timaeus222

I don't believe you actually play piano; this arrangement sounds mechanically sequenced, both in velocity and timing. I do hear the reverb though.

I'm not particularly a fan of that kick, but everything else was great. I noticed the strings were a bit plainly sequenced, but assuming you didn't have a thousand-dollar sample library, it was a good way of handling that. I didn't mind the length. I listened through the whole thing without fast forwarding or rewinding.

Sounds like more work than necessary. You shouldn't need to sidechain the snare to the bass or anything else. It just adds a weird pumping effect to the entire song if done badly, and it hurts the transients of other stuff. Just max out the snare volume, control the transient with a transient shaper or a compressor (or both). Then lower the volume, and raise it back up until it barely hits 0dB or so (your preference). Do that while everything else is playing at the same time---it stacks.

Aw yeah. EPICNESS STRIKES AGAIN.

I wanna show you some fun stuff I did using dBlue Glitch v2.0.2. I also just made a very cool sample pack consisting of glitchy drum samples I essentially synthesized in this video, as well as chiptune-y effects, reverses, and more! There are the raw glitched samples as well as some samples that were further processed through external VSTs. 55 samples total. It's free, by the way. REALLY Quick Audio Demo http://mediafire.com/?t2uhbmhrhjbp2sk - Mirror 1 http://4shared.com/zip/MIB3xZG_/timae - Mirror 2

Alright then. Yeah, it was a bit unclear at first. My mistake.

Not bad for your first. The orchestra and choir are very fake though, and the arrangement doesn't stray very far from the original other than 1:24 or areas like that, which is pretty minimalistic. The intro takes too long to lead into the main sections. I would have halved the length of the intro and put more of a progressive instrumentation, as well as reverb on the glock.

0:32 - The bass isn't very aggressive, and there could be a tiny bit more distortion in the rhythm guitars. 0:39 is plain-sounding, and needs more than just a generic chiptune tribute section. Maybe some detuned saws could work better, like .0:57 - The kick and snare aren't coming through very well. Did you try EQing yet? There doesn't seem to be a notch at the kick in the bass and guitars, nor any accommodation for the snare. The kick and snare are also a bit quiet. The guitars sound especially hollow here without a strong bass. The piano is kind of buried at 1:42 by the guitars. Piano needs to be louder. Pretty good first remix. I know it was better than my first.

The balance is completely off; the bass is way too loud, and as a result, the guitars are buried, as well as the drums unfortunately. The only drums I can hear are hi hats, cymbals (barely for some reason), kicks (very barely), and toms (barely but a tiny bit better than the kicks). For now, turn off the bass and make sure other things are balanced, and then put the bass back, mute it, then turn up the volume slowly until it's enough. It's good that the shakuhachi is realistic, but it's hard to hear.

It sounds a little muddy in the low end. Try high passing your EP-like instrument up to where the bass instrument's frequencies stop. The bass instrument is also really loud. 0:15 - The portamento saw has a weird LFO depth. Try decreasing the depth a little bit, and increasing the cutoff a little bit. Sometimes the cutoff gets too low. 0:35 - I suggest the kick be layered with something that has more high end to it. It's gotta feel like it's sorta glued to the limiter. The snare needs a little more treble. 0:39 and 0:47 - cymbals feel awkward. Why are they there? 1:04's lead is pretty flimsy, especially after that drum fill to what I would expect to be great. Honestly sounds like a simple sine wave with no vibrato. Everything after 1:34 is a repeat. Add something new. Lead sequencing needs more attention to detail. Came out alright, but it's not quite OCR material at the moment.

That's funny, I've always thought my low end was bad. I'll take another look at the treble. I do have trouble with that sometimes. I'm also going to further inspect the bass+pad combo in the breakdown. I think the bass has too much midrange. Just curious, do you hear a very soft but weird crackling noise every time the kick hits starting at 0:16 and 0:32? I can confirm that it's definitely from the kick. EDIT: Never mind, I got it. For some reason, my headphones were doing that... I adjusted them a little and it's fine now. I think it's from the bass rumbling my earpads while a hair was on them. As for that 11-source track, lol, I remember that one. (oh, and for the record, Rozo, Gario randomly came. :V) EDIT: Adjusted treble and uploaded a new version (not in OP). Will submit later, probably Saturday. EDIT: Submitted to OCR on 6/8/2013

Haha, I would have expected Doulofée then, but I guess you changed the o to an i because it looked better.

