timaeus222

I tend to get inspired by the soundscape of music that really resonates with me. For my round 2 entry, I basically imitated the vibe I heard here (unless you already saw me post it lol): https://soundcloud.com/biggiantcircles/borderlands-2-tropical-paradise-exploration My thought process was that I listened for what I recognized and considered how I could do it. I recognized that it had granular pads (-> I used glassy pads), congas/bongos (-> I used djembes and other world percussion), wooden percussion (-> I used Damage and various auxiliary percussion like shakers, claves, and rainsticks), a steel-drum-esque arp (-> I used various bells I synthesized in my free time that sound like they belong in a tropical rainforest), etc.

I find it's easier to get an idea of what to do on your track by listening to new music before your week starts.

icwutudidthar Bring down our expectations, so we think good is amazing.

Hell yeah; exactly fits my vision. Time to hearken back to my days working on that Gunstar Heroes ReMix! Prepare your bodies!

(The channel would be #ocrcompo)

What about a resub flood? xD

Just a reminder that Zero Tolerance's plan is for either pu_freak or I to go again for next week, while in the meantime, Mak is away until September.

There's a high probability that the song will be the complete opposite genre if you swap it with another identical one, so don't do it! #badelectronjoke

Much better loudness! Intro is just the right volume, in terms of perceived volume. It still feels overcompressed, though. Good job on making the stereo field wider. That helped. The revised version still has some prominent issues that would keep it from getting passed. What I hear is the following: 1. The intro bells and synth pluck are lacking velocity variation and the instrument playing the bass part lacks motion (the motion concern is minor). This combined makes the instrumentation overall feel stiff and robotic. This continues throughout. 2. The arrangement approach is rather straightforward (easy to predict what's going to happen next), using a generic chord progression (namely, C B Ab B for C major); nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but it's not very standout IMO. This is mainly due to the way the bass part is written, and there are also a lot of I-V-VIII (e.g. C-G-C, F-C-F, etc) arpeggios, making it repetitious. 3. The drums are buried behind the rest of the instrumentation and are therefore lacking punch and definition. 4. The instrumentation doesn't really change gear much, until about 2:04, which is after a significant portion of the track has passed by. 5. The mixing is muddy and washy (low-mids clashing and high reverb). The EQ can really use some low-midrange scooping on the synth strings pads to make room for your... "cello" arpeggio? It's a bit odd to be using what sounds like cello to play so much arpeggiation in a dance track IMO. The reverb is also pretty high on the pads and distant sounds (e.g. the high synth string at 2:16). I've bolded what I considered major. Here is what I would do to work towards fixing those things: 1. Try thinking about how a pianist might emphasize certain notes. Learning how to play piano if you haven't already is a helpful resource you can have to writing more realistic velocity variations. 2. If you add an interpretive section, it can help offset the straightforward nature of the rest of the track. You have the advantage that this isn't that long yet; people may have the attention span to listen for another minute or a minute and a half in this genre. Perhaps you can extend 1:22 and write something original there that breaks away from the progression you keep using and the almost-unchanging bass part. This way you can incorporate some dynamic contrast. 3. Find more punchy drum samples and try layering them on. I don't know if you're still using FL11, but the Layer tool is very useful to have. Practice with it! I like layering Goldbaby's drums, such as When Alien Drum Robots Attack Vol. 2 and MPC60 Vol. 3. It's about $60 total for both, for over 3000 drum samples. Pretty great deal IMO! 4. This is similar to 2, but essentially, 4 happens because of 2. Because the arrangement was straightforward, and because you may have become attached to the way things were written as you wrote them, you seem to have copied and pasted a lot, giving a repetitious structure. If you work on 2, I think you may touch on 4 at the same time. 5. Maybe even make that "cello"-soundalike an actual bass synth and give it some filter motion. A cello normally is supposed to sound human, and because of the way that instrument is played, it's almost as if it was accidentally written unrealistically, rather than intentionally as a backing element. I would also reduce the amount of reverb in the pads and raise the frequency of the low-cut on their reverb to decrease the amount of low-mids clashing in the EQ. Other less major but still significant things: - The bass drop at 2:00 feels out of place. Try putting it at 2:01~2:02. I think that would make more rhythmic sense. (minor) - There's a clicking at 2:41. Is it from your "cello"? Seems to be the exact same rhythm. You should work to remove that clicking, because it's an artifact that doesn't add anything. It's an enjoyable listen otherwise, since I can get past the overcompression and generic writing, and this is a great improvement so far, but there's still more you would have to do for this to pass. From a technical standpoint, it's mainly lacking the following overall: - Clearer mixing and less washy soundscape - Significant and meaningful velocity variation to eliminate mechanical partwriting - More interesting chord progressions (helpful but not strictly necessary) - Reasonable repetition in the ReMix structure for familiarity, and not just a bunch of autopilot parts copied and pasted.

