DarkSim

Hey there, welcome to OCR! Thought I'd post a reply since I checked out your tune, and also you got "josh" as your tindeck 4-letter extension, which is awesome, haha! Firstly, here's the source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_c_rA2s4q8 for anyone (including me) that's unfamiliar with it. Well, as for a critique, I think it's fair to say that pretty much all aspects need work, but given that it's your first try it's really not that bad an effort. You've got some dungeon-y type synths going on, and changed them up a few times. As for advice, this thread is a good place to start. First work on a decent drum beat to back it - you basically have no beat to this piece and it really needs one. Then try adding some pads to give it more atmosphere, and just generally experiment. Best of luck

http://ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=3314 taught me all I know, so it's a good place to start.

I agree with this, but I think I can offer an explanation. There's very little in the way of dynamics to the song, in terms of volume especially. The whole thing seems to be sitting on a level, and doesn't grab your attention when things change. There are a couple of sections where there's a half-tempo beat or the beat drops completely, but you don't really seem to notice when you listen to it. I think you need to do more EQing on individual tracks, and bring out the dominant frequencies more (especially for the lead towards the end - boost those highs). Everything seems to be in the middle as well, I don't notice much panning going on. Changing these 2 things would make a world of difference, I'm sure. Also make your drums meatier - I can hardly hear the bass drum, what's that about eh?! Make sure all your drums are on separate tracks if you haven't already, giving you much better control over each one. For a heavy, intense mix like this, I'd expect the drums to really drive it along with that awesome chunky rhythm guitar (and it is awesome), but they sort of take a back seat and as such it doesn't pack so much of a punch. So basically, it's just some mixing issues that need to be addressed - the actual tune is very enjoyable, and with some easy changes it'll really improve. Get cracking

Heyyyy I just searched to see if anyone had done a remix of this tune about 3 hours ago, and then you post this - great stuff! Love the interpretation so far, all I can say is keep it up, it's one of my favourite sources from OoT.

This wouldn't be a bad idea at all! I'm thinking a sort of Ganondorf meets Muse combo might work wonders for an ending, with some epic organ arpeggios and craziness.

Mm, very chilled mix here, and I'm going to play it safe and agree with everything Rozovian and sbeast said about it! I don't know anything about musical mode (although I did read the wikipedia page and sort of get it), but that note from the Serenade of Water does sound off. Expanding on this, it'd be nice to have a breakdown section where the beat disappears right after you've played the main serenade/bolero, and you have the "resolving" part of the song (e.g. from 0:17 in this) arranged to fit as a nice rest on our musical journey, before continuing on, with maybe some extra spring in our step (and by that I mean extra variations in the beat you have going on, maybe some hats/percussion, maybe some background arpeggios).Nice Zelda tunes anyway, you gonna continue with the Zelda theme?

Yaaay! An Advance Wars remix! Awww... it's a MIDI rip. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but have you downloaded a MIDI file and then slowed down the tempo and changed the instruments? If you have, there's no chance you'll get posted on OCR. If you haven't, you have a great ear and need to work on your arranging! Seriously though, I'd suggest reading lots of tutorials on the forums, and when you approach a remix, try to have a clear idea of a direction you want to take it, rather than trying to copy the original as closely as possible. Start with those basics and you'll be doing fine.

It's a really thumping mix, that's for sure - that bass is intense! My main concern though is I kind of got bored halfway through. No doubt it'd be great to play UT to, it's just to listen to it on its own, I don't think it's dynamic enough to keep your interest for 6 minutes. In terms of originality, if you wanted to add some stuff to it, there's definitely space in the higher frequencies (I'd actually prefer it, to give my ears a break from those bass frequencies) for a trance lead line. This would give you that extra bit of spice to the track to keep it interesting as well. Your builds could also do with being bigger I think, as each section just jumps into the next without really building up and crashing into each other to set the main sections on fire (again improving dynamics). Hope that helps, good luck with your remix project

Haha, this is terrific! Had me chuckling all the way through, in a good way

I've got something special for you! /dodgy Indian accent OK so I'm not going to say much about this track so as not to bias any feedback. It's been through such a massive update I've changed pretty much everything. If you listened before, please do so again and comment! The first version was far from complete, but now I think I've got something going on here, arrangement wise.

