MindWanderer

I'm not sure that rendered correctly; the second "bass" came out as a high-pitched squeal for me.It's funny you should mention this--I just learned the same thing a couple days ago, but I originally thought the wobble was caused by modulation in amplitude, not frequency, so I was even more clueless. I also don't understand what bitcrushing has to do with it at all--is it just to increase the "grittiness" of the sound? If you hadn't guessed, I'm a total noob when it comes to synths--I'm trying now to learn enough about them to implement them effectively later in this compo. On a related note: I've found lots of tutorials for raw beginners (e.g. "This is the difference between a sine and a saw wave, this is what ASDR is") and lots for advanced users that twiddle all the dials on the synth, like pulse width and routing, and assuming we know what they all do, but nothing that covers that middle ground. Anyone have any good resources?

For instance, sticking to one instrument for extended periods of time, even when an interplay between two or more instruments would be more natural (e.g. 0:46-0:47 of Tandocca Scale). You're not the only one who does this, but not many people do. Also the ending segment at 1:44 has what sounds to me like an arpeggiated lead with a delay that's out of sync with the beat, something else that I recall hearing in several of your mixes. Neither of these are necessarily bad things, but they're tricky to make sound good. On the whole you've gotten a lot better at separating your sounds, replicating melodies authentically, putting together good soundscapes, and getting a good rhythm going.

Just got my votes in, and it just keeps getting harder and harder. Lots of amazingly creative stuff, and lots of mixes I would have loved to rank, but I gotta pick just 3.... I want to give Zerothemaster a special shout-out, though. You have improved so amazingly much over the last year you've spent at this, and your persistence is really starting to pay off. If I'd heard Tandocca Scale even 6 months ago I wouldn't have believed you'd written it (though it does still have some signature Ztm quirks). Keep improving at this pace and you'll be one of the best around in another year!

Not that I'm up this week, unless Trism has to bail, but just to get this out of they way: Their Game Boy themes are somewhat different, Ballade's especially. Since Quint is OK, what about those?Edit: Bah, ninja'ed.

Hm, it's unfortunate that it came across that way. The structure is pretty common in movie soundtracks; I used "Aggressive Expansion" from The Dark Knight as my most direct influence, which shares the same rhythm of powerful opening and closing bracketing a soft, almost ambient middle.

Yeah, I could tell it was intentional, but it did sound like it was done in production rather than by the singer actually dropping his voice--which was indeed the case. It would sound fine if you re-recorded that one line actually singing more quietly.

Fair enough. I'm much less of an expert than you are! I can certainly the difference in production quality between my track and yours, though, and it's not all sample quality. I know that my sequencing was also mechanical, and that I screwed up the volume balance between the parts in my final attempt to improve compression, but both of those I could have fixed--or at least improved--given time. I would love to hear from you on what else I could have done to improve it, arrangement and production both.

The whole reason I do that is to keep it in a similar timeframe: One week to make a mix, then a second week to get and apply the advice of your mentor. At least, that's the way I'd approach it, because I feel like my arranging is OK but my production needs a ton of work. If you need arrangement advice, you'd probably work more closely with the mentor earlier on. Until now I haven't felt that way, because none of my competition has ever used a style similar to mine. But now ShrackAttack & co. have given me a good piece for the next time I want to A/B an epic orchestral score-type piece.What I really need to do is learn how to work with synths. Most successful entry-level remixers start there rather than with soundfonts, it seems, and there are more people I can compare to in that regard.

You think you feel that way? I think this is quite possibly the best piece I've ever done, and then the track right after mine in the playlist is done in almost the exact same style only about 1000 times better. I'm still pretty pleased with the arrangement, though.

It's anything downloaded from Napster, of course. Just voted. Really, really tough call. I was able to narrow it down to 7 with a fair amount of confidence, but then it really could have gone any way. There were a couple that were almost heartbreaking not to rank.

No kidding. Voting is going to be even harder than last week. Although I find it hilarious that so many people clearly struggled with getting their two sources to mesh together smoothly. Lots of strange transitions and brief cameos. Overall amazing music, though.

I wrote some lyrics in The Megas's style, in the first person about how much Toad Man sucks and he has no business fighting anyone. But my idea for the melody didn't sound any good so I canned it for now. Maybe if one of the later sources has the right meter, I'll use them.

Oh, sooo close to the >1 point threshold, good job Trism!... though I'm frankly stunned that Ragebot Massacre did so poorly. It just barely missed my top 3 after a lot of deliberation. Just submitted my entry. I honestly have no idea how it's going to be received. Wish I had time to painstakingly tweak compression and EQ, but I need to sleep and frankly I'm not that good at it anyway. Looking forward to feedback on it in any event.