Yeah, Doppler is subtly the first half of most of the melodic lines, but it is used throughout, much more than Cyber Peacock! http://ocremix.org/community/topic/41336-mega-man-x-the-sigma-fortress-remix-gauntlet-2015/page-17#entry791676

Sign me up for this! Raring to go!

Have you tried Impact Soundworks: Reforged? They sampled found metal for Kontakt 5.

Well, overdrive/waveshaping strengthens all of the harmonics until they all reach a ceiling (at which point a sine wave begins to look more like a square wave), but the strongest harmonics are most easily audible, so the change in the character of those tends to be noticeable first (in other words, they reach the ceiling first). So, if those harmonics reach the ceiling, and you increase the overdrive further, the strongest harmonics then clip first.

I tend to recommend the dual-band compressor endorphin as a post-distortion compressor. It really brightens up my drums whenever they are lacking the presence I want them to have. One note I should say though is that if you use both distortion and compression, just be aware that compression affects the strongest harmonics most, and distortion strengthens those strongest harmonics most noticeably, so using both for the same instrument may come down to thinking more methodically about how you want to go about it (otherwise you might overemphasize the click of the kick, for example).

=D As for distortion, I suggested that since certain methods of distortion strengthen the strongest harmonics of a sound. I tend to use overdrive or waveshaping (I like Fruity Blood Overdrive or Fruity Waveshaper); if you apply overdrive or waveshaping to drums (carefully, to avoid getting an overly-clipped tone), I find that it can bring out characteristics of the tone you may not realize are there on the clean sample. Since those characteristics that are most noticeable are the strongest harmonics, and one of these is for example, the fundamental, it'll add punch.

Not disagreeing with you on that. It just wasn't obvious that doing the same thing manually could turn out differently than doing Wrap Remainder.

It stems *from* an arrangement problem, yes, but I only get a significant issue with it with Wrap Remainder. When I emulate that as I manually make a looped extension of the track, it isn't nearly as noticeable. That aside, I find that if I render one OGG with Cut Remainder and then one with Wrap Remainder, then playing them in sequence makes the looping issue fairly unnoticeable, but that would require playing two files in sequence (and then playing the Wrap Remainder OGG every further time) in the programming. If it's possible for the programmer to do that for the game, I would try that.

It's a looping problem, since it was done with Wrap Remainder, just like Schematist; the issue that gave the eh loop was that there was harmony clashing, even though all the notes were in the same key. It just so happened that the tail was of a clashing note, purely in terms of the interval and just the bulky tone of the toms. I didn't expect to hear this issue, and it wasn't really obvious until I created the loop and listened back. (I'll add that this issue was somehow not as prevalent when I merely looped a WAV of the same track to be twice as long)

That basically is Wrap Remainder in FL Studio; it takes the tail of the track and layers it on top of the beginning, which was causing Schematist's frustration earlier. =P If the release on a sound at the loop point is long enough, and if it harmonically clashes with the first note at the beginning of the track, it'll sound pretty bad. (That has happened to me before, and I had to change my writing to accommodate for that) I'll render an example of the harmony/high-pass-automation fixes I was talking about earlier. EDIT: A not-so-good loop (you can tell that there's a [minor-2nd] clash between the bass, the toms, and the chordal instrument) A better/more acceptable loop (still has slight issues but not nearly as bad) EDIT2: Oh, and something I like to do, if you are someone who renders WAV and then encodes into OGG, is to use the tab organization feature in the Playlist window in FL, and it'll mark in the WAV where the tab is. So if you put a tab at the end of the track, that will mark where the tail starts.

