Garpocalypse

Just my 2 cents on the why/why not for the reviews. (also not intended as a defeatist rant ) I understand as much as anyone that people put a lot of time and of themselves when committing to learning this art (not the midi-rippers which there seem to be more of now than ever but that's a different subject) and for that reason I've often favored not commenting in the forums out of consideration that my comments might not be taken as constructive by the remixer-to-be and I also know that there are a near infinite amount of ways to approach anything so the last thing I want the person who's work i'm commenting on is to think that I think my way is the only way. There is a lot of self discovery that's needed and if everyone followed one or two mixing engineers to the T (Tee? Ti?) then that would sacrifice any potential for something unique to come out of all that self discovery. Yet, I also am familiar with the environment where students and working professionals were nearly reduced to tears by their instructor/choir director/orchestra conductor/what-have-you because they might have played 2 notes that weren't stylistically correct or used an up-down-up bow pattern when the director wanted a down-down-up bow pattern. I was initially attracted to OCR because it got me away from that into a more stress free environment. Now, with all of this music out there, it's no longer a similar minded group of people who care enough about their art to want to help each other further what they have a mutual love for and instead it's a lot of people who all want praise for their work regardless of how it is and won't take any constructive criticism without getting defensive. Of course I don't feel that this is 100% of the community at all. But it's the reason I mostly just stick to the compos because the attitude of the people competing I find is much better than elsewhere on the forums. I would love it if people understood that to be any kind of an artist it means you have to build yourself up then expect to get torn down REPEATEDLY before your art takes on any worth and I think that people should be encouraged more to speak their minds on the forums here as long as it has a constructive purpose to make the remix better. To echo Brandon's statements about the panel. The length of time it takes for a person to get judged and posted is an issue that extends beyond the trickle of music that gets added to the site but to the social impact it has on the remixers and how the reviews they write are perceived. Once a posted remixer is able to have their work featured and even gain a few fans, suddenly their reviews take on a whole different meaning. Back in 2010 when I first started putting work up in the forums I jumped if someone I knew such as Brandon Strader, Willrock, Darkesword, Avaris, Gario or other posted remixers whose work I enjoyed took time to comment on mine. Even if the comments were harsh they were much easier to take because I was familiar with who they were beyond their name just showing up in the forums. Now we are at a time when most of the remixers from earlier days of OCR have all moved on or are significantly less active than they used to be and the steam that was there for the earlier remixers to get noticed (I believe WIllrock had 10 mixes judged and posted in 2010) is not available to the new up and coming remixers which makes it much more difficult for the community to produce it's own stars. I know the panel is to ensure that people who come by the site are guaranteed a listening experience that would take them hours of searching on Youtube to find but I think we are at the point where the panel is separating itself too much from the community it once created and it's having detrimental effects. Hopefully no one is misreading my intent with this unusually long winded post. The topic IS about the lack of interest in doing reviews which I hope people understand just how it stems from more than one issue. I've loved OCR since I chanced by it during the summer of 2005 and I don't think there is anything that could change that but if we could return the excitement of being a part of the VGRemixing scene to when it peaked between 2010 and 2012, when everything seemed to move a lot faster, than I would be all for that.

