timaeus222

I actually came back to this and looked at the original, and there are actually pretty substantial differences in the melody and in particular the emphases in the lyrics' syllables (EX: the emphases on "Open your heart, it's gonna be alright!" shifted from "it's" to "heart" before the pause in the middle of the sentence).

Sounds like Toxic Biohazard! Well, mainly the issues are the fake bass and guitar being very narrow in the stereo field. Also, the bass pattern doesn't really change that often, so this gets repetitive. I don't care so much that it loops, but it could use more realistic instruments, or synth replacements.

This is very beautiful. Jill almost sounds like she's singing with a French accent on faux-Japanese lyrics, and I think that does make it sound like a unique language. Great stuff!

Oh yeah, also, I should mention why I suggested 15~20 dB boosts on the really quiet parts. I personally begin to have a hard time hearing things below -30 dB on my audio setup, and I actually have never mixed an orchestral track section under -20-something dB. So, I see that as a conventional minimum. I consider this being the maximum loudness I would listen to (in general, not just for EDM), for your comparison. For orchestral music though, I would recommend about 1~2dB quieter than that reference as the max peaking dB, and for your track in particular, probably around 1~3 dB quieter.

Yeah, it's definitely too quiet. I wouldn't do compression that is suitable for EDM (not that Skrypnyk suggested that), or even rock music for that matter, but rather, I would start by putting on a tolerant limiter and just raising the volume on the track. I know you said you seem to get distortion when you do that, but you never specified if you were using a limiter at all when you tried that. Try this limiter. (I can't try it out right now, but even if it doesn't sound right, it's still free) An important thing is to not compress it too much, so that's why I'm only suggesting that you do manual volume edits and not edits using compression. However, the loudest parts only ought to be about 33% louder. The size of the large dynamic range this has can't be fixed by simply slapping a tolerant limiter on, and I would definitely not suggest using strong compression on it either. Overall, maybe boost by about 4 dB, but in addition, you need to raise the volume of the instruments in the quietest parts with volume or CC11 automation (if volume is too low, CC11 doesn't do much, and if so, raise the volume and check the result, adjusting CC11 as necessary), and lower them to how they are now during the louder parts so the louder parts don't get too loud. The quietest parts were said to be about -40 dB, and boosting by 4 dB won't really feel much different at that level (our perception of loudness is logarithmic). Those would need about 15~20 dB boosts to get to more conventional levels. A 20 dB dynamic range is about a good maximum case for orchestral tracks in my experience. Then of course, the articulations are more exposed at those higher volumes, so you'd also need to rework your CC11 automation slopes. The louder it is, the more exposed the automation slopes are and the more issues you might hear. Check any parts where the strings (EDIT: or even brass, really, like Gario suggested) are disconnected in a legato context. I hear some parts where the string instrumentalist rebows, but it's not smooth and legato or slurred, but like new phrases were repeatedly started. So it's like a flautist breathing in between each note, but with violinists, violists, etc. Reworking your reverb would also help your strings. I would try starting with about a 1.5 second decay time, about 20 ms predelay, a low cut near about 100 Hz, high cut near about 8000 Hz I suppose (you should experiment with this one), and a wet mix of about -7~-5 dB. Maybe you can go from there and see what else it needs. Keep in mind the amount of reverb your instruments already have due to the air on the mic mix choices (hall/stage/close).

Oh, okay, so the mixing feels fine, but the partwriting makes things feel imbalanced in the midrange vs. treble. I'll try out new octaves; I actually like the airiness of the high pad though, so if that airiness doesn't stay up there on a lower octave, I might instead raise the midrange up a little bit on the "pad" (the midrange portion is a distant bell synth) and synth leads first (the leads probably could use a little more 1000 Hz or so, and with the parallel compression it should be noticeable even on smaller edits). I've had plenty more happening in the treble before in past mixes, so I'm not concerned about clutter there in the mixing, but I might also try lowering the first synth leads down an octave (besides the sine wave).

Could be my multi-band compression doing that, but I could also check the treble more closely and do some notch EQs. I didn't think the multi-band compression was that intense, but I'll try a 50% mix instead. Or maybe it was the sweeping pad that got hissier. I'll check, but I don't understand. It almost sounds like you want me to make the midrange even hollower, which would be weird. Do you mean lower the volume of the pad a little, raise its midrange a little, and lower its treble a little? About how hollow IS the midrange for you? And are there specific time stamps where you think I should focus on?I'm actually not hearing a midrange or treble issue in the sense that I don't hear a scooped feel to what's here now (so I think it's more the partwriting than the mixing), and I'm not cringing from the treble, so I'll have to ask someone else to check that too.

