timaeus222

Yeah, by the loudness, I don't mean it's really near 0dB, but I mean it feels a little overly pushed by the limiter. I'm unsure why, though.

Well, yeah. I already took AP English three years ago. I didn't say it *was* a MIDI from VGMusic, I just said it sounds like it could have been from there. I'd advise you to try keeping your personal opinions from restricting your open-mindedness. I'm just giving you some feedback, like you wanted.

What are you talking about? When did I talk about the government? You sure you recognize what MIDI means? This sounds like any old MIDI from vgmusic.com. It's rigid, and it sounds like there were extra notes to "create" delay to compensate for no delay effect. Just because something's "SPC" doesn't mean it doesn't resemble MIDI extremely closely, which this does.

What I do is sequence in just a simple four-on-the-floor kick pattern as a metronome, detect the approximate tempo, locate the first four measures of the song (not the first four bars in FL, the first four measures in the song's writing itself), and make sure that that lines up with the first four bars in FL and every significant transient lines up with the start of each bar. Sometimes using "Fit To Tempo" doesn't work for me.

Hm... This is kinda synth rock-ish. Kinda reminds of Skyrim. The mixing sounds fine up until about a minute in and you reach the rock part. I'm not finding the kick to come through all that much. The snare is kinda okay, and the toms are good, but I'm finding the cymbals to be centered and cluttering the stereo image. It's also tough to distinctly hear the piano and the guitar. The rhythm guitar and lead guitar are distant, the rhythm guitar tone sounds thin (high passed too high above 200Hz or so), and the lead guitar and piano fight for stereo space. This all seems to be overcompressed as well, and as a result this doesn't sound as loud as it implies.

First things first, LOUD. Gotta lower the volume of everything by about 1~2dB. It's pumping in the overcompressed way. Like two years ago, I actually still don't like the sub bass up until 0:39. It's so exposed that once I accidentally focus on it, it gets grating. Some sort of evolving bassy pad would evoke much more interest than a simple sustained sine wave. If the sound design is full, you don't need a layer of low end to fill that gap. Might as well design a sound that works in the first place rather than plop something bassy in to superficially do the job. At 1:00, there's quite a bit of reverb on the snare. I understand you want that effect, but it would help to noise gate the snare after the reverb in the chain to make sure it has reverb but the reverb doesn't interfere so much with the treble in the track. I'm not sure I really "get" the panning LFO on the lead at 1:06. It's okay in context, but in reality it's occupying a lot of stereo space and not really leaving a lot of room for any other elements. Its treble needs to be tamed as well with notch EQ so that you can at least hear the other elements more clearly. Also, I find the new hi hat layer at 1:21 to be quite distracting. They feel like they belong in a different genre. Your main drums make this sound like a swing-rhythm bass-heavy track, while the hi hats say straight trance. A swing rhythm playing at the same time as a straight rhythm throws me off. At 1:43, the builddown implies a breakdown section, but instead you continue the arrangement as before. It disrupts the pacing and I think it feels out of place. 3:24 has those same hi hats as before, but here, when juxtaposed with the plucky synth arp, it's even more evident that it feels rhythmically off. The arrangement, although repetitive, I suppose is borderline in that regard. I believe that that combined with the production issues would give this either a NO (borderline) or NO (resubmit).

Strictly on the arrangement, it actually sounds just like a direct MIDI rip to me. It sounds like you replaced instruments in a MIDI file and fixed up any weird notes. If you were to remix for OCR submission, what would happen here is that it would get rejected by email before it gets to the judges panel at all, as direct MIDI rips aren't allowed for copyright infringement issues. Going into the remixing scene in a serious way for the first time, it's fine to start off using MIDIs, but if you want to catch people's attention, it really helps to personalize your remix with your own arrangement contributions and do much more than a few alterations here and there. You can surely still honor the original without sticking to it note-by-note. It's not like an original VGM is always perfect by any means. Any OST can be reinterpreted if you really try.

Not to burst your bubble or anything, but the video/audio quality probably isn't going to convince those people. It SEEMS good to me, but to them... I dunno.

The arrangement seems pretty solid, with just a few iffy spots. The drums are more or less on autopilot with kinda subtle changes in the kick rhythm, mostly. More snare variation would really help lessen the repetition. I also agree with Kanohi about 2:00 being abrupt. Tying the two sections together with a more gradual dynamic curve would really help making it more cohesive. 1:02 - 1:59 is repeated verbatim at 2:41 - 3:38 aside from very minor drum variations. I strongly believe that adding more distinction between those two sections would make the arrangement less of one that coasts on one good section copy-pasted and more of one that adds a true sense of progression. Last thing is the dynamic shift at 3:51, and the weird arpeggio. It clashes with what came before it and makes the ending more jarring than you meant it to be. Currently this may get a NO (resubmit) based on the fact that 25% of the remix was repeated and doesn't really introduce new arrangement. Personally I'd limit myself to 10% or less repeated in any close form whatsoever.

http://goldbaby.co.nz/ is a very good place to look. Of course, drum programming and processing will help a lot to get these samples to really sound how you want. FPC isn't actually all that good, and it's more for songs that you don't have to have good production on for its intended purpose. i.e. 16-bit GBA video games.

