Garpocalypse

Some really good advice mak thanks. I'm still working with novice mixing techs but after watching some people mix a piece I think i have more perspective on it now. By "pick" did you mean the attack of the note? Or Peak on the meter? Well, I guess it would be related afterall... What i'll try to do next is get one of the rhythm guitar tracks out of center. That would probably bump me down to 2 tracks for rhythm guitar but maybe that's enough anyway. As for the drums, I did some parallel compression on them. The reverb on the snare might be from that, otherwise its straight Steven Slate Drums. uh oh, i've been found out. Yes this is based on my previous remix. Not a remix of a remix but the opposing side to my other one. (A- Or at least that's the way I prefer to think about it.

Most of the time i start by paying homage to the source. I do that by playing as much as I am able to across a couple of instruments. Then i try to think of a concept that's related to the game or to the source tune and go from there.

Kind of like Final Fantasy. "What we did recently sold well enough so never mind how we got here!" RE4 and RE5 were fun enough but, honestly, if there is a part of any game these days that's not sheer torture to play then nothing stands out about the game! Remember returning to a mansion full of hunters? The basement in RE2? The hospital of RE3? All of RE:CV? Having RE themed nightmares when I was a kid was part of the immersion! Today's kids will never understand...

I'm not about to buy a 3ds but after some of the very positive reviews about this game I'm wondering if the game is a return to form for the series or just more of the same from RE4 and RE5.

You've got to be freaking kidding me... Still, following in WR's shoes is not a bad thing. This year (or next) will be the year of the GAR! and not the fish either! Should have done a search, sorry. Lock thread if need be or keep it goin.

nice save. I just wanted to make sure I didn't divide the OCR community or make it look like a rant about certain games. I love you guys after all. I think seeing the robot masters on everyone's forum sig made me sick of megaman too actually. But, we are playing with people's childhood memories so don't make me bust on you!

Just a mild curiosity among all those posts out there that say "remix this game!" and "remix that game!" What games will you never want to touch the music of? Some reasons could be: You enjoyed the game too much to take the music outside of it's original context You dislike the game The music is unremixable or too good to do it remix justice The music has been remixed too often This is what I probably will not touch during my time here at OCR, 1. Anything related to Sonic 2 (especially not Casino Night Zone!) 2. All of the music from Final Fantasy VII 3. Music from Resident Evil 4. Music from Motoi Sakuraba (Dance rendition of On The Cutting Edge Of Notion anyone? didnt think so...) 5. Any game that has or has had "Nintendo" on the cover. And thanks to OCR, I have probably lost any interest I had in 6. Sonic 3's Icecap Zone (willrock's=best version ever, now it's time to move on) 7. Any mobile or social games, I always wanted old school gaming to return but...not like this! Note that this is NOT a hate thread. -gar

I didn't know much about humanization until recently. When I first got into this it seemed like if any note was not dead on top of the beat it felt sloppy or out of place. Now, going back and listening to some of my older stuff I can't believe I thought it used to sound good with such rigid timing. There are many ways to humanize something and it depends on what tools you have available. If you have a midi keyboard, practice a small chunk of the part you want to record then do it. The longer way to do it is to mess with note timing and velocity with a mouse. You can loop a few notes of a longer passage and make sure that they feel "human" <------KEYWORD. For example, if you are playing an aggressive passage are the note timings going to be dead on top of the beat as you move to completion? No freaking way! You'll find that most people under all of that intensity anticipate the beat and come in earlier. Same(well, the opposite actually) is true of a legato passage. Most people will not play dead on the beat but instead come in just after it with the actual placement of the note gradually getting further away from the beat as the passage progresses. Also, even on a good day a player will never play the exact same note the same way with the same attack with the same feeling every single time. That's just corny. A string player will have strings warming, stretching, and decaying. A trumpet player's lips might start to swell and affect his sound, attitude, perception of the audience. forget about the schmuck tuba player kicking his chair behind him. This is just a generalization of course but if you think about the playing, what the performer would be feeling, what the performer wants to communicate to the audience, whether or not a spot light is in their eye... if you think about things like that then humanizing becomes a bit easier. One last tip, if you are like me, sometimes you open up your DAW and have no clue what you want to do with anything. Afraid to mess with what you have because you may destroy what you have and make it worse. If that becomes the case just "F&CK AROUND WITH IT ANYWAY!" (my new motto) Mess up the velocity and note timing and see what changed, then make more changes and see what happens.

You're going to have to learn how to play scales. and sing them to understand what neblix is talking about. Play right up the scale you are learning. DO re mi fa so la ti DO(1-2-3-4-5-6-7-1) then try some different ways DO re DO mi DO fa DO so etc. (or 1-2-1-3-1-4-1-5 degrees of the scale) This will teach you how notes relate to each other. Also, get a drone cd and practice moving in towards consonance then outwards towards dissonance with your voice. That's pretty fun to do though your parents/neighbors might look at you funny. After scales and intervals you can move on to triads and chords. by then you should have a pretty good idea on how music flows. I wouldn't start with more than one midi rip. Really more for learning what instruments go well together and mixing practice than anything else. Try to do as much by ear as possible. Hear something on TV? fire up your instrument of choice and figure out how to do it. On youtube and want to imitate the sounds of a cat being hit by wicker furniture? again, get your instrument and figure it out. Good luck. You have a ways to go but each day you'll get closer.

What do you mean non story? 0:09Clearly Shaq goes back in time for some reason, or forward, or to another world maybe... and meets up with this catchick. After a quick What's Up they punch each other. That's all i got from it at least. What more do you need any way?