ooooooook. I'm going to be brutally honest. I couldn't get beyond 1:05... so I can't really comment too much on source usage, for the sole reason being the insanely overprocessed guitar entrance was deafeningly shrill even at low volumes. I'm guessing you significantly boosted the highs or it has something to do with your setup which sounds live. If you're not already I would strongly recommend running your guitar stems through an amp sim. Yes, it's a kicker to have to do that when you already spent money on hardware but the flexibility it provides makes it worth it. You can get a relatively cheap amp sim with tons of cab emulations for 50 bucks from Recabinet or for free with Le Pou Plugins and TSE. The most common argument against this is that amp sims lack the correct physics of recording through a live cab through a mic. While it's true for the most part (recabinet is getting closest to solving the issue) 98% of your audience isn't going to know the difference. The Alberti bass harmony in the piano is ok. An acoustic/clean metal intro should carry the energy into the guitar entrance. The guitar entrance itself should be jarring but not unexpected if you get me. You might want to rework the intro once you feel good about the rest of the remix. Correct organization of a remix like this means you would have to make a choice from the start of what you want it to be. Do you want the guitar/bass/drums to be the dominating force in this mix? Or is it more of a piano remix with some distorted guitars/bass and drums playing with the pianist? All of your mixing decisions from then on will have to stem from this choice. In either case it would be a good idea to have double tracked/hardpanned rhythm guitars with the bass just lightly squeezed under them and the drums audible but not overly audible. People know a kick/snare pattern when they hear it so you can get away with keeping them quieter than you would expect and the listener not even noticing the difference. However, before I can really comment further that lead guitar NEEDS to be taken down several notches. Lower the volume, Reduce the gain, Reorganize your effects chain, Reset your EQ, Dip 2khz and 4khz, ANYTHING to get it listenable. Good luck!

Symptom of a larger problem sure. A significant part of OCR is the nostalgia factor. It hits pretty hard and people love to relive things they once found interesting and pleasurable. But the nostalgia wears off quickly when you have to live it everyday. Psychologists call the decrease in response to a stimuli over time "habituation" and I think we are seeing a significant dip in interest in VGRemixes across the board because of it. It's probably also compounded by the lack of loss we have in the digital age. Back when technology moved forward and left the past behind you probably were not going to be able to play "classic" games ever again. This added to the feeling of loss and likelihood of nostalgia. Now you can get almost any game you want and play it in all of it's retro glory. Until you get tired of it. which is probably pretty quick. At some point you gotta stop living in the past and get on with things. ...not me tho.

I actually did a presentation on a related subject just last year. Around 2001 Hajime Fukui started testing the effects of music and sex hormones. He found that in a group of healthy college students testosterone was lower in men after listening to music than females. Some females even showed an increase in testosterone making music more of a hormone equalizer of sorts which he believed made it easier for musicians to work in groups than most others. I had the original article on this but for the life of me I can't find it so here is a couch reporter's interpretation of it. http://www.anabolicmen.com/music-lowers-male-testosterone-levels/ Now, of all the music tested. He did not test the aggressive styles of music such as Metal, Hardcore Dubstep etc. It is believed that listening to this style of music encourages hypertonus and enhances the body's ability to recruit more muscle fibers in a single movement and some people believe that listening to music that pumps you up can even increase testosterone for your workout. HOWEVER! Listening to aggressive music triggers the production of cortisol, the stress hormone, that can put you deep into a fight or flight response, yet the presence of cortisol can also adversely affect the available testosterone the body has. You hear about people with high stress levels http://news.utexas.edu/2010/09/27/stress-hormone So is a musician actually advocating the disuse of music? Heck no, i use it all the time for my workouts but the jury's still out on it's actual effectiveness. If your goal is to look like the picture you provided. It's possible music may actually be a hindrance. HOWEVER AGAIN! There were several contradictions found by the same person that in patients with neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's that music therapy could increase sex hormones that were already low to closer to normal levels that could help control the disease. http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijad/2012/531646/ Music seems to be more of an equalizer than anything and may or may not help you reach your goals. Doing my own tests on the matter I have been doing some musical manipulation and starting a workout with Then when I get in the car to go home I IMMEDIATELY cool down with something like to get the cortisol down. So far it seems to work. And not to dash too much reality on anything but fitness models don't look like fitness models for long. In between photo shoots they maintain their overall level of body fat to around say 12% or so. Then when a shoot is coming up they drop down to around 8% along with a significant amount water loss. After the shoot they rehydrate and don't look like what they just did the day before. It's extremely taxing to the body to get down that far in the first place and maintaining it year round is more or less impossible. good luck!