Change the date range at the bottom and you can view from the very beginning. http://ocremix.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?s=&f=16&page=1&pp=40&sort=lastpost&order=desc&daysprune=-1&prefixid=

I just want to say I get this error too when I use Firefox 36.0 in Windows 7 and on Safari on an iPad 2.

Oh, nice, so it's his guitars! Cool, I didn't know he played!

How about this? It's basically a "now we part ways" feel. It plays when the main character (who saved the world 6 times in grade school) has to move away and all his friends gather to say goodbye to him.

Some passing critiques: Jonathan!+Cyril - Nice, I remember this source well. I'm guessing Cyril did the guitars (edit: nope); recognizing the tone (edit: nope). Small note: Cyril's timing was a little off on the rhythm guitars, if you listen to them alongside the drums. Good featuring of Bleep, though I think that it was lacking expression (vibrato, pitch bend, etc). At 1:35, I was hoping for some sort of solo since the mood changed for a while with that dissonant arp, but oh well. Also, the ending was odd since it was very left-panned without something on the right to balance it out. Overall not too bad IMO. Definitely not lacking in energy, and in general solid performances from Cyril (edit: Jonathan) and prominent usage of Bleep. Yoshiblade+Gario - With this being almost pure chiptune, it really puts a lot of weight on arrangement for me. I just thought the arrangement was... plain/straightforward... and the production felt sparse. It was practically Bleep and drums. That ( ?) drum loop also doesn't help too much with the arrangement flow there. Needed more chiptune synths or something to fill in the soundscape more for more interest. I thought it was a little quiet or missing a lead at certain spots.Necrox+Me - I actually really liked the sound choices here. It sounds rather cohesive, especially in the first minute with the ambient noise hits. All of the sounds are him, except for the violin. That trembling sine wave later on near 1:10 was pretty cool; I think I saw what you were going for there---a delicate lead, but I think it worked. I thought the piano notes were basic (common intervals), but the volume was nice and I didn't think it overpowered too much. The structure is surprisingly not cryptic, which tends to be a problem with ambient music---I would think people tend to get lost in the expansiveness of the sound design and think "okay, what just happened again?" and rewind or skip. supercoolmike+Esperado - I liked the bass sound here. Good use of detuning work to thicken it up there. Some of the sequencing felt too fast for the tempo, but it's OK. Oh, this source. MMZ4! Interesting shift in mood from the original's (obviously) rockin' vibe for the first half of it. It almost felt like a march toward the battle itself, before getting into the battle vibe (rather suddenly) at 1:21. Overall, I actually liked this quite a bit (though it could just be because I played this game before).

Yep, that's the one. Btw, what I ended up contributing was the violin solo.

Fun facts: The pizzicato is fake. It's a synth, but I didn't feel like using the real pizzicato samples I did have. I omitted this in the end, but the last 3/4 of the arrangement and its production was all done in about 12.5 hours straight on Saturday (before the revision).

Nice use of Cinematic Synthetic Drums (or Juggernaut-free)! Personally I think there's a bit too much treble going on; the snare is lofi, and it mixes in with the digital arp (from 0:40) and creates a constant, upfront lofi texture that ultimately gets grating. I think you should pick something you want to keep that trebly, and low pass the other instruments near perhaps 12000 Hz or so. This sounds to me like it wants to be a chippy, ambient, chillout style. You might want to try bringing that snare (the one that has more treble) back further by lowering the reverb dry mix a touch so that the drums are closer to each other in terms of depth in the stereo field. I do agree with you that there's definitely still clutter. I don't think it's too washed out, but I do think there is currently a large amount of midrange going on. Anything that's not leading, you can stand to lower the midrange even a little bit. Anything background definitely counts towards something that doesn't need a whole ton of midrange; just enough to not be too hollow is all they need. I can kind of hear what's going on if I really try, but the treble clutter is distracting me from doing that properly. Arrangement-wise, you're probably valid on the source breakdown, but I would take another look at the flow. The dynamics need to change more to give the listener a break from the "main" portions. If I look at what you have to drop off the dynamics, you have 2:01 - 2:03, 2:21 - 2:43, and 3:00 - 3:02. On top of that, I hear hardly any obvious transitions, and partly due to that and partly due to the way the arrangement goes, it's hard to tell where the remix wants to go; there's a lack of direction. That seems to be a common issue. Try not to have wandering melodies, or new sections that don't start with a transition element of some sort. And as a general rule of thumb, I try to have a 'breakdown section' at least halfway through the song if not earlier. Usually I have one at about a minute in and about halfway; whatever feels right for the particular remix. For example, in this remix---one of my personal favorite arrangements I wrote/contributed to, there's a dynamic dropoff about 3/8 of the way through for about 24 seconds, and another one (a breakdown with a solo) a little over halfway through for about 24 seconds (like earlier).

