timaeus222

Do you have a stereo separation plugin? You could probably do the reverse of its function and narrow the stereo width of the leslie slightly. Personally I don't find it necessary, but if you wanted to do it, and there's no option you can find in the leslie itself, there's a workaround. Yeah, the chords sound better! Hm... what if you tried experimenting with the mix level on the wah for the e. piano? Maybe decrease it a bit to get more body into the tone and fill in the soundscape some more? Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WniU8SAgLs&t=6m4s

Maybe you could slightly decrease the rotor width in the leslie and find middle ground between headphones, speakers, and earbuds? Earbuds tend to send sound more directly into your ears due to their small output radii, making the perceived stereo width a bit wider than regular headphones. Or at least, that's how my earbuds feel in comparison to my Beyerdynamic DT-880s.

That sounds convincing to me! Maybe ask for a mod review later? Other than that, I think this is like 99% done.

Well, it depends on the person, but for me personally, I don't think it translates into a better or worse track; rather, I might make a track that is imbalanced in favor of a source tune I find fits better into my approach at the time. I actually haven't played any Mega Man X series games, so I have literally no attachment to any particular source tune other than what I hear right as I pick each one. I pick it based on how I think I can transform it and adapt it to multiple different genres---that is, what parts of it I can alter the rhythm of, or use a new tempo for, or change the mood of, etc (in fact, throughout this compo, I did all three at some point). The important thing for me is that I pick something that doesn't make me think of only adapting it to one type of feel, like only funky remixes, or only dark remixes, or only fast remixes, etc. Whether or not it appeals to me though, is kind of a matter of both musical use and personal likes/dislikes, IMO. Honestly, at first it appealed to me only out of its flexibility for interpretation. I initially did not like Cyber Peacock, but I came to love it by Round 4 and then really got something I loved in Round 7. At that point it appealed to me both musically and personally. So, perhaps try to figure out your skills in terms of what you can do well and what you have trouble with. If the track you pick is something that you think fits you well, then give the track some time. Work with it for a while, get it in your head, and maybe you'll progressively figure out a way to transform it more creatively than the previous times you work with it. Maybe it isn't a fit. It happens. No risk, no reward, I suppose. For reference, what I think is that from my Round 2, to Round 4, to Round 7 entries, my arrangements were improving in terms of incorporating both sources in a suitable way. I took a risk, and liked the reward. I didn't think it fit my interests at first, but it grew on me. Like a good fungus.

"Psytrance" is basically a form of dance music that emphasizes a certain kind of bass (an ostinato TB-303 bass, to be specific) and uses layered melodies, and "EDM" is just an umbrella term for dance music that might be hard to classify under a more specific genre. I picked 'Time to Oil Up' and 'Let's Bust Some Viruses!' because those basically boil down to a form of electronic dance music, without adding in too much complex bass work (like in 'Tears of Blood'), while you said you didn't want a "heavy beat" to take away from the original.

This was a pretty fun compo. I got to try styles that I either hadn't done before or hadn't done in a long time. Surprisingly enough, 'Flight of the Peacock' was the track that took me the least time to write and finish (less than 20 hours???), and given that it's orchestral, it somehow took less effort than 'Mind Flip~', the metal/dubstep track I did, which took the most time (~36 hours) out of all three entries. By the way, I've since then updated 'Mind Flip~' (improved mixing, added variations after 2:30) and will definitely submit all three tracks to OCR. =D

To me they sound like trance or hip hop adaptations to the original themes, retaining the melodic aspects of the song but depending generally on textures and drums to substantiate their interpretation. I'm actually going to stray away from the idea that perhaps you're looking for specifically trance or hip hop, or the original plus drums, or something like that, and suggest what I think you are looking for in general, yet is not necessarily trance or hip hop-like. "Cool" is pretty general, so we'll see what you mean by "cool" when you see what I put down below. http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR02767 - Electro Funk adaptation of 'Vampire Killer' http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR03060 - Metal/Drum & Bass ReMix of Pokemon X's 'Legendary Battle' theme http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR02770 - EDM/Funk adaptation of 'Bloody Tears' http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR02522 - Glitch/Dubstep ReMix of Super Mario World's 'Sub Castle BGM' http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR03036 - EDM medley of Mega Man Battle Network series title themes http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR02028 - Psytrance ReMix of Hakan's theme from SSF IV.