The Japanese Ju-On movies are a pretty good watch. They don't have the polish of Hollywood of course but manage to be creepy in there own way. http://horror.dreamdawn.com/img/japanese_horror/juon_tv_still.jpg

Currently, I have my hands full but I've had this folk version of Horteka I've been meaning to send in to OCR for awhile now. As a fellow SEGA enthusiast I could certainly shoot you the track for use in this project if you want. As a huge fan of the game and the OST good luck with this!

Hey everyone, I am going to be relocating myself fairly soon and i'm looking to dump a few of the instruments i've collected over the years that I don't want to travel with. One of them is a Yamaha YAS-23 Alto Sax I originally bought for around 1200 bucks. The instrument is in great condition and would absolutely be a great addition to any home studio. I am going to be throwing it up on Amazon at some point in the near future but I wanted to check to see if any fellow OCR'ers wanted to get their hands on it. Of course i'll be throwing in a new mouthpiece free of charge. Send me a PM or post here if interested.

While not technically "Horror" but a game that was released around the end of october is Toejam n' Earl III that I really wish I could play again. Outside of ebaying a new xbox i have no idea how I can play it since MS didn't feel like emulating the game on the 360. Can't praise RE:Revelations 2 enough. Going through it on survivor mode now and it's the most fun i've had playing a resident evil game since RE2.

Not specifically a horror game either but I always thought walking around the Subways in Fallout 3 was extremely unsettling. Especially at low levels and not being able to see some of those ghouls come after you even though you can hear the sound they make when they are running at you full sprint.

Sonar. It's the best. Really. It is. Don't trust anyone else's opinion.

I'm a huge fan of Amnesia: Dark Descent. Probably the most fun i've had with a horror game (In contrast to Slender which was more like actual torture). I heard that Machine for Pigs simplified a lot of things and to be honest I thought DD was already too simple. The only item management the game has is stocking oil and tinder for your light source and a few items needed for puzzles. Don't get me wrong, it was used to great effect in DD but I can't imagine anything being more simple than that. Resource management should be a big part of all horror games imo. How does Soma stack up to the first amnesia?

Until Dawn looks awesome definitely getting that at some point. Not crazy about the vast majority of horror movies i've seen. A few that standout are The Shining and the original Pumpkinhead and I love the amount of tension in Alien and Aliens but anything recent has mostly just involved people screaming in front of the camera for 90 minutes and not much more. I've been on the fence with the Five night's at freddy's series. On one hand I want to support indie developers that come up with a great idea that gets run into the ground by imitators. But it looks like the creator is also running it into the ground himself.

As i think about starting up a new game of Amnesia I thought I would start up a thread just to see what kind of horror games OCRemixers are enjoying this year. Some of my favorites that i hope to be hitting this month are: The first 3 Resident Evil Games Lone Survivor ClockTower Silent Hill 1&2 Catherine (Hey solving a puzzle while getting stabbed from a disembodied hand holding a fork is kinda freaky) Fatal Frame and I just picked up I Have No mouth and I Must Scream From Steam (I really want Soma but I'm still on XP) Anyone else have some favorite horror games?

Honestly the most cost effective way to do this would be to get a midi keyboard and turn it away from your computer. MIDI keyboards would be a lot cheaper and you would get more experience learning to use the samples/synths you have. I had one of these last me around 12 years. If you can find a used one it would be well worth it though it does use the old fashioned 6 pronged midi in/out cables and no USB compatibility. http://www.roland.com/products/a-37/ I now use one of these cheapos. http://www.m-audio.com/products/view/keystation-49es1 Which i'm not overly fond of because of how the keys feel. Unweighted keys never feel....real... Another option is to get a simple Casio that you can use for practicing away from your computer for $100 and save the rest for your studio. Just to go off on a tangent, the best way to learn music is to play music. Sitting in front of a keyboard practicing sheet music for hours on end is how I and many others learned back in the day and frankly it's a really outdated way to learn music. I emphasize MIDI keyboards because some of the best musical experience you can get is from loading up the music you already like on your HDD and playing along with it, figuring out the chords and melodies by ear. Do it enough and you'll recognize patterns you can use in your music which is the real key to actually learning anything. Learning to read sheet music does help some when you learn to read music vertically but it's not 100% necessary. It's important to remember that when music went digital people who learned music "the old ways" all had their legs kicked out from under them. Finding your own way of learning whats out there with the combination of resources available is all part of the fun of learning music today.

