Nabeel Ansari

Only shallow companies like EastWest actually have that stipulation. Many do, many don't. Also why the necrobump >_>

The workshop is completely independent of the official OCReMix postings. Anyone is allowed to post to the workshop, midi-rip or not. Just preface your thread by saying you don't intend for it to be an OCR submission as it is not an arrangement, only a cover. You can still receive valuable music production advice (instrument sounds, levels, frequency shaping, effects use, etc.) even if there is no composition/arrangement advice along with it due to you not being interested. If you ARE interested in creating what qualifies an arrangement to be posted on the site, then just say that, then the people there will also be able to provide the composition/arrangement advice.

I can't do a mix regardless of an extension. School just started for me and I'm taking 20.0 credits, which means music making time can only be on weekends for me.

Do you have any credibility to your attitude on improving? It seems like you're saying a lot of things without evidence to back up your claims. I would've stayed quiet, but since you're so insistent on disagreeing with Snappleman (arguably one of the most helpful people to my music making attitude), I seriously question if you really are sure of what you're saying, or if you're simply saying it just to sound progressive and "liberating". You're also making it sound as if personal style and comparisons are mutually exclusive things; that's pretty damn naive. Not caring about comparing your work to others is something I've only seen accomplished people do well. People who try that from the start of their music making career in my experience have made pretty awful music. Yes, you can say "everything is subjective", but unfortunately, the "everything is subjective" attitude doesn't really actually work in real life. Everything is an extension of the human condition, and a composer's job is to know his audience well enough to manipulate their preferences and cultural conditioning. Perception of music isn't random and undefined like you say it is. There are inarguable trends of preferable vs. non-preferable, and anyone wanting to improve their abilities as composers and producers need to understand how to learn from those trends. Yes, you can start to make bad things sound pleasing by listening to them long enough. That's not anything special, it's a basic human phenomenon. It doesn't profoundly mean that "everything is good", it simply means that our response to poorly constructed stimulus in general can be dulled and satisfied at a mundane level. It's *fine* if you like having that done to you as a consumer, but it certainly isn't as a creator, someone who wants to make better music. You need to be able to recognize intelligent musical decisions from non-intelligent musical decisions. Poor harmonic construction from smooth harmonic construction. Balanced frequency response versus imbalanced frequency response. In other words, you need to learn how things work before you choose whether or not to ignore how things work. This is why professionals and well-accomplished musicians can go with the "I'm just doing me" attitude, because they've done the learning, they've done the countless imitations of "how do I sound/feel like that?" and have chosen to take what they learned and put their own spin on it. People who try it from the get-go, who don't listen to music and say "how do I make something feel like that?" don't learn anything, don't develop a musical vocabulary, and generally just don't understand what they're doing. I say it all the time and I'll say it again. Isaac Newton's famous quote doesn't just apply to science, it applies to everything, including art forms: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Perfection is a journey, not a destination. Understanding this is key. It's not elitist, it's idealistic. Which isn't a bad thing. Realism is a bad thing; realism doesn't motivate you, and it doesn't move you forward. Striving is the most important part, and if you're not striving, you become stale. This conversation, for clarity, isn't about monetary success, as we have all plainly seen how mundane successful money-making music can be. I think you're applying his statement too liberally, on a short-term time scale instead of a long-term one. He's more talking about "every one of my next songs should be better and better", not "this one song I am doing should only be as infinitely good as my potential". Settling, in what he is saying, is not about ending your song by clicking export and leaving it alone. Settling is saying "I'm about as good as I can get. My music is pretty great and I have nothing more to learn."

Hey guys, I already told Shariq earlier today but I am forfeiting and will not have a remix this round. I was going to bulk work my remix today, but when initiating moving in to my apartment, it turns out my assigned unit was unfinished and I spent the day getting maintenance to fix it up and then settle in. I was planning on simply getting in and waiting to settle in till after the remix was done, but with all the extra stuff I had/still have to take care of it wasn't happening.

It's just another remix. When you say remix, people will ask "what is it a remix of?" so you say "it's a remix of Zircon's remix of Mario's theme" or something. Yes, people do remix remixes. But as far as OverClocked ReMix and the submission criteria for this website specifically, I believe the standards call for unique arrangements. This means you can't do something that's already been done before, so you certainly can't REDO something that's already been done before.

They wouldn't (or maybe they do, but they shouldn't) accept it because it's not a unique arrangement; you'd be essentially submitting variations of an existing posted remix. It dilutes the spotlight and would end up filling the site with really weird bunches of remixes that sound sort of similar but each have their own variation. In other words, the mission of OverClocked ReMix is the love and appreciation of video game music. We do that through free fan-made arrangements of video game songs. Doing fan-made arrangements of already existing fan-made arrangements is sort of diverting from the mission. You're not appreciating the VGM anymore, you're appreciated the arrangement, and that's fine for you to post and release by yourself, but OverClocked ReMix the website wouldn't get behind it. If you have something where you think that even if you arrange an existing arrangement, you're still focusing on appreciating the VGM, you could probably just create your own original arrangement without basing it on somebody's existing track. There's no need to add ownership complexity if you have an idea that's unique enough.