Yep; Edirol Orchestra and Edirol Hypercanvas are very similar to the Roland SC-88 orchestral samples, which were used in games like Final Fantasy Tactics and Suikoden II.

What about rnn (did art for For Everlasting Peace) or Jared Hudson (been posting character art on OCR)?

Content that isn't from the source tune, to illustrate that you've made the effort to re-arrange it, but to also integrate your own ideas into someone else's ideas.

If it's a track that loops verbatim, then yeah, it wouldn't fit into the OCR guidelines of substantial interpretation. Try incorporating more variation and some original content in there.

I got the sudden urge to mix these three sources while I was waiting for a ride home from school.

timaeus222 Gate's Secret Dream Lab (Shield Sheldon in Gate's Laboratory [X6]) You Know The Game (Gravity Beetle in Gate's Laboratory [X6]) Beautiful Bloody Bats (Dark Necrobat in Gate's Laboratory [X6]) Zero Tolerance

I think you should start by finding a new limiter that is more tolerant. I would suggest TLs-Pocket Limiter as a nice free one. I got it 3 years ago and I still use it today. Since you have FL, try using the Fruity Parametric EQ 2 and looking at the visualization more closely. The brighter it is at a certain frequency range, the louder those frequencies are. You always have the option of comparing specific ranges visually to find EQ clashes if you can't hear them yourself.

How's this going?

Production So, a prevalent issue I'm hearing here is that your volumes are so boosted that it's causing something called overcompression. What that means is that your limiter is rapidly detecting loud instruments and is pushing them down very often. That creates this "pumping" effect which is generally unpleasant to listen to (sorry). That's the "muddiness" that DragnBreth has mentioned (although muddiness really means frequency clutter in approximately the 100~500 Hz range). As for actual muddiness, it's a bit hard to tell, so maybe it'll become more easily detectable once the overcompression is lessened. Also, there's a really weird volume drop at 1:00 for some reason. About the overcompression, I'm just going to take a not-so-wild guess and say that your drums are too loud. Try comparing the amount of pump the track has with and without the drums. Without the drums, I'm highly anticipating that there will be quite a bit less. If so, that's a sign you need to turn them down, at the very least. You should also check your bass instrument, because that's potentially also too loud. Arrangement In terms of the arrangement, it basically just goes right into using the melody without an intro, and I usually like to give my tracks a logical structure. Instead of just jumping right into using the substantial parts of the source tune, I would try to lead into it, transition out of it, and later come back into it. That's a pretty general (and probably vague) way of saying that you should incorporate more interpretive sections in this track that differentiate it from the original. A more specific way of saying it is to just have an intro, a "main" section, an energy dropoff, a buildup, another "main" section, and an outtro, or something similar. Try to make it so if you close your eyes and listen, you can see that it goes to many places (logical progression) instead of in a circle (repetition), and gets higher energy as well as being more subtle every now and then (dynamics). If you want to learn more about structure and dynamics, I highly suggest closely listening to this track: http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR02488 Try picking out the instruments. Whether or not you know what instrument is what, just try to distinguish where they are in space (and where they move), their relative volumes, and possibly their approximate frequency range (e.g. hi hats are upper treble, basses are sub to low-mids usually, leads are generally midrange to upper-midrange, etc). Each and every instrument or sound in this ReMix has its place and role---nothing felt unnecessary IMO.

