Rellik

This EP has sounds that make me want to pay money.

A friend of mine who has cancer called me up to tell me that Songs for the Cure cleared up his cancer quite nicely so it looks like it's working so please keep buying the CDs!!! Plus the music's great and all

I'm really looking forward to this release! Alec friggin' Holowka is in it! Even just the fact that Kyle Gabler was featured last year makes it something special, to me anyway. Let's fight cancer, 'n stuff!

Yo, this thread seems like a "let's talk about MAGFEST thread" and I have stuff to say! 1) Prophet of Mephisto, awesome jams! So much fun. Baba yetu, yetu, uliye, mbinguni, yetu, yetu, ami-NA BA ba yetu, yetu, uliye, lako yabo something something kuzwe.... can't stop singing it. 7/4 is no good btw cuz you lose the "ul-i-ye" which is a beautiful sequence of rhythmic syllables. 2) DrumUltimA, best Corridors of Time ever, thanks to you. Believe it or not, my bassist friend was TOTALLY PISSED OFF that we had to leave right afterward - we just don't get this quality of musical experience regularly enough. Melody, you were great too! 3) Getting 15th (14th? 16th? 18th?) place in DoD was alright, but I especially enjoyed the warm congratulations and cheering and who could forget being randomly foisted into the air by drunk indie game composer panelists.... That's what I wanted to say right now

This here is an album! Thanks for introducing me to MilesTone

That was fantastic. You guys are fun, and I'm glad I got to meet many of you - see you next year! And Jamspace... amazing. Unimaginably great. Thanks Escariot for helping out with it, and to everyone I got to hear (notably the well-rehearsed and unique combo of Harmony, Taucer, bustatunez, yodaisbetter, AudioFidelity, The Pezman, and more I'm probably forgetting probably). At one point Vincent Diamante (one of the game composers at Magfest) must have liked the stuff myself and some others were doing (2 of my band-mates, plus beej, coda, and more), since he came up and jammed with us for quite a while! And then Dom too must have liked what he heard, since he joined us for some amazing CT jams (including "Undersea Funk Palace"). Can you believe this stuff? Rellik, Vincent Diamante, Dom and a drummer that I didn't recognize jamming deliciously on Chrono Trigger... can't wait for the video.

Hey, I figured I should post this here as there may be some of you in Pittsburgh who may be interested Basically, we're two awesome bands called Battlecake (the video game band) and Antimotion (the anime band). Battlecake plays hard rocking rock and roll in the vein of The Black Mages but more fun, and Antimotion plays anime openings/endings with a ton of flair. (I'm the keyboardist in Battlecake - I'm spoiled, I get awesome synth solos in lots of the songs, but hey that's what an OCReMixer pedigree gets you =D) Here's the flier: It's at Carnegie Mellon University, in the "University Center" building in the "Rangos Auditorium". It's $3.00 at the door, $1.00 pre-sale (I have no idea how any of you would be able to obtain a pre-sale ticket at this point, but anyway, it's cheap regardless!) We would love to entertain the fine, sophisticated ears of OCReMix listeners - it's more satisfying than entertaining the unwashed masses. [i don't know if there's anyone still around at OCR who remembers me - anyway, I'm still around! By the way, we have a fantastic arrangement of Corridors of Time from Chrono Trigger - when we get it recorded maybe we'll submit it! Oh yeah... to entice you, we're covering the Advent Children version of One Winged Angel (I play full orchestra :mrgreen:), but don't tell anyone, it's supposed to be a surprise!]

