MindWanderer   Members

Seriously, focus on one album at a time. A lot of albums tank; it takes a lot of energy and coordination over months or years to see a single album to completion. You have a firm source list for the first album. If and when you get to the final stages of getting this thing pushed through, talk about a second. But that's way, way down the line.

Woot! RMWtS on the first page! Always knew this was the mix that was going to make it happen. With so many compos running these days, it's hard to generate much interest in this one. Stars in particular are hard to come by. I was going to run another round in January, but it looks like SZRC2014 will conflict. I may need to consider an alternative schedule or format to keep this going on a more regular basis.

Harpsichord sample in the intro is still pretty poor, and very mechanically sequenced. You'll need some humanization there. The kick is a bit overwhelming from 0:30 to 0:54. Balance in 0:54-1:47 is drowning your melody, all I hear is accompaniment. Panning helps but is no substitute for equalization. 1:47 to 3:40 really has too much kick--too loud and too much of it. The samples still aren't good here: the strings and piccolo still sound really fake and mechanical. And that snare is awful, it sounds like someone slapping a wet towel on the ground. Transitions are also a problem. There's a slowdown and climax at the end of each section, but then the next one starts straight in at full strength. That works OK for intro->main, but not so well more than once, and all your transitions are like that. Build tension and release with either a fast climax and continued high energy, or with a slowing climax followed by a soft, slow section. You almost do this with the outtro, but even the piano is too energetic, and there's no continuity. Played softly, with some residual elements from the earlier section, would work better.

I'm inclined to agree that one edition will do nicely. I listened to several soundtracks of several Yu-Gi-Oh and One Piece games and there really wasn't anything that leaped out at me. (I couldn't find much for Bleach, and I wasn't sure what was O.G. Naruto and what was Shippuden or whatever.) Also, these are all comparatively recent mangas. Dragon Ball and Yu Yu Hakusho are older and more iconic (especially DBZ). The Rurouni Kenshin games seem to have decent soundtracks (though I'm having trouble finding much). Really, 1-2 remixes per series is plenty. If there's huge demand, there could be a second album, but start with one and assume it'll be the only one. The album could open and/or close with a Jump Stars remix. Incidentally, I did find a playlist for JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Heritage for the Future. There's some good stuff there. Jotaro's theme seems popular, and I see why. If it remains unclaimed and allowed after I get my SDMRPG WIP in I may claim it myself.

I looked for a general thread for these but didn't find one. I apologize for any duplication. This seems like a common and simple sound, but I can't find any presets in any of my synths that come even vaguely close to it, and so far my attempts to recreate it from scratch have failed utterly (which is no surprise, I still have a lot to learn about synths). It's the very first sound, the opening pad in this: http://youtu.be/VrN2vT0ISf4 I know I could sample it, there's a good two seconds of it playing clean with no other sounds, but I'd really like to figure out what it's made of, partly as a learning experience and partly to possibly tweak it. Also I strongly prefer not to even sample anything that isn't open license when I can avoid it. Any ideas?

Not necessarily. Wearing headphones and mousing it in one-handed isn't a bad use of your time when the baby just insists on being held for an hour at 3am. Not conducive to live recording, but fortunately that isn't djp's main thing.

Here's the official SFZ specifications: http://www.cakewalk.com/DevXchange/sfz.asp I'm not aware of any easy-to-read tutorials.

Apparently Dr. Luigi was just announced for Dec. 31. If it has any unique music, this would be absolutely perfect.

Also, there's no real need to make a true "soundfont" (sf2). sfz's are easier, they're just wav's and a text file. You can use a program, like sfzed, to help, or you can write the text file from scratch in Notepad (which can end up being faster, since you can make your own templates and copy-paste). For the SNES, Genesis, and earlier consoles, there are already soundfonts and VSTi's out there. Consoles after those didn't use such constrained sound-generating systems and don't have any practical limits as to what they could produce, so you'd need to rip sounds directly from the games somehow.

I've only ever played the first game, but I fell in love with the soundtrack immediately. I ripped each of the character themes as soon as I had them unlocked and slapped them on my MP3 player. And the soundtrack is full of catchy melody hooks, it absolutely screams for remixes. I'm a noob yet, and I know I'd have to audition for a project, but I would absolutely be on board (with a preference for characters from the first game, of course).

So, freesound.org has four different use licenses. Most of them require attribution. I don't recall ever seeing sample attributions on a mixpost, nor have I ever seen them in judge threads. Is there a way to use these legally? Should I stick with Creative Commons Zero samples? Or do people just not care?

Still saying: Gauntlet-style, characters vs. bosses.

Huh, I was looking for the boss vote thread and somehow never saw it. Weird. Well, doesn't matter, I would have voted for The Extreme anyway. And I never really listened to Kuja's theme before--my brain turns to mush at the end of FFIX every time, so now I get to appreciate it.