If you've often found yourself writing music with specific instruments, and then later wanting to replace them, you should find that the notes you wrote for those instruments suits those instruments, but may not suit other instruments. That's normal. What would really help is if you learned how to adjust your partwriting and adapt it to the new instrument. To do that, I would suggest you learn the capabilities of the new instrument---know what it can and can't do, and how you should write it so that it sounds natural, logical, or "flowing". ----- For example (this is completely general and might serve as a starting point), after writing a melody on piano, it will not work if you simply swap out the piano VST for a violin VST without doing anything else, no matter how good the violin was sampled. You would have to at least check the note overlaps to see where the phrasing sounds more natural with overlapped notes, and where it sounds more natural with a re-bowed (not-overlapped) note starting a new phrase. You would also have to incorporate a variety of articulations that a violin has but a piano does not---writing a short note for violin using a legato sample doesn't make it act like true staccato, but writing a short note for piano using a "standard" sample is closer to true staccato, for instance. Another example is that violins can do a portamento, sounding almost like a pitch bend (but not quite), but pianos sure can't pitch bend in real life (even though they can still do portamentos, those sound different from violin portamento). Here is an example of a pretty cool piano melody (I know context matters, but I want you to be able to hear all the details of the instrument): https://app.box.com/s/b3iw29h1iropynzqmpk8hshejn1iqt09 Here it is with the piano VST replaced with a violin sample library (untouched MIDI notes, removed delay): https://app.box.com/s/gpc7il9sup09scuginr44re0tym5tpha Hear how disjointed and awkward it sounds? Surprisingly, it's not terrible on the fast runs because of the bow-switch legato triggering on note overlaps, but it's not good either because of all those messed up notes wherever there were harmonies for the piano. Coincidentally, the highest note is actually outside the range of the violin as well. Now here it is adapted to the violin sample library using the suitable reverb, (mostly) better notes and rhythm, and the proper articulations (re-bowing, slurs, portamento, etc.) and MIDI CC automations (CC1 for vibrato, CC11 for expression+volume, CC14 for vibrato speed): https://app.box.com/s/8roeaysu4q5zd5jno1qjsihdn4oziyyx It's not perfect, but it's much better than what you get from doing nothing to it. It's actually got the slurs, vibrato, staccato, and portamento that were previously missing. ----- For you, what I would suggest is trying to decide on your sounds/instruments as you go, rather than after you finish your arrangement. Whenever I write music in general, I often find that the first sound I pick is important. That's because whenever I pick sounds, I try to think of whatever sounds match it best, and then use those. That means if all goes well, then I'll have a track of cohesive sounds, and so the aesthetics of the first sound determines the soundscape of the finished track (at least for me it does). Furthermore, since I write parts for my sounds as I pick them, they tend to fit those sounds when I'm done. If I went through my old music that is already done and satisfactory, and I swap out some instruments for something else, it would be hard for me to pick new sounds to replace them, and I would almost certainly have to rewrite some of my notes to adapt to the new sounds (yes, even if it's a synthesized sound replaced with another synthesized sound).

I thought the drums were just fine and not too thin, actually. I tend to find rimshots a good choice for an ambient percussive snare-like hit. Alternatively, the splash of a regular electronic snare could have replaced the rimshot later on for percussive variation, but that wasn't necessary for this IMO. Or, a soft tambourine could have worked as well, as an alternate "snare" in addition to the rimshot. As for the arrangement, I agree; melodically things didn't vary too much on the repeat, but texturally they did, along with some subtle differences in background notes. I found it just bordering on a good length, and it looks like you had a lot of fun with the reverb. Could have used a touch less, but it's not a huge deal IMO. Great job!

Then why not post it here so we can give you advice?

Yeah. I found "growing up" to emphasize an expansion of skills more than progressing into a more difficult area of learning.

I didn't think the 0:47 harmonies were necessarily clashing in a bad way, per se. There could have been slightly better chord choices there, but what's there is fine by me; I got what you were going for. I don't really understand the violin in the breakdown at 2:02 and 3:04 though. It sounds too "pulsed", meaning that the attack envelope is consistently too slow. I think it could work better if you wrote it staccato for the first, third, and fourth notes in each repeated phrase, while the e. piano in the background could be sequenced a bit more quietly so that it doesn't take over. Right now I find the violin lagging, rather than being a tight "solo". The violin's really the only huge deal IMO. The arrangement is really transformative as usual.