That was actually a statement regarding room for a reasonable doubt, rather than a suggesting a real decision was hoped to be made. In a case like this, the negative is easier to be sure about than the affirmative (and no, I'm not actually doing any special pleading. ). You were making that point; that's a given. However, in order for your assertion to work, you needed a good connection between violence for literary arts and real-world violence. Otherwise, these sentences you wrote would be useless: If you want to use literary art as something to be compared safely and reasonably with real-world violence, it could be a case-by-case basis. Obviously you can't compare the murder of a person by poison on a TV show with the murder of a person by a gunshot shared on the news. Poison is much slower than a gunshot, so it's not a close enough comparison to be a strong analogy/comparison.Also, by writing this paragraph: you implicitly compared two different definitions (or measurements, using your word) of violence by accident: fictional/literary/scripted violence and real-world violence. I believe that those are different enough in their severity to warrant that an equivocation was made. You may not have meant to say that, but that's how it came across from what I read. You're right, depictions of violence are not necessarily and unequivocally bad. The encouragement of them for two contradictory reasons is what confused me. In the same post, you had written this sentence: and this one: and finally this one: Line those up, and you'll find that contradiction you made, probably by accident somehow. You were at first hoping to see any sort of real concrete evidence proving that depictions of violence would actually cause an increase in instances of actual violence. Then you said it would be great to spread the awareness of issues regarding violence by use of the depictions of violence, and followed that up with a hope that seeing violence will help us to not do it. It's your hope that was contradictory though, and not the content you were talking about. You see, your hope for evidence of an increase was direct hope. Your hope for a decrease was a conditional hope, so if either of those are accurate, only one, or neither, would happen, and obviously not both. If you were meaning to say "if it's really the case that depictions of violence cause an increase in violence, then here's how we might be able to work towards fixing it little by little, and it involves bringing in more depictions of violence---albeit harsher than the previous ones---as an experiment to see if harsher unconventional violence might be enough to steer people away from committing them", then yes, I agree, at the extent to which it works well enough. Yep, that's the issue with a lot more than just violence (the ACA, for example, but let's not go offtopic), as a lot of legal terms are ambiguous too (like in Regulating vs. Mandating by Howard Schweber). I agree that it can be vaguely described with examples, but the varying degrees of violence is what makes it so hard to compare versions. That's why it's important to use as recent evidence as possible.

Yu-Gi-Oh dragon from my favorite season plus three twos.

Sometimes you just need to layer some samples together. There are times when the EQ AND the tonal character are what give the snare that pop, and not just the EQ. Bad samples and good EQ, mediocre result. Bad samples and bad EQ, bad result.

It just came to me! I didn't remember it from Bleets of Lightning, it was Pull the Plug! Right before the resonant bass breakdown. At any rate, this and Bare Knuckle Blitz were both high energy and awesome. =D

Hopefully you know that's asking the impossible, so you probably won't see it anytime soon. It's like asking someone to find evidence that any student who plays video games does worse in school. It's one of those cases where non causa pro causa is the primary reason it will likely not work out. I'm not trying to make any hasty generalizations, but I play video games, and I do rather well in school. I could be the minority in this situation, but I'm probably not the only one. In any case, it would be a counterexample to what I had analogized to. What's to say there's no counterexample to what you're asking? Yes, I agree. Nature, violent? Sure, but in an entirely different and non-deliberate way. Nature's violence is incredibly ambiguous. What could you be talking about in a phrase like that? Lightning? Sure. Tsunamis? Sure. Bear attacks? Yeah. Shark attacks? Why not. Not the same as human violence. Accurately depicting modern violence with art depends on what "art" you use. Here's where things get iffy. You started off as defining violence as something to be discussed through harmless acting and writing, then you aimed to connect depicted violence for literary arts with real-world violence. If we take Shakespeare's work, for example (you did say "for thousands of years"), we would be talking poison, rather than a more straightforward method of violence. Poison certainly counted as violence back then, and while it does count as violence now, it's not the same as a stabbing, for example (although Hamlet did stab his uncle with a poisoned blade, but that's not the point). Poison is more premeditated and deliberate, less detectable, and reserved for the more intelligent. Stabbing is more on-the-fly, improvised, as far as I've read about. I actually don't even recall the last stabbing discussed on public television. Then again, I don't even recall any non-gun-related violence in today's highly-discussed games, like Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, etc. I'm no expert in either of those games, but I have seen some gameplays which all depicted gun/military violence. Gun violence and stabbing isn't exactly poison-related, so it's not the same definition of violence; more like an equivocation to me. Of course, that's way too far back. Nobody poisons or writes about poisonings anymore (I hope), except maybe Sherlock Holmes stories, but those are classics. Basically, just because what happened back then counted as some form of violence doesn't mean that today's violence is of the same magnitude or can be considered of a similar magnitude. It's not comparable. The definition of violence has changed... arbitrarily. While spreading awareness is a good thing, it's not quite necessary to suggest the insertion of depictions of violence in video games as a "method" to illustrate violence and to promote its reduction. The original argument was whether or not evidence could be found to provide a link between "depictions of [modern] violence" and "an increase in instances of actual [modern] violence", so if you aim to consider that as an option, you'd be contradicting yourself as you were hoping to reduce violence. Yes, violence for shock value is a possibility. I have no issues with that being a possibility. However, some people still think that depictions of violence cause an increase in instances of actual violence (sometimes parents). Seeing violence in video games is different from seeing violence "on TV" (TV shows, movies), and seeing violence "on TV" is different from seeing violence played back on the news. When people see violence in video games, they see it as more mentally harmful (in the sense of corruption) than violence on the news (mentally harmful in the sense of psychological damage) because video game violence is entirely and utterly fake. Planned. Scripted. News violence is entirely real. When people see violence on the news, it's a much more intense reaction due to the possibility that if you live near where it happened, that could happen to you, whereas video game villains can't jump out of the console and attack you. The issue with what you said is that you wanted more video game violence in hopes of reducing real-world violence. Some people are indeed oblivious enough to believe that if certain acts of violence happens in video games, it can influence those players to be violent in the real world. Are you going to be okay with them breathing down your neck?