DarkeSword beats Rellik to first TP mix?! Impossible! Or actually very, very possible... at least you didn't take the material I want I officially call dibs on a complete ripoff of Yoko Kanno and the Seatbelts for Midna's main theme (whether I can handle it or not is another story). I kind of forgot all about OCR until I read that press release in my e-mail today, but it's nice to come back and hear some stuff from good old Darke! Maybe I'll stretch EWQLSO Gold Pro XP's legs a bit with a Midna mix of my own, as a hold over until I can get a jazz band together (a hold over until the end of time is not a hold over, mind you) With regards to the mix at hand, the harp and woodwinds sound fantastic. Very atmospheric stuff - the backing padding of overarching strings and choir makes for a very deep feeling, really reminiscent of the kinds of times the source material would play, actually. Nice arrangement, although I feel like some of the parts were pretty stilted at times, and realism tended to go way down the tubes during the parts with faster strings or brass (can't blame you for any of that, though, I'm not much better, even with my new super-expensive orchestral libraries ). Interesting choice of reverb, I think it fits really well Congratulations on the first of what I hope will become a long line of Twilight Princess mixes!

Actually, it's even now possible to use Windows VST's in Linux - there are several wrappers out there that, as far as I know, allow a reasonable majority of synths to be used. Plus there are plenty of synths written specifically for Linux - I think it's as viable a platform as any other for writing music. I mean, even a Commodore64 or Amiga will do the job - there's lots to like in Linux for any reasonably code-sensible musician. You just won't be able to use the same tools, necessarily. Of course, I can't see any good reason for most people who are used to their Windows environments to switch - I know I'd never give up my comfortable workflow and hardware support if I didn't have to.

Nobody has any right to ask you to care. For those of us who do care, we care because of an innate sense of connection to the rest of humanity (compounded by the fact that most of us can relate closely to the circumstances of the VT students - or even have friends among them) - if it honestly makes no difference to you, nobody can judge you for it.

Wow - really liking this! This your first foray into D&B? The bass is great. The drums are stereotypical, but hey, D&B is D&B - everything functions nicely. I'd have to say that if this were a soundtrack, I would end up having to mute it, though - the intensity would start to grate after a period of time, especially if this is an RTS (as I believe it is). Regardless, great imitation of D&B fashions!

Holy crap... Death Note just stopped telling the story I wanted to hear (episode 25).

If it's really every day... it would almost be worth it to learn how to track just to compete!

I just found out about this competition at KVR: http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=172132 It's called a Remix contest, but really, it's a composition contest - they provide you with a sample pack which is basically a very limited collection of synth stabs, sound effects, 3 very useful drumloops (perfect slicing fodder), and assorted other short samples, and you create any song you want! You can use any effects you want, but you can't introduce any new material - i.e. no synths, no outside samples, you can't record anything, etc. I found it incredibly fun creating my entry (in a total of ~6 hours), so I thought I'd share this with you OCR folks in case you want to participate. The deadline's March 31st, but you'd be surprised how fast composition goes when you're dealing with a limited sampleset. Also gives you a chance to show off your tricks more than your average compo and showing off tricks is the perfect way to pick up some new ones, from the superfluous to the fundamental. In case anybody's curious, here's my entry: http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~alederer/Rellik_-_the_wired.mp3 (when I time-stretched the Am_chord sample it sounded like it was saying "the wire", but I edited it so that it sounded like "the wired" - it still sounds more like "the wire", though, but I like using a Lain reference more than I like calling it what it sounds like. Plus people will hear "the wired" once they see the title!) And yes, the lead is totally inspired by beej's Fragments of Gold. I encourage anyone who's even remotely interested to enter - it's a lot of fun, and there are even one or two decent prizes!

Gotta say, electric concerto... sounds like the biggest cop-out I've heard in a while =P. If I'm wrong so be it, but if you're hearing it like I'm hearing it, yes, it is indeed awkward and ungainly, ineffective. This is a key concept: if you don't like it, change it. Rationalizing it is the worst thing you could do =P. Other than that, I think this is a pretty solid euro-dance-or-whatever track. The chord progression is classic and effective, the melody is classic and effective - rather well-composed all around, although I wouldn't give it extra points for originality. The drum track is especially nice - quality, aside from the fills, is great. You picked a great kick and snare. The synths are interesting, in that many of them seem to have this strings-ish timbre - I think the sound is great, although I think the experience is weakened a bit by the mixing. Nothing specific, just the liberal and judicious employment of EQ and compression can make or break the overall feel of a track - sorry to point out the obvious, but you're going to get batter at things like that with time. If you're not just starting out, I apologize for what I'm about to say, but: it definitely sounds like you're on your way to creating some great stuff, as this is on the whole well-composed, well-conceived, and well-executed, and it sounds like you already know what you're doing in a number of compositional and production areas. Thanks for posting it!