If it's any consolation, I'm willing to master the album to get it as consistent as possible. I did the mastering for the BadAss V3 album recently.

YMMV, but just going to elaborate on some of this with my own thoughts/perspective. I agree that arrangement and orchestration is a great skill. What I think is that the difficulties of traditional orchestral soundscapes, specifically, lie in not the textural diversity of the instruments (because of the more-or-less set structure of the orchestra after its development over the years), but the complex compositional layering. Sometimes you may hear talk about a "wall of sound", which is this idea of complex layering that makes it sound like a large portion of the orchestra is working like a single "unit" to sound big. That contributes greatly to the "completeness" of an orchestral soundscape. You also tend to use cohesive reverb on many instruments so they sound like they're in the same room, meaning few variations on reverb qualities should be apparent and the reverb isn't excessively washy necessarily, so rather than depending on reverb nearly as much to fill in the soundscape as in some electronic arrangements, you depend more on adding particular instruments to fill particular roles to fill in the soundscape. Because of the more-or-less set structure of an orchestra, you have fewer choices to pick from. In terms of arrangement, well, there is the fact that each orchestral instrument is designed to play in a certain way; you can try to bow a regular woodwind or blow on a regular string instrument, but it won't sound conventional. There are more ways you can play synthesized instruments (which don't have physical restrictions necessarily), and they don't usually have as restrictive pitch ranges or as particular playing techniques as orchestral instruments do. As a result, in order to really make impressive arrangements, you have to understand the intricacies of (1) what playing techniques are possible for particular instruments (is it possible for anyone in real life, ever?) (2) which are natural for live players of particular skill levels to do (would they do it in real life? Could they succeed?), and (3) which sound better than others in context, purely in reference to the song itself. That doesn't yet include the chords, melodies, expression controls, and so on that you could do. That overall, IMO, is much harder than finding the right sound to fit into your electronic soundscape and writing the most suitable chords, melodic contours, and expression controls for your synths.

Interesting, I never really realized that MIDI CC has been called "Continuous Controllers" before---I've also seen "Control Change". ----- What it sounds like to me is that you like these orchestral instruments because they're already made *for* you, as if they were "organic presets", and you can just pull them out as a "shortcut" to getting music written relatively quickly (not out of laziness, but ease). With electronic genres and the usage of synths, it basically asks you to put more effort into making or editing your own sounds, but with practice, over time you should end up with a pool of sounds that you can pick from and tweak for context, nevertheless. I understand that these sounds may feel more diverse than orchestral instruments, but if you continue to work with a variety of sounds, you will implicitly be training your ear to pick sounds that match not just by convention but by your own judgments as well. It'll take a while, but eventually you can get your synthesized-sound selection ear up to par with the perhaps more "concrete" task of picking orchestral instruments. What I would do if I were to shift over from writing mostly orchestral music to mostly organic/electronic hybrid or fully electronic music, is: - Find what electronic genres interest you. Drum & Bass (fast tempo)? Dubstep (halftime tempo)? Trance (medium tempo)? A mixture? Other? - Find a synth that you think would introduce you to the sounds you would need to practice writing in the genre(s) of your choice. As I always do, I would recommend Zebra for its diversity in sounds and intuitive workflow (although it's expensive, I truly believe it's well-worth it), or if you want to ease in, TAL-Noisemaker has been recommended several times before by Rozovian. - Practice using that synth, maybe gather presets that have already been made by other people, and perhaps pick ones that you think fit together and organize them. It tends to be that the preset developer tells you outright what genres their patches generally fit into, because it helps them target specific audiences. - Try using those presets in a song and seeing what you can edit in them to fit your context - Maybe try making your own presets that match your "musical identity" if you find it fun to use the synth