Just leaving some major tips I could have given, or ended up giving to Necrox: Watch your harmonizations in your low notes; those tend to harmonize less well even for theoretically correct (in terms of music theory) harmonies. The nitty-gritty reason is that the harmonic series correspond to an increase in the rate at which the fundamental frequency increases when you go up octaves, so the spacing between each harmonic increases as you go up in pitch. See the line spectra here for an analogy. Therefore, at lower notes, the harmonics are closer together, and your harmonizations should feel more clashing because chances are, each note that is harmonizing at that low octave will have overlapping harmonics, making the chord "quiver". Play any bass sound in polyphonic mode and play a major 3rd at a low octave, and you'll be doing what I'm describing. If you think of writing a chord like that with harmonizing low notes, try bumping the second and/or third-to-bottom notes up an octave, or removing them to clean up the bass frequencies. It's very messy when you combine this with a washed-out reverbed soundscape. When you add a new instrument, try starting at volume = 0, and raising the volume until it's just about right. That way it's harder to put in something too loud. I used to find it easier to detect volume changes from volume increases than from volume decreases. Mix not in isolation (single instrument, i.e. soloing an instrument), but in context (groups of instruments enabled for playback). However, it does not mean mix with everything going on at the same time. For example, if you have a song with bass, two chordal instruments, a lead, and drums, group together the two chordal instruments, get the mixing down on those, then perhaps enable the bass as well and mix in that new context, enable the lead and mix in that new context, mix with only the drums and bass enabled (sidechaining, perhaps), and then see how it sounds overall with everything playing once that's done too. Unless your headphones are pretty dry (adjust the wet mix on your reverb and listen to how the sound changes; if nothing much feels different for, say, -20~-10 dB wet mix, it's pretty dry), use a bit less reverb than you would prefer. A lot of headphones have a "reverb response", which means that they give a natural ambience to compensate for their close-up output to your ears (whereas speakers just respond to the natural ambience of your room). Some headphones have high reverb responses, so they sound wetter than better, drier headphones. So... mixing with less reverb than usual helps to ensure that you are using an amount of reverb that sounds about the same on most headphones. For example, my Shure SRH440A's are pretty washy, but my Grado SR-60i's are drier, and my Beyerdynamic DT-880's are even drier than that. So if I mix on my Beyers a minimum amount of reverb, it sounds about the same on the Grados and on the Shures, but if I mix a minimum amount of reverb on my Shures, it will appear drier when I listen on my Beyers.

Yes please, send in your WIPs as soon as you get something, let's say, around a minute or so done (personally I consider a minute 'rough', 2 minutes 'well into it', 3 minutes 'substantial', more or less). Or even if you have less than a minute done... at least let us know you've finished SOMETHING! Something leaving you inspired enough to get it done! Good luck!

Yeah, but regardless, it still has to be submitted at all, I would think. I don't know if the Bubble Bobble track was already submitted before the DP consideration, but I would guess that it was. (Not to mention it had a cool video. Because that's important. ) Plucking a finished track off of a random thread and thinking "WOW! We have to post this, and let's do it now!" ... I'm pretty sure that considering whether or not it was actually submitted is important. The OCR Guidelines explicitly say that a submitted remix must be submitted by the remixer and no one else (don't submit on someone else's behalf, etc). ...so that the remixer is aware, I'm assuming.

inorite? This confuses me. It's not an OC ReMix before it's... submitted... and... accepted... at all. Presumably he meant a WIP on the OCR forums...

I think the chord at 1:31 sounds a little weird; you should check that again. Also, 1:53 has an early/rushed note on the chorused rhodes (still sounds like a piano to me on the chords; the higher notes are more obviously rhodes), by a few ms. I'd agree with Emunator that the arrangement gets to sound a little similar throughout. I think it's in part to do with the way the rhodes plays three notes, then a chord, then pauses, and plays very similarly a great deal of the way through. Changing that up later on can really help make the listener understand how far along in the track he or she is without looking at the timestamp. Whatever criticisms on the humanization feels fine now for the most part. I think the hand-bell-like sound (with the delayed note) at 2:02 - 2:27 sounds odd playing those faster notes, and arguably they feel mechanical. I'll say something on the actual production later.

