MindWanderer

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.

Except that it's Darke's compo, so he decides what the voting criteria should be. That's not to say you can't have your own opinions about how to apply them, but it does mean that source usage, which means integrating the two sources into one coherent whole, should be the most important factor, followed by production and enjoyability. In practice, most people reverse the order of those when voting. In fact, I personally rarely vote for the pieces that make it into my own playlist, because the ones I enjoy are often not the ones that best meet the voting criteria.

I was really hoping for the African Mines, I had a good idea for that one. Depending on how the rest of this compo works out, I may do it anyway someday. But I have a pretty decent idea for The Moon, too. My way of thinking about it has always been: Someone unfamiliar with either source shouldn't be able to tell which parts are from which source, or even that two sources were used. Someone familiar with both sources should be able to pick out which parts are from which sources without the use of a breakdown. Someone familiar with one source but not the other shouldn't be able to tell which parts are from the source they don't know and which, if any, are completely original. I doubt I'd be able to fit that into my schedule, but I'd love to listen to it afterwards. I can get things into the same key by ear most of the time, but I don't always know what key I've gotten them into. And chords are the same but harder.

Actually, with vBulletin, poster IP addresses are logged, so unless you are very careful about only using one ID at home, one at work/school, etc. you will probably get caught, and even then it won't get you very far. I was a moderator on a different forum at one point, and yeah, folks got banned for this.Inviting friends to vote happens, but yeah, since there are no prizes, Wheaton's Law is what really applies here. ... So, we're shooting for at least 7th place in order to get more than one point. That's reasonable, you have to beat half the other teams. Although, more than half the teams have some really kickass members, so even 7th place ain't easy.

Plus there's always the possibility that lurkers who haven't actively posted for years do in fact pop up just to vote on this. With Google Forms they'd have to post in the thread saying it's legitimate.

If the Disney thing continues into block 2, I'm sure we'll get something from DuckTales, but hopefully it will be one of the other great tracks from that game--which is pretty much all of them.Then again, I feel pretty much the same way about Mega Man 2 - Wily 1, and Darke picked it last time. To be fair, it did still result in some great mixes (Rexy's and Nutritious's mixes are on my main playlist to this day).

I'd like to echo this, and remind everyone: While therex's reviews are really helpful, this footnote is the only thing he said about source usage, even though it's supposed to be voting criterion #1. This is why I ranked KingTiger second, incidentally: production was pretty weak, but he really owned that Pirate Island source and made it his own, integrating and morphing it so that it went hand in hand with Galaxy Man naturally.