I'm in again for this year but I have no idea what to do for a remix just yet.

Had a great time competing this year and was glad to see my remixes consistently perform better then they have in past compos. Over the course of the competition I found a few more EQ cuts I like and some different ways of parallel processing that i haven't tried before. Special thanks to Esperado and LadyWildfire who were up for joining me in this thing at the last second and gave some great feedback each week to help push the remixes forward.

Watched the whole thing for Yuzo and was not disappointed. ...even though it meant sitting through several anamanaguchi "interviews". I liked how they softballed some of the plagiarism allegations that yuzo endured once the youtube era exposed the roots of some of the Streets of Rage grooves. It gave him a chance to say something about it and not look like a bad guy.

Have you tried VOPM? It's a free synth modeled after the Yamaha YM2151 which sounds extremely close to the YM2612 sound chip that was used in the Sega Genesis. http://www.geocities.jp/sam_kb/VOPM/ There's also a link to a ton of Genesis presets for VOPM here: http://truechiptilldeath.com/blog/2010/05/04/opm-patches-out-of-most-genesis-games/

Great to see this awesome indie game get some attention from an OCR judge! nice work!

Garpocalypse We are Many, We are One (Boomer Kuwanger in Gate's Laboratory [X6]) Beautiful Bloody Bats (Dark Necrobat in Gate's Laboratory [X6]) Gate's Secret Dream Lab (Shield Sheldon in Gate's Laboratory [X6]) Nightmare Tank Police

We're posting lyrics already? Ok. For analysis purposes here are the lyrics to my remix for this week. Lyric 1: eeeEEyyyYYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Lyric 2: eeYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHH! Lyric 3: EyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyAAAAAAAAAHHHH... Lyric 4: aarrrreeeEEyYYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Fun Fact: In Japanese it sorta sounds like "No" In German it sorta sounds like "Yes".

Sounds to me like you are relying on the humanization inherent in sample libraries and don't really understand how to replicate that in a midi file for a synth. Get really familiar with the midi tools in your DAW and also learn how to use Midi Continuous Controllers. It takes some careful, slow and repetitive work which is really much more akin to painting sound than playing it but take a passage you think sounds good with your sample libraries and try to replicate the playing down to the smallest detail. It's not going to sound 100% authentic because it's a synth but you can at least get close to all of those details that were recorded in the sample library. When I started that was a huge hangup for me. If I couldn't get exactly what I wanted from playing it for a few minutes then I gave up immediately.

Oddly enough I prefer to use Guitar Rig for synth leads instead of for guitars. I have Guitar Rig 4 and i find that the heads are usually good but the cabinet and mic sims are far from the best. Especially when you look at what you can get for free. It's also a huge disappointment that I can't use a fredman mic setup within Guitar Rig meanwhile fredman IR's have been free to obtain for years. While we are on the topic though. Recabinet is by far the most impressive Amp Sim plugin i've heard and it's price is extremely competitive. www.recabi.net So if you are looking for a good amp sim I couldn't recommend that one enough.

In the process of subbing then off to work. I think you guys are going to love the lyrics I worked on all week for this remix. The best part is! ... they are not all even in their yet.

True, but I was scarred for life on an early play through. At some point, i forget exactly when but it's early, some of the enemies will spawn without warning directly behind your defenses and have a straight shot at your main castle. The first time this happened I had saved a few minutes before it occurred and had all of my generals way the heck out from the main castle. Which resulted in a dead game because it was impossible to get back to save it in time. Which was annoying.