Back in the day I was commited to learning every fighting game I could get my hands on. This one was unlearnable. but i'm thinking of giving the music a shot. Liking Gargoyles peak quite a bit. Now if I could just get my boss off of my back I would have more time to work on it! I like the Genesis's versions better. I always thought the SNES had some dull sounding soundtracks. Though i would like to point out that both the Genesis and SNES versions of the game had a catchick.

An Irishman promoting Belgian beer? That's kind of like a Dutchman promoting Irish Beer. DRINK GUINESS! It goes great with everything Ice Cream=Guinness Float! Coffee= Guiness with Coffee in it! Rum= Guiness with rum in it!

Update 1-15 I think i had a few eureka moments this time around. I spent a rather large chunk of time this weekend watching mixing videos from RecordingRevolution and I think they really helped. For this mix I tried a bunch of new things in order to bring out the sound. After making my initial fader adjustments I switched to mono for some serious EQ'ing and was able to get most of the instruments pretty audible compared to how it was before. My only beef with this version is that I think i took too much of a chunk out of the rhythm guitars in order to keep them from killing everything in the mix. The inner rhythm guitar tracks got slammed down to one, center panned, with a different rhythm guitar double tracked and hard panned. I then cut the outer rhythm guitars around 300-400. For the master I tried something new. I put a multiband compressor on it which is something that I always avoided doing since I figured that I rarely knew what i was doing with a standard compressor. After hours of playing with it I think it helped the mix greatly but I'm sure i killed parts of it. On the plus side the mix is louder! and by louder I mean audible. http://soundcloud.com/garpocalypse/sormelo1-15-master Check original post for first version if you want to do some comparing -gar

Already done Not sure what you mean by that one. Usually i mix by getting the drums to their level then the bass etc. but this time since i figured that since rhythm guitars and the drummer work very closely in metal to develop a solid groove i did Drums, rhythm guitars then tried to stick the bass in there somewhere. Don't hate, just sayin'. I'm playing with the idea of changing the strings. I was going for a contrast in intensity between the two major elements of the mix but I may just cave in and make everything intense. with more brass. More to come!

Thanks for the comments. Especially the one on compression. I'm going to get the rhythm guitars back down to 4 tracks and EQ them differently. I should post something tonight or tommarow. No one thinks that the melodies need to be rewritten? I got kinda playful with it and I was wondering if anyone would recognize it.

You know I did too. And that was a year ago at least that I thought that.

Nice change of pace AngelCity! The dizi kind of sounds like the free one from Kong Audio, am i right? The only thing I can really say is that it's evident the intro was on a click track or just not humanized enough. When playing something like that take very long breathes and flow. One of my favorite examples Awesome CD by the way. I'd recommend picking it up.After the intro I think the piece should open up more then blast completely open further into it. I'm still working on doing this myself in my mixes but if you keep something close to center pan in one section, then double track and move it outward for another it should sound more open. I may be wrong on that or there may be better ways to do it but it's worth a shot.

Working on a name change! This was my first submission for DoD's Sega Vs Nintendo month. Probably the worst month to have a debut as there were loads of incredible entries. Needless to say, I tanked. Hard. But now I'm looking for some feedback! Thanks to Aster who blasted out the rhythm guitar part in two days. I remixed the piece so this is a bit different from my original submission. Here is what I changed. 1. I have six rhythm guitar tracks instead of the original four. 2. I double tracked the live rhythm guitars differently than I did before mostly by cutting up different sections of the playing. (Putting some from the end in the beginning etc.) 3. I cut out the crap intro until i get something better 4. I was very liberal in double tracking, this time I added more tracks for the strings and the lead guitar. What i'm looking to change: 1. I used a VST for the lead. Terrible idea. I'm looking for a lead guitarist! 2. The ending 3. I'm a bit timid when using mix compression. I played around with it for a nice chunk of time but the piece is still too quiet! Does anyone have any tips that would keep me from feeling like i'm destroying the piece if i use compression? 4. Name Change: My original idea was to cram every SEGA GENESIS related marketing buzz word i could into the title. "I heard Billy got a "Welcome to the Next Level" on the Streets of Blast Processing and Ninten didnt'!. Or something like that. Still makes no sense to me. Who's Ninten? Original Version (well almost) http://soundcloud.com/garpocalypse/sormelo1-15-master (1-15) As of right now, I'm not sure if i am going to submit this to OCR or not. The ideas I used for this mix mostly came from my previous remix of the SOR title (that's currently in the judges panel). The melody does get a tad, what's the word, unrecognizable through a rather large chunk of the mix so unless I rewrite half of the piece I'm sure i'd get a NO(go away!). Still i'll take any crits I can get! -gar Also if anyone was at the listening party listening to this at Magfest i'm curious to know how it was received. Edit: Update info with current version on last post

Congrats! I know I like two of you already.

hmmmm. Who's Chris? Sounds good to me. This is a busy month for me jobwise but i'll do what I can.

Sorry if this was posted before. I took a few searches through the forums and didn't see any mentionings of this one. Recording Revolution did a great series called 5 minutes to a better mix in May. One tip was given each day for a total of 31 easily digestible tips that are aimed towards beginners. Gain Staging Mix Cleanup

3 steps to enjoy game aviation. 1. Put PS3 in closet 2. Ebay Sega Saturn 3. Get WING ARMS

I think I have a similar problem. Not a bad thing, but needing to find the balance of familiarity and non-plagiarism is part of the challenge! I think it's easier to write original work but then you'd have nothing to mooch off of. Take me for example: "There's a new SONIC REMIX?! I don't care if it's in DanceRussianFolkMelodicDeathLatinElectronicaFusion with Dubstep influences!! I'll download the hell out of it!" There's tons of great OCremixes but I think some of the best that find the balance of source and remix are Willrock's.

At first I felt bad for laughing at that when i heard it. Now I think it was intentional. Got Phrasing?