I've been poking around at a couple of albums in their recruiting phases. No time like the present to get started on that and kill two birds with one stone!

a) Joining a project is up to the director. They should have acceptance criteria listed in the project thread. The usual arrangement is that posted remixers are allowed to claim tracks as long as they meet deadlines; everyone else has to audition, either with a sample work of some sort or a WIP of what they have in mind for the project. Someone who just shows up and tries to organize a project will probably have a hard time finding participants, but nothing prevents you from trying. The process to get accepted as an official OCR project is fairly rigorous, but there's a lot to do before that's something you should even be thinking about; mustering participants and getting WIPs in will probably take months.

So it's more like a remix album of a fictional game's soundtrack? I'll start playing around with my idea and send you a WIP when I have something presentable. I may end up needing a fair bit of feedback and advice, but I'll try to polish it as much as possible first.

Also FFIX's battle theme is, I believe, the last FF battle theme to use the classic bass line for FF battle music used in FF1-6 (and for specific bosses in 7 and .Incidentally, the youtube link to this source in your track list posts is now broken. I don't see anything about any kind of unifying style, instrumentation, etc. mentioned anywhere in the first post, or in this thread. If this were a "real" RPG, there would be some kind of consistency in that regard. I'm seriously tempted to give this a shot--I've not yet made anything of sufficient quality for this, but then I've not yet spent more than a week or so working on one remix. If the style/genre restrictions, if any, match something I think I might be able to do, I'll start working on a WIP to audition. Edit: I notice there aren't any "location"-type entries on the tracklist yet. I'm thinking about working on something for "Beware the Forest's Mushrooms" or "Still, the Road is Full of Dangers." That way, if I come up with a WIP worth using, great, it could be worked in; if I don't, then it doesn't block off someone else from remixing a source they want. I have some very preliminary ideas regarding a combination of "Beware the Forest's Mushrooms," Dr. Mario 64 "Que Que," and SMW's "Forest of Illusion."

I've been following OCR almost since day 1, I remember downloading "Horizontal Armada" shortly after it was uploaded (and it's still proudly on my playlist). I think somewhere I may still have some MIDI remixes from the pre- and early OCR days. It's been a great ride, and I'm grateful to everyone who's helped make it so.

Sure. Feel free to suggest improvements. Speaking of this: There seem to be some strange effects of channel selection with some VSTi's that I can't make a lot of sense of. With some instruments, when a note in a lower-numbered channel follows a note in a higher-numbered channel, with no gap, it has some specific "blending" effects. In some VSTi's (Zebralette and TAL-Noisemaker), it's a way to get portamento to trigger without notes overlapping. In Synth1's arpeggiator, it can make the pattern become offset. It probably isn't a Reaper-specific question, but why does this happen?Edit: Fixed bugginess in previous version of custom action.

Amazing stuff. Downloading and keeping.

Stacatto violin is a bit dry--the velocity varies a lot but it still sounds a bit weak and artificial. The source is heavily interpreted, but enough of it is done "straight" that I don't think it will have a problem passing on those grounds. Ending is essentially nonexistent. Definitely worth submitting overall, though; if arrangement is your usual problem, you've overcome it nicely here.

Oh my God this stuff is turning out awesome. SWS is absolutely amazing--I thought I was adding it just for the new Actions, but it's a rabbithole of tools. Just started looking at sequencer_baby; I need to learn how to use that effectively so it doesn't just keep playing for the whole song. Automating the volume would work but seems like a crude way of doing it. Incidentally, I started with your "create folder" action and took it a few more steps for when I need a quick start on a compo: I made one action that imports a MIDI from a file, puts it all into one folder, colors it, renames it, shrinks it down, and opens up the I/O window so that routing is to the hardware MIDI is right there. Couldn't figure out any way to do that last step automatically, or to automatically strip all the CC items and stuff, but still this will be handy. One annoying thing, though: if you cancel one interactive part of the action, it keeps trying to do the rest and gets very confused (though Consolidate Undo Points makes this really minor).

I personally don't need an insane number of presets, I just wish they were organized and described better. Usually all you have to go with is a general category (lead, pad, atmo, arp, bass--and a lot of synths' ideas of "bass" is a lead or arp tuned a couple of octaves down) and a name that might be vaguely descriptive (e.g. "aluminum chickens," "organic galaxy") or not (e.g. "I love this one," "useless"). I either waste way too much time going through them all, or just go with one I used once before, or build something really simple from scratch.

Thanks! Looks good.sequencer_baby and arpbangzero make my eyes glaze over... those look like they need fairly extensive tutorials to make any sense of. At least, unless you have some idea in advance of what they're supposed to be used for.

Sweet. So if the Light bracket is battling Gilgamesh, who's in the Darkness bracket...? To keep things fair for Brandon, and give us more than one thing to vote on this week, we could vote on it.