Thanks, -RK-; I appreciate your kind appraisal! I know what you mean about the sidescroller thing - it definitely is very melody-driven. I actually got alot of my inspiration from anime opening/closing songs, especially in terms of the guitar (if only I could play guitar =P - I've been picking it up slowly, but I almost resent it for making me jump through all these hoops when a keyboard accepts my ideas and outputs music without any complaint - like a keyboard is an obedient, loving dog and a guitar is a surly cat with an overblown sense of entitlement). I do think it could use a bit more bass content, though - the whole production feels a little top/mid-heavy and floaty when I compare it to tracks of other artists and even other recent tracks by myself. Not sure if it's even worth the effort to go back in and change it, though - I do agree that it sounds pretty good as is! Thanks again for the comment.

Thanks for the info, SGX - I'll have to look into why, exactly, a soft clipper is desirable (sounds like it might be basically transistor saturation emulator - anyway, I'll look it up). Good advice about the kick/bass EQ - and actually, through experimentation, I've been able to achieve the solid bass effect I admired so much in these two using a similar concept (basically layering a sine wave at the fundamental with the bass, and then high-passing the rest of the bass, so that the bass range harmonically consists of only the sub, leaving room for some low oomph in the kick - this is more effective than trying to just notch out a bit of the bass's low end, in my opinion). Also, I've never really given much attention to sidechaining either, but from what I've heard about it, it's probably only a subtle advantage (depending on the way you write your basslines and your kick rhythm). Mixing a compressed signal and a dry signal, however: that seems to be all the rage these days! If only I had a compressor that had a control for mixing in the dry signal - I'm too lazy to check how much latency my compressors are reporting .

I wanted to separate that from my actual post for comedic impact This is really really compelling stuff. I feel like when you use the kick for fills it sounds really off - too boomy and full. During the beat I feel like it could be better too - a track like this needs the perfect kick more than most other genres, but I don't think it detracts enough for this not to be enjoyable. Seems like the track is kind of based on just those two sounds (the wind instrument sample and the FM-fart-thing), which fits really well for the theme I think. Nice going - the hats/tambourine line are excellent. And it's really hard to tell if this is psycho-acoustic or not, but if the tempo is changing slowly over time, that's a nice touch, but I'm not sure psytrance dance party audiences appreciate that kind of thing.

Yo soc Who are you, Infected Mushroom and Israfel's "Lesser Kerubic Patchwork" mixed together?

SGX, both of these are great - the basic bones of beast are fantastic and definitely extremely danceable, despite the relaxed pace. I don't think the the synths later on with the sweeping cutoff are as cool, but maybe if the rhythm of the sweeping were more precise they would leave a better impression. The rhythm and bass are ingenious - you sure know how to use (and apparently enjoy) those fast-repeat snares and hats; all of the variations are great. newmelody I like even better. When the strings are exposed (as in the intro) they sound a little iffy (although a bit more reverb might fix that), but the texture they create when they're playing chords along with the choir is amazing. The way it's mixed with the powerful bass riffs and the apparently idiosyncratic fast-retrigger drums is incredibly slick and transparent - just what I'd expect from SGX. I'd love to hear an explanation of how you get such a massive low-end without any fighting between the bass and the kick, and without any obvious ugly compressor pumping, as well as how you manage to get the strings/choir across so clearly without disturbing the phat beatz - but I think that's probably the kind of thing that I have to keep bashing my head against until I get it . One question, if you would be willing to answer: did you use any EQ or compression or multiband compression or limiting on the master channel or post-render on these WiPs, and if so, how much?

