timaeus222

I thought they were the same piano. In that case, yeah, the lower one is less human. When the time slider reaches in between the T and r of "Track", the Ti-Do-Re-Mi (or Mi-Fa-So-La) notes sounded mechanical. Might as well check both, then! The lower one sounds more low-quality than the other. By quality, I mean the results of the depth of the sampling in however you're using it (a General MIDI soundfont?), but not actually what I simply like better. To conserve space, many soundfonts sample at the C of every octave, and the more realistic ones sample at those C's plus each G, at least. Each pitch recorded is then shifted up and down the keyboard to give all the note timbres, and as you may guess, drastic pitch shifts (C<->G or larger) can warp the tone a lot, especially on the lowest and highest notes on a piano. So, I'm not saying that a real piano can't sound better than a soundfont, but if the soundfont sampled a piano that's supposed to sound higher quality in timbre than the real piano that was compared to it (i.e. Steinway & Sons vs. Yamaha S Series), then I'd say the soundfont sounds higher quality, but the real piano, of course, sounds more realistic. I'd opt for realism more so than quality any day, but if you can humanize the soundfont, then you've accomplished both parts.

Can you timestamp what you're talking about with the loop? This track gets really muddy later on, so the dynamics are pretty flat right now and I don't hear wherever it's supposed to be. 0:38-0:58 is where I'd say it starts getting too muddy, 0:58-1:17 gets muddier, and 1:41-2:12 is even muddier than that. You'll need to mute some instruments and pick only the ones you want to keep. You may have too many things going on at once for you to EQ. Know what's there, keep track of what frequencies it's taking up, and organize yourself. You're using FL Studio, so you should be able to see the frequencies that your instruments are occupying.

The strings are missing some humanization, and more reverb would help. Their phrasings aren't smooth, so that breaks their melodic flow. Some automation on the volumes to add swells on sustains would really help the realism. I'm unsure how off the rhythm could be in the intro since there's no rhythmic reference. The piano sounds rather mechanical, especially near the moment the slider reaches the left of the T in "Track". Each note sounds like it's literally starting over. Its sample quality is kind of low, too. Also, it would really help to adjust the velocities to how a real pianist would play it, overlap notes a bit, and offset the timings a little bit for more realism. Since the texture of this track is pretty much just piano+strings, it's that much more important to fix those issues. Good start. This could be a good read.

I agree that people shouldn't have to compare a breakdown with a remix to get the source usage, but I think it's nice to have one for the fans. Like Larry said, if you write melodic content or otherwise that sounds like it could have come from the source but is actually original, you're going to give the judges a harder time than if you actually pointed out what was supposed to be source usage. Sometimes original content works so seamlessly that it could accidentally be counted as actual source, and that's happened a few times before, I believe. Now, if you don't trust that your source breakdowns are accurate, that seems to be what Shariq's against---using a breakdown to justify source usage that doesn't actually count; as in, is truly way off and much too liberal. If you think it counts, then it should be recognizable, and when it's borderline, well, that's something for the j00jes to pore over. In the end... I just provide one with every sub, and if I really like the sub, I plop it into my actual comments.

0_0 Happy... Birthday? O_O

As chill as I remember it. Some spots were a little jarring, but other than that, good stuff.

Oh, yeah, I *was* a little vague. Yeah, I meant to say to try taking out the last notes of every *other* chunk. Great! =) That's good! I really love FL's workflow and convenience. I can't get enough of its automation clips (I tend to use more layers for my automation clips than my musical content! ).

I'd recommend that video too. I think anosou makes good sense and what he said in that video applies in the general case (though not in exactly the same way with everything, of course).

Pappy nerfday!

Not bad. I'm noticing the guitars are rather thin-sounding though. The tone is lacking some low-mids, and the bass seems to be EQed to make up for that. As for the drums, the snare is good, but the kick is buried. I can kinda hear it, but it's not that present. Needs more click and a little stronger sidechaining with the bass. Good drum playing though. Things get really muddy at 1:34, 2:06, and other places with fast kicks. It's kinda muddy in other places, but not to the extent that it obscures the clarity too much, IMO. As for the arrangement, all of the transitions seem awkward to me. I can instantly tell when you've shifted to the next source tune or a different one, so this is pretty close to a literal medley. Also, each source tune was treated in a pretty straightforward, cover-ish manner. Good start. Needs more production polish, but more importantly, much more expansion on the themes if this is supposed to be a sub for OCR. This post I made might help with the metal production.

Either use the "FL.exe" file for FL 11 instead of the "FL (extended memory).exe" file from FL 10 (both of these let you use more than 4 GB RAM), or get more RAM for your computer.