Wow, I really like the atonal percussion. It lends well to the spooky atmosphere and still maintained my attention the whole time.

Oh, okay. I guess the problem was not that assigning it didn't work, but that it was confusing how it should be assigned. I couldn't find a good way to do it since the demo page screenshot cut out the mod matrix (), but it turns out the Pitch control was the one. Yeah, that's why I love Mod Matrices.

I don't think I know of many free VSTs with stereo vibrato. Maybe TAL-Noisemaker, but aside from that, not many are actually easy to use. I just use Zebra2.

Okay, it's sounding better for sure. It would really benefit from some minor detail-oriented improvements. Just a few last things from me: The kick is a little clearer now, but there's something else you can do that can make it even clearer. You can increase the treble just a little bit more, and do a notch filter on the bass where the kick is, and a thin peaking boost where you had notch filtered the bass. Usually this is near 80~140Hz. It would be interesting to hear how much clarity can be achieved simply by panning more creatively at, for example, 1:06. It can be as simple as separating the lead harmony into two lead instruments and panning one left and one right. Even to the extent of 16~40% would make a difference in the clarity and leave some room for the kick as well since the kick is logically in the center. I still think the vibrato would make a huge difference. I checked out quadraSID to see if it can do vibrato in any way, and it seems it can. Are you sure you're doing the MIDI control correctly? You may have forgotten to assign the modwheel to what is being modulated, or maybe the assignment is dependent on the mix level and it happens to be untouched at 0%. By the way, I'm imagining vibrato that is extreme like this: https://soundcloud.com/zircon-1/augment at 1:21 It's like an LFO on the pitch to the extent of +/- 2 whole steps, or something close to that, with the LFO amplitude modulated by the modwheel or some other MIDI control parameter. 1:43 makes for a neat transition to me, great work! The only thing I would have wanted was maybe a cymbal at 1:51 or some sort of distant crash/white noise. Something to connect the two sections even more solidly. 2:14 would be a great time to pan the PWM detuned saws wider (creative delay) with automation (maybe 40~60% in extent), if possible, or in some other way, to make room for the lead guitar (which sounds panned center). It sounds really crowded and a tad too bright at 2:40~3:30 when both the synths and guitar are playing at the same time. My headphones are quite clear in the midrange, but the clarity is still a little iffy to me. -------------- 0:16 makes a huge difference to me, great use of the portamento! 2:08 had a great use of the drums, and is what I would have been looking for. Guitar is highly expressive to me (great tremolo picking and hammer-ons), it just needs to be brought out a little more with that panning. for how you can make your synths more expressive. 0:35, 0:55, 1:36, and 2:32~2:39, in particular.Tempo boost makes sense to me. I wrote something DnB that's 160 BPM recently.

Just in case it isn't completely clear, @Radiowar: From what I've read, I agree with Dave. What you've been saying are principles with which we are expected to agree. Although those principles are accurately and conventionally described, you did not follow them with any real explanation of their importance; you simply labeled them as "important to recognize" and left it at that. There's a huge difference between stating with certainty a fact without supporting explanations to connect the argument with the fact and stating with room for doubt while also using supporting explanations to connect the argument with the fact. What you had said with that certainty in those posts does have a hint of bias mainly because the certainty with which you have expressed the evidence and the lack of explanations to connect the evidence to your point illustrates a bias towards the evidence being inexplicably true. In a sense, when Dave said earlier that your argument at one point was like it was just opinion (correct me if I'm wrong), it kind of was. One of my rhetoric teachers once said something like, "Any statement without support is just an opinion." My literature teacher said something to the effect of, "Stating a fact without support is not introducing your own ideas, and is therefore not exactly credible. You need to connect the fact with a clear explanation that belongs to you regarding how that fact connects to your point." I could add to that quote, "Otherwise, you're just regurgitating something that can be found online." All of that should accurately describe what it is you were doing, and will hopefully allow you to consider what has been said for future moments like these, before they happen. Also, @Dave: While what you said was accurate and entirely correct, the way you said it could be misconstrued as too blunt and direct. Just a few examples: You get what I mean; you're a smart guy. Maybe it just didn't occur to you right away, as you were on a roll with the counterargument. Regardless, this makes me feel proud you're the OCR founder. =D

Damn. Not only was the main bass synth badass, but the modulated tape delay effect thingy at the end (4:08) was pretty cool too.

I just love how this took 7 months of judging, and Larry was hilarious with his honesty.

I'm not sure, but I might have heard this on the WIP forums a while back. Good to see it up!