I nearly threw up when I heard this song for the first time http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB-OjNmuUag&ob=av2n My friend had it as his ringtone... epic fail. Led Zeppelin can't be ripped off this badly... it's just...

Apologies for the double post, but it's far enough apart I think. Just wanted to post an Electro-style tune I've been working on for a couple of days, trying out some of the ideas and points raised in this thread. It's a cover of an old I've wanted to do for ooooh 15 years or so, and I thought it'd be a perfect candidate for some messing around with new techniques.You can find my version here. That bass sound is just a single square wave and a single sine wave with a tiny bit of modulation around 230Hz. You should also be able to hear the fade to greys after each build, I've tried to keep as few channels as possible so that everything can be heard easily. I forgot to mention that effects are really important too, to keep a monotonous beat interesting. Every 4-8 bars, have some sort of weird effect in there (see also: Electrodispenser) to mix it up a bit. I was playing with my synth VST and made a weird sound that's a bit like a monkey jumping on some hot vinyl, so I decided to use it. As an aside, I think djp posted a question on facebook a while back asking "what is 'Electro' to you?", and for me this would be exactly it - oldskool sounding synths with a fresh take on the music. Sadly cracktros aren't accepted on OCR though so I won't be doing anything else to it unless I want to experiment some more. Apologies if there are any duff notes, it may not be 100% correct... I'll call it 'artistic interpretation' if there are

I know The Radical Sifu was working on a DK64 Frantic Factory mix here: http://ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=29082 but I'm told he's given up on it. I liked the WIP anyway so give it a listen

Hello there, I was wondering what OCR's stance is on accepting remixes of "cracktros", that is, the hacker intros you used to get on old floppy disk based games (usually with cheat options and a shoutout to all the BBS crews). I know they're not strictly game music, but the only place you hear them is if you load the game up, so I was just wondering if I were to sub a remix of a cracktro tune, would it have any chance of passing?

When you click "Edit", click "Advanced", and it's in there.

Happy birthday bLiNd! I listen to your remixes almost every day, have a good one!