I have 8 hours a day when I can check on the forums, and to a certain extent listen to music for inspiration, but can't work on my actual DAW. When I get on my home computer I'm all business.I know most of the Mega Man music by heart, but even without that, it's usually pretty easy to tell when someone is reproducing a melody vs. noodling around. I did have to reference Tengu Man.

I dunno... I think food is a little different. I can't tell good wine from bad wine, because when I drink the stuff, all I can taste is tannins and alcohol. The stuff I don't like is too overwhelming for me to even detect anything else. But I can tell good rap from bad rap, even though I hate rap: it still has meter and rhythm, the vocalist still has to have good timbre and it's even possible to be off-key. You never get to a point of sensory overload with music, unless your EQ is screwed up, and that's a valid point of critique.

Many folks have managed to get stuff posted to OCR using free orchestral samples. Nutritious comes to mind as someone who pulls this off masterfully, and you wouldn't even know they were free samples.However, I was referring to general quality. I've seen mediocre rock guitar win over very good classical pieces. All else being equal, choice of genre can help or hurt in the winning of votes. Which is to be expected to some extent--enjoyability is a valid voting criterion, and everyone enjoys some genres over others. I personally consider it unfortunate, though.

An unfortunate consequence of all this is that, if you're interested in winning votes, genre really does matter. Folks around here seem to like dubstep, rock, and chiptunes mostly. If you go with classical or something unusual like spaghetti western, you need to come up with a piece that's of significantly higher quality just to get the same number of votes.

So the list is just there because there is otherwise no list of every source ever chosen in a free round.Basically, combine the lists at https://sites.google.com/site/bambombim/prc and in the top of this thread for the full list of eligible sources.

Sorry, which part did you think I didn't read? Absolutely if your goal is to decide whether a mix is good or not, the first 30 seconds, or even 10-15 seconds randomly pulled out of the mix somewhere, has merit. But none of these mixes are perfect! Every single one has strengths and weaknesses, and some of the mixes that would fail the 30-second test are among the strongest in terms of the most important voting criterion.I'll call out Space Pirate Attack again as an example: to be honest, if I were using the 30-second test it would have failed. Production was weak compared to many of the other entries, and the arrangement through that point was extremely straightforward. But at 34 seconds the second source comes in, and at the 39 second mark it's arranged brilliantly. The Sky Demon, on the other hand, is an excellent piece of music by any standard, but except for 5 notes, use of the Moliarty theme is sufficiently liberal that I personally wouldn't know that source was being used if I hadn't been told ahead of time. Again, I feel strongly that votes should reflect these things more than they have been, given the criteria.

In general, yes, completely true. But in this compo, we're given voting criteria, and use of the two sources is the most important one. If you're chucking a mix based on the first 30 seconds, you aren't playing this game by the rules. And if you don't think the voting criteria we're supposed to be following are worth paying attention to, then don't vote. Compose whatever you want, add whatever you want to your personal music collection, but make people earn their votes by following the rules of the game.Someday when I'm a really good remixer I'll enter one of these things, spend a month working on a kickass mix that completely ignores the other source, and see how many votes I get. It should be zero. It won't be.

I don't know how you can determine anything about how they integrated the two sources given 30 seconds. I don't think a single submission hits both sources that quickly.

Last week it took me a couple of hours to choose my votes. This week it took me the better part of two days. Lots of great stuff, especially in regards to the topic du jour of source integration. Although interestingly, last week there was a pretty even spectrum from good to not so good, while this week there were two clusters with a significant gap (IMHO).

This is exactly what we did with Cash. Trism kind of ran out of time, so we didn't have a chance to see his WIPs except for a very rough one of maybe a quarter of the piece.Problem with us is, we're all really slow. It took Cash and Trism, and will take me, nearly the whole week to come up with a complete arrangement sans polish. That leaves very little time for feedback and even less for collaborative elements. I'm hoping we'll get more of a chance to really collaborate in the final round. (This is, incidentally, why I personally use MIDIs. Not because I can't transcribe the source--I even helped Trism with Moliarty--but because it's time-consuming and I need all the free time I have to work on arrangement and production.)

I'm sad to admit that this is complete gibberish to me. My formal musical training literally consists of Music 101 taken... oh, about 16 or 17 years ago now. And a children's book featuring Mr. Eegybeedyef at least 30 years ago. Other than that, I pretty much just move the notes around until they sound good.However, thanks for the effort.

This makes me wonder: has anyone ever tried a pure production compo before? For instance: The organizer provides a MIDI, and participants are not allowed to change or remove any notes (though possibly notes could be added?), but they can do anything else they want.