The cases I've seen are: - VGM that wasn't originally written for the game. EX: TV show themes that were adapted to chiptune - VGM that was used in a trailer for the game but not the actual game - VGM that sounds like classical music or non-VGM. EX: Magic & Might: Theme Song So I think that matches up with the third case.

What's up? I like how this is so far, but I agree on how the strings are off. I don't think they're annoying as they are, but they sound stiff, and sometimes the timings are late. The choice so far to use all spic articulations makes it seem like you ran out of time, I think. It would really help to incorporate some legato and/or tremolo in there with some volume swells via automation. I think 0:31 - 0:40 gets pretty quiet compared to the rest of the track. It's totally fine if you want to give dynamic contrast by doing that, but I think it's a bit too quiet. My bad headphones have a pretty low impedance, so I should be hearing things more loudly than with my actual mixing headphones, yet that section was barely audible on these (aside from some of the trebly sound effects). At 0:45, the guitar that fades in is pretty narrow. It may help to double track it. That aside, I think the drum and bass loop doesn't help to lead into a half-time section. That fast tempo didn't foreshadow a very slow tempo for me. It may help to just put a few cohesive risers there, and maybe even trilling violins. I also just realized that the section at 0:53 has some rather lofi hi hats. I like the modal shifts up to 1:56, though it seems a little cliche to me with the triplets. Cool trebly FX at 2:22. It kinda sounds like something from Evolve Mutations, or Evolve, or something of that sort. I would have liked to see those details in here earlier, but that's up to you. Also, 3:18 - 3:20 felt the weakest to me in terms of the realism. Maybe trying shorter/tighter articulations there on the brass could help. Overall, I think this is pretty good. Just needs some production love and some refining on the sequencing. The low end support could be stronger and clearer.

The arrangement is kinda repetitive. 1:11 - 1:54 is an almost-identical repeat of 0:15 - 0:58 with a few new notes, and 1:54 - 2:08 is almost a direct copy-paste of 1:41 - 1:54. 2:36 - 3:06 is a mostly-copy-paste of 1:12 - 1:41. 3:06 - 3:30 is another copy-paste of 1:41 - 1:54 with a lead guitar on top. So then... there's only two unique sections in the entire track: 0:00 - 0:58 and 2:08 - 2:36. I dunno, with this, the track feels generic to me. If you can add a solo or something else new and not just copy and paste old sections, it would add more interest.

Yes. It'll help those with... well... college duties. ___ I think that would help differentiate this compo from another. A lot of the compos I've seen are just "Person A vs. Person B". ___ ___ ___

I like the addition of the lower strings at 0:27. It helps with the progression aspect. However, with that section and the one after it, it feels like it could be a little repetitive to other people since 30 seconds is about as long as a 3~4-minute electronic track's intro. Maybe you can add something to vary up the textures a bit, like some automated filters on the pad, or a high countermelody? At 1:26, I think it could be cool to shift every other chunk of notes right by one note and taking out the last note in each chunk. That would offset the rhythm for every other arpeggio, and add rhythmic interest. It sounds like there's a resonance at 1:53, since that high note is pretty piercing. Sounding good so far!

Cinematic electronic.

This is amazing! =D

Happy DJ day, Mikestylez.

Another fantastic glitch arrangement from Clem. =)

Minor thing, but it should be OC ReMix, not OCRemix.

Good job. Good chips, and good guitar. I was missing a lil salsa in the drums, but that's okay.

The day Bison graced this ReMix was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday (which was Feb. 4. OH THE IRONY!).

What can I say? I'm feeling extra philosophical today.

So then you're saying we should try to learn what we want to learn to the extent that we truly believe we've exhausted whatever it is we're learning. Fair enough. But one thing bothers me. How would you (the producer, not you, Snaps) know when you've exhausted the capacity of knowledge you can acquire from said plugin/topic/object? It's been said before (with regards to Philosophy) that you can't identify that which you don't know without first understanding its essence. Do you just pick a point where you decide "okay, this is good enough, I don't need to know anything more about this to fulfill my goals, even though there might be more out there"? For example, if you've never seen a dinglehopper before and have no idea what it looks like, and I asked you to find one that perfectly fits the description of what one is (assuming that is a singular object type with no other variations), could you go and find one, bring it back to me, and show me that it is indeed a dinglehopper without any doubt? Similarly, if I picked out a plugin from the set that I have, how would I know whether or not I've done all I can with it and maximized its use? There has to be a point when you just know that you've used it to its fullest extent, and that point is the actual capacity---the objective truth. How can you know, to the extent that it matters to you, that you just can't identify any more new and practical applications for your plugin? That's hard, because our experience with plugins/topics/objects is always in development. We're always hungry for the truth.