For the record, the title is a Beatles reference Anyway, this is a track I finished just recently. I've been incredibly busy musically (and otherwise, but that's irrelevant), mostly creating soundtracks for the Game Creation Society here, and this one is no exception - hence, the chip-ish element(s) are there mostly because the developer asked me for them. However, since these games are non-commercial, I figure I can still call the soundtracks my own property/copyright if anything comes up I'll work it out with the developer, anyway. http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~alederer/Rellik_-_Penguin_Element.mp3 Genre-wise, I have absolutely no clue. So listen, and inform me with your criticisms! I didn't spend much time tweaking the mastering on this one, so if you think it's over-compressed or anything be sure to point it out (it's hard for me to tell). There's plenty more where this came from. I've been working in all kinds of different genres and styles - and I've got a lot more I want to try ASAP these days I feel like I have so much room to improve.. it's very liberating. Anyway, thanks!

http://nitouhei.blog42.fc2.com/blog-entry-145.html That link Bundeslang posted... surprising stuff. Call me an unglobalized bumpkin, but somehow it never occured to me that anybody would be blogging in Japanese about a remix by some American fellow whom he refers to as "Mr. Rellik" (would that likely be a translation of 'Rellik-san'?) Use the search function to see if he has anything to say about your own mixes - although it's hard to tell via the translation if he liked them or not . "I think that it makes it there are a lot of play and not getting tired. " Thank you, AFAIK.

In concept, I think it's pretty cool - and I'm not going to say it's not catchy. It is catchy! I think the way it was mastered is holding it back a lot - the frequency balance and mixing feels off to me, but more imporantly, the stereo image seems weirdly distorted. One way or another, I feel like this could really, really benefit from some more effort to nail that smartly-produced, pumping bright DDR sound - then it would truly be a fantastic track (I find the ending, for example, especially ingenious). Obviously it was good enough to be posted to OCR as it was (since, of course, it was), but I'd still love to hear an upgraded version sometime - maybe on VGMix3? Even just a version that turned down the resonance on the filter-sweep at ~0:40 would make this mix quite a bit more listenable.

Actually, in my opinion, SA2 is a fantastic game. I'm not the only one that feels that way, but I'll explain anyway: basically, it's a lot of fun - vibrant levels, decent challenge, excellent replay value. New Sonic will never be old Sonic - if you don't torture yourself trying to pretend Sonic Adventure 2 is a classic Sonic game with impeccable and loveable gameplay, music, and mood, you'll see that there's a lot of fun to be had, and a lot of vibe to be appreciated. I don't disagree with any of your specific criticisms (even something as fundamental to a game as the gameplay is obviously quite flawed in this case), but when it comes down to the actual playing experience, it's not that hard to call SA2 a great game.

I picked it up for the GCN on Sunday - and since I'm home for winter break, I've put in ~25 hours so far still only on my way to the 4th dungeon though. I love how the plot is so much deeper and more eventful - there are actually supporting characters you CARE about, that have a role, and that don't feel like robots spewing out useless dialog (and not just Midna)! It's not on the level of something really plot-centric like a really good RPG (at least not yet - )Also, I think this is definitely the best soundtrack I've heard in a Zelda game. As far as I remember, none have had this "character motif" interplay throughout different sections of the score thing going on - very cinematic. Alot of the tracks bring personality to places in a way that tracks from previous games wouldn't have, e.g. - and the little musical references to classic tunes are seemingly omnipresent!Too bad the night/day system makes things so annoying sometimes as well as the over-abundance of rupees (who would actually go back into a dungeon to pick up the ~100-150 rupees they left behind because they were full?) Although I got the chance to use up all my rupees and then revisit the mini-dungeons I had raided to pick up hundreds of rupees apiece later on (who can resist a face that round?)