For some parts, different articulations would work more cleanly. EX: 0:21 could use tighter notes, so staccato or spiccato should work better to convey what you meant. Right now it just sounds like short sustains. I'm also questioning the use of a contrabass as a drone. You're using sustains, so it's more drone-like and lackluster. Doing something with tremolo may be more interesting but more repetitive. Automation to add swells to the volume and expressiveness would really help make this more interesting. You're also using the drone throughout, and it gets pretty grating to constantly have bass in the background.

Feliz cumpleanos, seniores! [sic]

Yes, that's certainly possible, though I find that a rare occasion, or an obscure topic, at times. I think I first was introduced to something of that nature .

I guess there's the possibility of those being remixes of other people's original non-VGM tracks. Then contacting them is at least easier.

Nice cheerful atmosphere. Reminds me of Chiwalker's take on a Donkey Kong Land track.

Right; I just meant as a side-by-side situation. You can't have a composition already finished in a studio without the production to go alongside it, but I can see how you mean that the production quality, if not taught, will be up to the reader, but the decisions may or may not be similar. i.e. If you write in the same genre/style as the author, production decisions may naturally adhere to those that are common to the genre/style. I did, actually, and I saw how you said that. What I said was emphasizing how music theory is essentially the "method to the madness" (derived from Hamlet, by the way) and explains why something makes sense. If you learn music theory to analyze music though, no matter what level of theory, it would at least help you learn how not to write theoretically incorrect music. For example, and you would already know this, if you understand the resultant logic on how some sort of melodic line works, or something like that, you can construct a line of similar effectiveness, but doesn't necessarily have to be similar in structure. Of course, there are exceptions, like atonal music from people like Edgar Varese or Arnold Schönberg, that don't seem to follow theory, but that's not exactly common. I actually don't know as much music theory as I need to in order to explain why I do things a certain way, so that's why I said I would rather explain them in a simplified manner.

Ironically, I'm working on exactly that right now. I'm not actually going to cover advanced theory, but instead, I'll simplify the theory into the resultant concept plus some very basic theory, broken down into subjects such as flow (natural/awkward feel), realism (accuracy to how a real instrument can capably play, nothing to do with articulations, keyswitches, etc.), sensibility (harmonic sense/awkwardness? logical sequence of intervals?), etc. Obviously I wouldn't then explain why it works by way of rigid music theory, but I'd generalize it and only use the most accessible concepts of music theory so that even those who don't know music theory at all can "catch up" and eventually get the hang of it based on example, practice, and muscle memory. Since I won't be explicitly using advanced music theory to explain logical arrangements, I think it'll leave more room for flexibility than if I did, and it won't encourage a "restricted" way of composing. Speaking of examples, come to think of it, having actual chapter problems in the book wouldn't be a bad idea. I'm assuming you mean in production quality and arrangement tendencies. If it were production quality and arrangement style, then you're not really differentiating yourself from that person. (Tendency is like sensibility, flow, etc. in your notes, while style is like genre [which restricts the arrangement tendencies even more], in this context.)Thankfully, I'll stick to writing with humble wording for the book, so that the reader will only take in that which they agree with, and whatever they agree with will usually be a concept, not a specific example. I'm sure you agree that understanding the underlying concept of something gives more flexibility and less rigidity than understanding how to carry out that specific case, because then that concept can be reapplied in other contexts.

I'd be up for that.

Nice birthday!

I think at one point I wanted to fix that, and, going back to it, I figured out how. At first I was confused as to why regular text acted like the link to the first page in the dropdown, but once I re-iterated the transformation of the text to a link, I could force it to go to URL#, so... problem solved! Also, the footer links are identically ordered compared to the dropdown menu content in the case of that happening.

Hm. Well, what it sounds like right now is that you have a concept going, and a skeleton written, but I would prefer more variation in the wobble timbres to polish the concept. Right now lots of them are being reused in the same section repeatedly. The electro house section sounds like it wants to be big, but the repetition of the same wobble sound and pattern causes that section to not convey that. The dubstep breakdown wants to be big, but its repetition and simplicity downplay the intensity. This sounds like what you were going for, basically.

Oh, that's just me adding bass fills. I think it's gonna be fine.

There's a nice little feature in CSS2 or 3 or so that lets you make your browser detect the window width, which I believe you've heard of. The cool aspect about this is that you can integrate this with the ability to control what displays and what is invisible. With this, it's possible to detect the window width (targeting mobile devices, for example), display certain content, and make other content invisible. That way, you can simply design the site how you want it for a certain window width, classify each set of elements (maybe a div container for efficiency?), and have designs that perfectly fit each window width and work with many mobile devices as a result. Example: http://tproductions.comeze.com/ --- my website reformats when you reach a max window width of 480px. You can look at the coding if it helps, or gives you any ideas. Just a little trick I picked up from http://css-tricks.com/.

Happy Theoretical Birthday! Wait a minute.