Yoozer, thank you kindly! OK so now I've had chance to listen (on repeat for 45 mins), I'm going to give an extended critique on the song, as Yoozer's gone to the trouble of mirroring it for me. Bear in mind that while I like the song, I'm being extra critical because I'm trying to help you improve, BP With that in mind, let's begin! It starts off with a nice beat, I was half expecting Gimme All Your Lovin' by ZZ Top after that, but then the electro elements come in and the song gets going. I really like the zappy electro-toms that come in, and that right-panned delayed synth is very nice, clearly heard all the way through due to its stereo position, despite being pretty quiet. Gotta say, I'm not a fan of the vocals in this track, the voice is kinda annoying, and the lyrics are so basic they don't do anything for me. About the only bit I like is the "Whoooooooaaaaaaaaa" part, but then a synth could replace the voice there and it probably wouldn't detract too much from the song. It might do the track good to layer the vocals a bit more, but I'll concentrate on the actual music cos it's not like you sung the song yourself. The first build comes in at 0:38, and that's really not much of a build either. If you listen to most of bLiNd's stuff, there's barely any point in the song where there isn't some sort of build filling out the frequency spectrum. Look at your spectrum on the master channel, and find holes that need filling, then slap some white noise in there. This has double an effect, firstly, it fills out the soundscape, giving the track a more epic feel, and secondly you can get away without a kick drum for a while, thus making the drop bigger. See Golbez 'n' Goblins for an example of this style intro. Skipping ahead, you do use this technique later in the song at 2:51, but it feels weak there. You need to be building up and fading out a lot more, unless you're in the main groove of the song. A really nice plugin is a "Fade to Grey". This will slowly turn whatever noise you have into white noise. I like to use a build leading into a fade to grey, and then automate it so that the "greyness" lasts as long as I want it to (usually for the breakdown period). Also sidechain that noise. At the end of Golbez 'n' Goblins, bLiNd uses fade to grey (probably) for the last 10 seconds or so, but you can use this to naturally lead in to a fading out for a breakdown section such at that at 2:51. There's probably a bit of greyness in Dance Nation too, but just listen to the amount of white noise there is in the background of Golbez 'n' Goblins, Dance Nation and Chemixtrixx. It's actually surprising. All in all, good intro up to 0:45. The bassline's really the star in this mix, and when that comes in at 45 seconds it really gets going. Absolutely love the sound, but I think it could definitely be improved by making it sound much dirtier and then adding more sidechain compression. I find you can get away with a much more outrageous sound if you're sidechaining, because the ears get a break every beat. For example, a hoover synth can sound horrible if you play it continuously, but drop it a couple of octaves and add a sidechain, and it can sound like a really dirty bassline. Try adding light distortion or modulation to the bass and then increasing the sidechain compression on it. I've been listening to Chemixtrixx loads the past few days and I'm thinking you could have a bassline similar to that. Also, when sidechaining, don't have a hard knee on the compressor - use a smooth one (increase dB value). Then play with the threshold until you get something that sounds right. I should mention at this point that I think you could also get away with turning up the master volume a little, I had to turn up my headphones to get the volume to match other OCR songs. Just a little, mind you. Moving on! Again it's a pretty short build (6 seconds or so) leading into the the section from 1 minute onwards. This part's good, I really like the high harmonising synth. You've used it pretty sparingly which I think is a good decision. totally awesome 6 seconds from 1:30 where you twist and wind down that bass (what do you use to do that, out of interest? Is it Glitch with TapeStop and a slow wind down with quick wind-up?). Nice filtering and white noise, I just think it needs to be more energetic there. More volume and more sidechaining on the white noise and bass I think would help. Good energetic verse up until 2:06, more nice synth variations. It's round about now I'm wondering where the snare has gone, you should try and turn it up a bit as it seems to be lost in there somewhere, despite being fine in the intro. The breakdown, like I said, lacks white noise (or at least the volume of it, cos there's some sort of LFO synthy thing going on in the background, I just can't hear it too well). The final drop needs to be huge as well to let the listener know the song's reaching its climax. Listen to the build/drop in White Skies (4:14-4:41) or Dance Nation (4:14-4:44) for examples. When it hits back into the final chorus at 3:50, that needs to get everyone on the dancefloor going MENTAL. Some nice vocal panning towards the end - this could be done earlier as well to make the vocals a bit more lively. Maybe add a subtle synth in line with the vocals in the final chorus to emphasise them. That final chorus needs to go out with a bang, but as it is, I can only hear the vocal panning that's different from the first time it was played back at 1 minute. Raise it an octave? More sidechain? Lose the bass a couple of bars before it comes in? Add another snare layer? Not sure really, it's something I struggle with as well. But there are a number of things to try there. I'd also have a bit more of an outro to make it more DJ friendly. So, there's my essay on the subject. Please take it all with a pinch of salt, as I can't exactly offer you any of my work that's any better! I'm still a newbie myself but am trying to assimilate as much knowhow off here as I can. Hopefully I have been of some help!

Yeah it was just a simple bass synth, so you could probably do it with any synth, and I used Glitch to play about with some modulation settings on it, although I'm sure there's probably an easier way to modulate stuff. I'd love to check out your track, but I'm stuck on a boat and I get this message when I try to listen to anything: Banned extension: .mp3 You are seeing this error because what you attempted to access appears to contain, or is labelled as containing, material that has been deemed inappropriate. You see that? Your mix must be too inappropriate for my delicate ears

Was just messing around today using Sylenth Polar Virus trying to get a rasping, twisting bass sound using a simple square/saw bass with 1 voice, and I threw some modulation onto it. It sounded amazing, try it

Make sure your master channel doesn't have reverb turned up to 55% wet and 800ms delay. ...this may or may not have caused me some embarrassment today wondering why this one song I was working on sounded so much quieter and muddier than all my other ones...

This is simply amazing. For a source that's so old and tired, it completely refreshes it. The change to the minor key gives it that sort of desperate, earnest feel of nostalgia to it, like the game's so old you're trying to remember it and bits are missing. Then you just let the synths take you on a journey as they dance around with each other in some twisted psychedelic retro soundscape. Truly emotional piece.

I'd also like to see this, and it would be quite interesting to see you create a synth sound from scratch, as that's an area I'm keen to improve upon. Finding the right synth sound can take literally hours for me, and even then I'm still not happy! Any tips would be greatly appreciated. Also, I wish I had youtube at work

Well, I really like it at least. What do you think? http://www.tindeck.com/listen/bjud