I find it very humorous how all of your points pertain to production and not composition, Timaeus.

Great audio editor, not a good all-around DAW in my book as it lacks MIDI functionality.

Try messing with the velocity curve. There's an "options" rectangle that will reveal it to you. Perhaps it may be a little too abrasive for you, you can make the curve lower in that case. Also, by personal taste, I lower the "high" knob a little more than you did. Unfortunately I can't help you without you being a little more specific. :/ Perhaps show me some examples of what you're after and I can help you then. Also, where did you get the sheet music for that? I'll have to add that to my list of songs to learn.

It doesn't hold together. People are always going to call anything misogynistic. No violence against women? You think women are weak. You're misogynistic. Violence against women? You hate women and get sick pleasure out of seeing them hurt. You're misogynistic. There's no "safe ground". There's nothing you can do to placate the people who are essentially drumming up trouble for the sake of attention. Calm down, sir, it's just a debate. OCR's community isn't being hurt by anything. There's like 5 people in this thread talking right now. If anytime a thread makes you feel bad or sick about something, you're more than welcome to leave it. Regardless, your stance of apathy is just plain wrong. Nothing becomes solved when you stop looking at it.

So listen to the demos, you'll notice it's got a very whole, rounded sound to it. Kinda reminds me of glass stones, if the imagery helps. Turn up the mid all the way. Turn the bass to maybe 3 o'clock. Turn down the highs to maybe 9 or 10 o'clock. Next, turn on the keyboard and ambient mics (there are tiny buttons under them to do that) and then use the sliders to bring them up a few notches. The keyboard mic gets you the sound of the keys themselves, so it adds some "thunk" to the key sounds. The ambient mic just gets some nice space. Next, you can turn up the wet knob on the reverb a tad to bring some more wide space in. That's a lot of things to keep track of, but as long as you know what each knob is doing and how you can use it to modify sound in certain ways, it's more a task of experimenting than of memorization.

Here's me doing pseudorandom improv. I just turned up the keyboard and ambient mic a little bit, and turned up the mid and bass. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15510436/File%20Sharing/randomkeys.wav

I edited that in later on.

Yes. It's my favorite piano, blows the Komplete pianos out of the water. Most sample libraries don't really sound as good as their demos, but this one certainly does. It's got 6 mics and different patches, like a glockenspiel or string layer. One patch gives infinite sustain. If you want a sound like the demo, just turn the mid and bass knobs up a lot on the base patch in the small EQ section. It's got its own reverb convolution as well, so turn up the wetness on that and select your room style to get the best space. However in more upbeat, brighter settings like jazz/funk, I find NY Concert Grand and Upright Piano from Komplete to be more useful. There's no piano library that does it all, but if you already have Komplete and you got this, you'd not need anything more.

By far the best solo piano I've ever heard. I use it when I practice and it sounds like I'm actually playing on a Steinway. http://8dio.com/instrument/1969-steinway-piano/

really now

Shariq and I driving back from MAGFest right now. He can update everything within a couple hours.

Because it's early. They haven't gotten the chance to get good at it.

diatonic scales are for the weak But yes, my solo tones were random at times. There are more notes out of the key in this song than there are in the key.

http://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/orchestral-cinematic/session-horns-pro/ This is a cheaper option. Though if you're going up to $1000, I believe there are way better options than this. I'll defer to the other forum posters.

Hakstock gets the vote.

Neblix I enjoyed DusK's concept. Reminded me of Castlevania.

These aren't reviews. This is just why you chose to vote for who you did. Now watch while I be a hypocrite. Quick voting choices: I vote for myself for a very specific reason. Harmony is the foundation of most music and DusK had harmonic mistakes in how he handled the Spectre Knight melody (every time he hit the sharp 4, or G natural, in the melody, he didn't accompany it with the chord it needed) especially in the introduction. Since the voting encouragement is for handling and incorporation of both themes, I feel this is a justification for not giving him the vote. Whether I handled the note better is up to the public, but I handled it in a different couple ways including the way virt did in the source that I personally think are both functional (as a blues scale tone and as a major II chord, by major II i am in the key of Bb minor and use a C major chord there). I vote for Hakstock because while both of these guys incorporated both tunes, Hakstock did it in a way that wasn't exhausting. Alex's track seemed to go on for eternity. Not in necessarily the bad way, but it didn't feel like there was any variety of progression, especially using the same synth lead over the whole track. Also, I am disappointed neither of you guys used Shield Knight's picardy third. It's when a song in the minor key uses the major tonic chord instead of the minor. The campfire scene does this at the end of its melody and hits an F# maj instead of F# min. It's part of the character of the track, because a major chord instead of the normal minor chord indicates something like an unnatural feeling of hope and directly correlates to Shovel Knight's struggle to want to save Shield Knight (as shown in his campfire dreams to catch her after every boss). I guess it's artistic license to use the Minor one from the catch her scenes, but I personally feel it would've added some color to the tracks.

His natural strength is in jazz and electronic music but he is a master of imitating any style he wants to.