Sounds like it. "EWQLSO"

Yeah, multi-band compressors are definitely tough to use. I used to have trouble using regular compressors, and I did similar things that you did here, adding compressors to keep things from getting too loud. What should have been done is simply looking at the Master volume meter and seeing how loud that is, seeing what the sum total of the instrument volumes becomes by the time it reaches the Master track, and lowering the volumes of instruments that don't need to be so loud, cutting unnecessary frequencies from your instruments, etc. So maybe high passing non-bassy instruments near 200 Hz, scooping the midrange (500~2000Hz) of background instruments a little bit to let the leads cut through, and so on. Since multi-band compressors are essentially three compressors in one, separated by frequency ranges under which they work to push down or bring up your sound, I would recommend that you spend more time to figure out how regular compressors work first, before you try out the multi-band ones. With both compression and EQ in one, it's a complicated plugin to use.

This part feels a little weird.Does it mean that only at certain times is that action possible, or does it mean that at one point in time Dark Samus did that? Should "is" have been "was" to keep the tense of the sentence consistent? Also, This can be made more concise and on-point, to parallel "she can absorb, use, and...": or

I have even LOWER standards! For me, you just have to play as someone other than yourself, have stats, and be able to level up in a story (so Fruit Ninja doesn't count)! Role-playing! C'mon.

Challenge complete! :U I did a wind-down ending, reworked some part writing in the middle, and refined the kick and snare mixing. Total worktime: about 35 hours. Not too shabby! I may go back and adjust some of the bass playing, but otherwise it's about done! https://app.box.com/s/e2z9qst2rw7iozz85zcbqzstkr48g4tr ~ V2-3 Gonna be thinking of a name soon. EDIT: "Kirbland"! Yep, it's done! Final version (after slightly revised bass humanization): https://app.box.com/s/50yyxi6hzdwsjqzg9d44bfudh424ebd5 Grass Land 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLnqF9KKvTA (main) Sand Canyon 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jt5arkk5lVo (cameo) Ripple Field 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub0iWyJYLko (main-ish) Flower Garden: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=refalB4VM6o (cameo) --- Here's the source breakdown, and it's a doozy! Source Breakdown: 0:03.28 - 0:08.95, 0:09.77 - 0:13.84, 0:16.26 - 0:21.83 = Grass Land 2 (0:00.00 - 0:06.47) [bass and piano] 0:22.75 - 0:27.61 = Grass Land 2 (0:06.47 - 0:12.88) 0:29.24 - 0:38.96, 0:42.21 - 0:53.76 = Ripple Field 3 (0:00.00 - 0:25.36) 0:42.21 - 0:48.69 = Flower Garden (Yoshi) (0:00.00 - 0:26.70) [background sine wave] 1:04.90 - 1:06.91 = Sand Canyon 3 (0:00.00 - 0:02.45) [Different "mood"] 1:08.15 - 1:15.58 = Grass Land 2 (0:00.00 - 0:06.47) 1:17.88 - 1:19.91 = Sand Canyon 3 (0:00.00 - 0:02.45) [Different "mood"; bass] 1:21.13 - 1:32.68, 1:34.10 - 1:45.04 = Ripple Field 3 (0:00.00 - 0:25.36) [Mostly retained bass, with solos + interpretation] 1:47.07 - 2:13.01 = Wild solos! 2:00.05 - 2:01.66, 2:06.52 - 2:13.01 = Grass Land 2 (0:00.00 - 0:06.47) 2:13.01 - 2:22.34 = Grass Land 2 (0:12.88 - 0:24.09) [bass solo] 2:25.99 - 2:31.87 = Grass Land 2 (0:12.88 - 0:24.09) 2:35.71 - 2:37.75 = Sand Canyon 3 (0:00.00 - 0:02.45) [Different "mood"] 2:42.21 - 2:47.07, 2:48.70 - 2:52.75, 2:55.17 - 3:00.74 = Grass Land 2 (0:00.00 - 0:06.47) [bass and piano] 3:01.66 - 3:06.50 = Grass Land 2 (0:00.00 - 0:06.47) 3:06.50 - 3:32.09 = Havona-style ending Grass Land 2: 5.67 + 4.07 + 5.57 + 4.86 + 7.43 + 1.61 + 6.49 + 9.33 + 5.88 + 4.86 + 4.05 + 5.57 + 4.84 = 70.23 70.23/212.09 = 33.11% Ripple Field 3: 9.72 + 11.55 + 11.55 + 10.94 = 43.76 43.76/212.09 = 20.63% Sand Canyon 3: 2.01 + 2.03 + 2.04 = 6.08 6.08/212.09 = 2.87% Flower Garden: = 6.48 6.48/212.09 = 3.06% Total (note the Flower Garden overlap): 120.07/212.09 = 56.61%