I never really had much of a workaround for this, but whenever I encountered something like this, if it was necessary, I slightly adjusted the writing of the track so that the loop point and the first second match harmonically, and adding a soft cymbal at the first second sometimes helped. Sometimes, it can also help if you automate the EQ to match at the loop point versus the beginning. For example, on a render using Wrap Remainder, if the loop point has a tom creating a boomy tail, and the first seconds of the track do not contain a tom, you can automate a high pass on the toms that starts near the loop point and match that up with the beginning of the track so the boominess won't overlay with the beginning of the track and clash with the low-mids. Ideally it would be great for you to find an OGG-supported audio editor (like Audacity). Then maybe if the click is fairly quick, you can either use a declicking feature or highlight the click itself and decrease its volume until it's even with the rest of the nearby milliseconds.

Really great round, guys! Reviews: bLiNd ~ Arsonist Really solid work here, and out of all the EDM tracks in this compo so far, the best production. My only production gripe is that the lead guitar felt like it stuck out of the soundscape for some reason; I think it was the reverb design and midrange EQ that did it. The arrangement was fairly predictable, but there were lots of subtle variation details. The incorporation of Doppler felt kind of "shoehorned in", so a decently-cohesive but well-executed track. Cam3 ~ Tiger Millionaire Cool concept. I get that you were going for kind of a grungy, techy feel. The production needed work in the Master track processing in that the whole track felt quite overcompressed whenever the drums played. The main drum samples also felt rather tonally weird, moreso the kick than the snare. I thought the sources were fairly well-integrated and personalized to the style. GrapplingHook ~ Arma Gonna Topple That Dopple v0.1 Not too shabby. To me the tempo felt a bit slow for what you appeared to be going for (not by much, just maybe 4~8 BPM). At 0:43 - 0:56, it felt like the lead was meandering. The production is alright, but could be better. For example, the intro guitars had quite a bit of reverberation in the treble frequencies, which isn't really audible once all the instruments come in. I find that the upper treble frequencies get cluttered fairly easily, and even the smallest EQ edits up there could help. Also, the drums felt fairly clean/uncompressed, and some controlled distortion and careful compression could have strengthened the tone of those drums some more. WillRock ~ MMMDop Dat title; what, X3 = times three, and so Mega Man X3 -> Mx3 = MMM, and then Dop? Aight, anyways, this arrangement is clearly exceptional. Loving the chord progressions throughout, especially the ones at 2:28 and 2:48. The wicked solos also weren't totally terrible (in other words, they were awesome). On the production side, I thought the midrange was a little bit cluttered with regards to the backing instruments (those could have used some slight mids scooping), but it wasn't a big deal to me. That shift to minor at 3:16 was also genius. Based on the chord progressions and crazy solos, and the solid production, this is pretty awesome. Tuberz McGee ~ I Don't Run At All Right off the bat this feels a bit quiet, but that's not too hard to fix, right? Some small crits of note: At 0:19, I can hear you make a noise with your mouth that you could have edited out, for example, and some of the fricatives and sibilances on the vocal takes don't line up to such an extent that I would call them "tight" (such as 2:13 on the "st" in "style"). And then there's the lyrics; funny, but perhaps a bit overdone on the frequency of usage. I get that that's your theme, so to speak, but I kind of anticipated cameos more so than repeated usages. I thought the rock part was fairly straightforward, and my favorite part was the acoustic outtro. The drums are serviceable, though they could be a bit stronger via some controlled distortion and careful compression. Garpocalypse ~ Is é mo aingeal imithe This was a refreshing vibe to hear amidst the more electronic tracks I tend to hear in compos. It sounded Irish to me, and I actually sang lots of Irish music in high school, so that's cool. The production is fairly clean, aside from the amount of reverb on the distant choir that shows up every now and then, and my main concern is the amount of repetition in the track. By about 3:07, I start to crave more variation in at least the textures, and if not, at least the chord progressions, or even the melodic contour. Maybe a stark left turn into a mood shift, or something new to keep us interested. I think after you incorporate more variation or eliminate repetitious areas, it's a