of sense. Good performances all around, to boot! Here's hoping we hear more of you on here!

Quick update: Jorito requests that we take this off the projects list, since the project is likely not going anywhere.