jnWake

Hey, When you are mastering a mix, how much do you usually allow your compressors/limiters to do in gain reduction? I know you should "play" with the settings until you feel it sounds right, but I'm curious as to what are "common" levels of gain reduction when mastering. I'm always "afraid" of compressing too much so I always end up with pretty quiet mixes

Man I love this remix. I heard it on PoD's youtube channel a while ago and hoped it'd get posted here someday! I like how the song feels like this is what the composer aimed for with the original. I hope he gets to hear it! The rocking mood is very cool and the synth leads are awesome. If I were to be very nitpicky I'd say the orchestral instruments are a bit too wet, but who cares, the mix is ridiculously awesome anyway!

Cool! I always wanted OCR to release a SMRPG album. Too bad (for me) that most of the tracks I like are already claimed though... Anyway, I'm looking forward to the album

You can also use Dropbox. It's free and has a lot of useful functionalities.

Reaper still works after the trial ends. You're never forced to buy it!

Congrats to the winners? Or something like that I have no idea what a Wily Gauntlet is but I may participate even if I barely know Mega Man (not X) series' music. Also, if anybody's interested, I'll do better versions of my 2 entries for the competition and will post them on my Soundcloud when they're done.

Did you see this: http://www.zeldainformer.com/news/zas-displays-seven-years-an-ocarina-of-time-remix-album ? Interesting idea for the Forest Temple by the way. Temple themes are always hard to rearrange...

Seems the intro HiHat doesn't have many fans For that section I actually wanted to do a percussive thing with "mine sounding" samples, kind of like what ectogemia did in his entry. I didn't have time to even look for them though so I just used that HiHat. Anybody know where I can find good samples of mine sounds? Thanks for the other tips, I'll definitely will look into them. I did this quite fast so the mixing isn't that polished. Other stuff, like the bass having no articulations, will also be fixed.

I have no idea how you came up with that Lost Woods arrangement lol, it's so weird and has so many cool key modulations. It has many cool moments but I'm not sure I'd listen to it on a regular basis I'd change the intro though, make it start "sane" and then slowly turn into the crazy thing it's now. The Temple of Time mix is very pretty. The things that appear at 1:11 are beautiful, feels like a movie. The arrangement is maybe a bit liberal but I wouldn't change a thing in it anyway. Pale Blue "Fure" is interesting. It keeps the feeling of the original nicely. The part with the flutes at 1:31 is a bit too loud... Nice job with the organ. I really like the organ sound.

I believe Omnisphere works great for this too. It has much more than pads I think so it's a good buy. EDIT: Woops, free! Uh... DSK has some decent pads. DSKChoirZ (something like that) has some passable pads...

To be fair with this, in most of the cited examples (Metal Gear and TLoZ:WW in the video), the male character that escapes happens to be the main character. Looking at it from a pure gameplay perspective it'd be ridiculously dull to have the game stop every time the male protagonist is captured and switch to another character that saves him. I guess the "problem" here lies with the fact that most main characters are men. I'm not sure about examples of male NPCs (like most DiDs) that are captured and manage to escape because of their manliness. There probably are but I don't remember any right now.

Solos are Native Instruments' Alicia's Keys and the rest of the song is Native Instruments' The Giant.

I can blame my headphones then

The intro is nice, it creates a cool creepy atmosphere. The rhytm guitar could use more low-end frequencies. It sounds way too sharp in my opinion. This is very noticeable in the 0:41 guitar riff. The synth you used for the main melody of the source is amazing. Like, really amazing. You should use it way more in the song! Source usage is a bit tricky in some sections but I think it's recognizable enough. I think that returning to the intro at 1:22 is a bit lame. It kills all the energy that the song had been building and serves no purpose in my opinion. You could have jumped to the 2:17 section, played around a bit and then returned to the intro. On that note, the transition to 2:17 is bit dull, you should change the drums there or something. The sound of the drums, by the way, is pretty cool. Are you using a bass guitar or any equivalent? I miss one, or at least a more noticeable one. Overall, I like this mix. I think it has potential to become amazing so I hope you continue with it! EDIT: Forgot to comment on the lead guitar. It sounds very nice, but dat synth sounds so much cooler

I made this remix for the FF6 contest that recently ended. I like it so I might continue working on it: https://soundcloud.com/jnwake/final-fantasy-vi-mines-of I think I should work more on the drums and bass (maybe use another E. Piano sample), but I'm open to any criticism to the arrangement and production. It's pretty straightforward in source usage, the section with the piano and synth solos uses a variation of the intro for the chord progression. Hope you like it!

Congrats to the winners! There are a lot of nice songs here (atmosphere in "Following Forgotten" is cool, Timaeus' entry also has some cool sounds, very refreshing after all the Narshe mixes). Hope you like my entry (and hope it didn't place too badly...). I guess I can give it a shot at getting it posted outside of the album I always pick the source that gets the most remixes. Sad to see no one mixed "The Unforgiven", I actually wanted to give it a try but I only had a couple days to work on a mix and I only managed to do the Narshe one. Should've done Unforgiven instead

Terra's character is problematic? I remember all her drama coming from the fact that she was used because of her magic and then learning she was an esper. If that's sexist then I'm really not getting what the hell is allowed to do when writing characters. To be fair I do remember disliking her character a bit for all the drama but I never thought it was a consequence of the character being a girl.

I still plan on auditioning for the track I pm'ed you about, I'll try to do that "soon"

My shrink would probably agree with that.

Phallic spike? It's a cone You can interpret that way if you want, I'm not saying you can't. I'm just saying it feels forced to me.

What is that suppossed to mean?

I'm sorry but most (if not all) of the shots you posted are really stretching it. Head like an orgasm? Going to mount her? You can find sexism anywhere if you really try to. Would it be better if the thing went through her chest instead of her lower abdomen? You would be calling it sexist anyway. It's also a bit funny that some possibly sexist scenes are something to worry about but merciless killing is normal. If we're going to analyze the cultural influence of games, shouldn't we be worried about anything morally wrong in them?

I'm surpried nobody has mentioned Twin Snakes. That one gets a lot of hate in most forums. I love it though

Zelda is constantly strong in SS in the sense that she is always brave. She always accepts her fate of "godess" even with the consequences it has. Getting captured by Ghirahim at the end of the game doesn't make her weak, especially because Ghirahim is a very strong villain. Link only manages to defeat him because he uses the super powerful Master Sword, not because he's some sort of super strong male. In fact, Link's grand (and possibly only) strength is his courage.

What I mean is that it doesn't matter what Mario is. Mario could be Peach's anthropomorphic pet dog or even Peach's sister and the games would be the same thing (without nose kissing at the ending probably ).