pretty good candidate for OCR. Gario ~ Red Shifting Drift This could have been one of my top picks, actually. The lead sequencing was excellent, and the drums, while fairly generic tonally and in terms of the sequencing, are serviceable. My main gripe with this was actually the pad/synth choir you had going on, which had quite a bit of reverb and made the whole track feel a bit overly washy (the one exposed at 2:28). The sources were pretty well-integrated too. fxsnowy ~ Thermoception The intro literally felt like an X-style stage-select theme. HAH! The drums were fairly serviceable tonally, but they didn't seem to fit the mood I thought you were going for. If you wanted to go with that drum kit, I felt you needed a wider bass (even if by just a bit). The bells were pretty loud and lacking in velocity variation (such as at 1:24). I also thought at 0:46 - 0:48, the notes were rather weird, and there were some other spots that felt weird with the melodic contour and/or chord progression, such as 1:25 - 1:26, 1:36 - 1:37, and 2:13 - 2:14. My main issue with this is that the bass frequencies feel fairly bare, leading me to perceive a bit of textural sparseness overall. I realize that you actually have a bass, but it was written staccato for a good chunk of the track, so there's not as much of a "foundation" beneath the other instruments wherever it feels more fit to parallel the action of the bells and pads that each had long releases (ADSR). That really comes down to the flow of the way you wrote the bass, so I realize that it may not be an easy fix. Shadix ~ Winter Weather Advisor I see you were going for a Jazz Fusion feel. I think that tonally it worked. I enjoyed the less busy parts the most! One of my three main concerns with this is that in the spots where the drums are busiest, they feel conflicting relative to the other lower-energy instruments. Perhaps if the writing in those spots was lighter (such as using primarily overhead and not writing such hard hits), even if nearly as busy in terms of the rhythm, would feel less busy overall. My second is that there is a bit much reverb on most of the "primary" instruments. For example, the sax could have a higher low-cut cutoff frequency on its reverb to minimize low-mids reverberation (the character of the reverb is fairly perceivable at 3:07). My last concern was that the overall track feels overcompressed, but you knew that. I would check the Attack and Release on FabFilter Pro-L, and experiment with the Attack, Release, and GR settings on the LA-3A compressor emulation. DusK ~ Just Give Me a Minute Fun metal track! Sounds "like you" (easily identifiable as something you wrote). Rather short, though; to me it felt like it could have been longer, based on the arrangement flow, but that's alright. Fairly solid production, and I wasn't bothered by the clicky kick. I forget if that's FPC or something else. Cash ~ Dark Times, Happy World To me, the arrangement felt rather forced, and the stereo field was strange. I personally have (almost) never auto-panned a bass or anything having low-mids frequencies, because it tends to feel weird doing so. The people I know are so used to bass being centered (typical) or wide (dubsteppish). The overall soundscape also felt sparse, and lacking a chordal component; you seem to have tried to make up for it with reverb, but I think it would be more helpful to write chords. Lastly, the ending note tail needed to last in its entirety before the track ended, and it's an easy fix (just add an empty/silent clip at the end of the track, perhaps). jnWake ~ Beetle Dopplerganger The arrangement was really fun, and my favorite part of this was the chord progressions you used. The solos were quite nice too, though they could have used a synth tone that had more body to give them more of a commanding presence. The rhythm guitars were fairly straightforward but pretty realistically sequenced/MIDIed in. I don't think the lead guitar was really lacking realism, per se, but the execution of the performance emulation wasn't as impressive as a real person playing the same notes, and was lacking the variation in playing style that a real person would naturally incorporate out of human tendencies to not play the same thing the exact same way each time (even if it was written that way on sheet music). Overall, based on the chord progressions and pretty good solos, I think you should continue polishing this track in the guitars and solo synth tones and submit this sometime to OCR.

I do get the Vangelis vibe from this, but kind of mixed into an Indian vibe with those tablas. Nice listen!

Slimy's got a nearly-finished, spooky track, with an excellent, unsettling arrangement!

On my Master track, I literally have one high pass near 30 Hz, one instance of a free limiter, and a spectroscope. And occasionally a compressor.