satoka-eldon

Minor comment: can't quite put my finger on why, but it sounds a bit unfocused from 1:30 to 1:50. The buildup beforehand (culminating in the cymbal crash at 1:30) made me think it would have a more clearly defined rhythm to it. Otherwise it's very cool, and I hope you can extend it a little more~

Excellent suggestion. "The Solipsistic Ineloquent Buttballs of Prof. Mrs. Hieronymous Beaverwipe, The 13th Duchess of Neo-Gloucester" it will be.

I'm not reading all that crap just to suggest a name. You will call it "The Solipsistic Ineloquent Buttballs of Prof. Mrs. Hieronymous Beaverwipe, The 13th Duchess of Neo-Gloucester".

Ok, I'm interested. I would really really enjoy some live flute on this! I know I already submitted, but whatever. PM me with some deets!

This is really cool!!! As far as submission goes, I'm not sure how the judges would feel about this, but I say go for it! I don't think you need to worry about humanization, though. It should sound like a video game (which it does).

You know what's really strange? I thought you hated that picture, but now it's your avatar.
Anyway, I honestly think both are kinda crap now.
Soundcloud was great before it got rid of embedded sharing into social media like Facebook, and groups. I cannot, for the life of me figure out why they thought getting rid of groups was a good idea. There is also the fact that it is plagued with bots, or people who feign interest in your tracks and page, only to unfollow and unlike you if they don't get a follow back almost immediately...
YouTube is the superior platform in the sense that how you can present your music is a lot better. You can get great After Effects templates and all that jazz. The downside is that YouTube expands more rapidly than our own universe, and it's extremely difficult to bring in much of an audience. Worse still, is that in the last few years, Youtube has become a haven for SJWs and Neck-bearded, fedora-tipping "skeptics"; it's a political cesspool. But YouTube sides with SJWs, and as I've seen videos demonstrating, Youtube will demonetize your videos and make them harder to find even if you associate with someone who is known to disagree with their politics. Not sure if that applies to subscribers, but I doubt it.
Back around 2010 - 2013, both Soundcloud and YouTube were absolutely amazing for sharing music. Both have fallen from grace, and nothing has really risen to the challenge of filling the void.

That's strange. How or why would the Soundcloud mobile version have a drop of quality that far down? Just something wrong in the coding that distresses the audio or something?

One major issue with Soundcloud is their mobile app. If you listened to your own music on the mobile app, the quality is horrible compared to the Soundcloud on your desktop or laptop. It fools you into believing that there is something wrong with the mastering. You will hear clicks and pops. Makes sharing your music over the aux at a party or friend's place humiliating. Especially if said friends are familiar with audio mastering. Youtube's mobile app does not suffer the same issue.

Is this an either or? Or we have to mix them together?

Very cool! I think I'll stick to Maple Treeway though if I get time for a quick remix.

I prefer Youtube because of the better audio streaming quality (audio streaming bitrate of 128 kbit/s at Soundcloud vs 192 kbit/s at Youtube can make a noticeable difference in sound quality) and the possibility of underlining the audio material with some fitting video material (own gameplay scenes of video games for video game remixes, for example).

I do both. When I started out, a few years ago, I just started uploading to both of them because Soundcloud was in a bit of flux at the time when it comes to who they are, who they target and how they earn revenue and so on. Youtube is more stable in that regard, but the ocean of YT vids is massive and it's harder to get noticed. Interestingly enough, on both platforms the amount of subscribers and views are pretty similar, so I haven't seen one grow significantly more or less than the other.
I do prefer that I can edit my tracks on Soundcloud (e.g. replace the audio file), on Youtube I can't. I solved the visual part on YT by creating a template that I re-use, so it's just a matter of changing background artwork and colors mostly.

Either or, or if you can somehow find a way to MnP a mash-up that works too.  I think that Kat managed to pull that off on http://compo.thasauce.net/rounds/view/MnP82
"Eve's Mansion"...Kat did an amazing job of jelling the two together - not sure if that it was the classic take on MnP, but it worked for me lol. 

I can't absorb myself in long gaming sessions anymore because I start to feel guilty and anxious about not doing other things. Even if I've sat at my desk and worked for 12 hours I find it really hard to relax in the evenings. Part of me thinks it's because I don't actually want to play games as much in my free time, but i'm so used to seeing it as the only option that I feel obligated to do it out of habit. Heck, if i'm honest they feel like work now in a lot of ways. I've been wanting to get back into Terraria for months but every time I open it I feel overwhelmed about the amount of work it would take to build something cool. Same with Skyrim. Additionally, with the speed games are released these days I feel more pressure to play often so I can actually feel that sensation of knowing a game inside out like I did when I was younger, because to me that was the difference between just playing a game and loving a game. It was so much easier when I would get a game maybe once every 6 months and completely master it because of the multiple playthroughs I would have to do. Nowadays it feels more like a race to just finish the games that are being spat out every week.
To remedy things I've started only buying games that I believe will offer me a valuable experience and preferably has a start and an end. I'm putting a serious dampener on games like Fallout that could potentially go on forever, and I've pretty much quit Guild Wars 2, Warframe and anything that has a grind factor like that (though I will get Monster Hunter World because I love the series. To scratch the online competitive itch I play Atlas Reactor, because it's a quick 15-20min game I can play in work breaks on my laptop with little commitment. Forcing myself to reduce the gaming scope has opened up some time for things like reading, which is nice.

Heh, a year later I finally see there was some music theory going down in here and even got a call-out. What shame must I feel to have missed that!
Here's a small Christmas gift from me to y'all (particularly @The Nikanoru @HankTheSpankTankJankerson) - an analysis from me, over eight years after the last one I did! Boy, sorry for that break! ... er, it's probably a one time thing, but y'know? Anyone else who has some really cool analyses of VG music should feel free to use this thread as their playground; it's what I intended this place to be, after all.  
Time to roll up some sleeves and dust off my analysis skills a bit. Using this link for reference, here's an analysis of the tonal structure of Star Fox 64's Meteo!
Seeing that it's in 'E' (double checked against a pitch generator, to be doubly sure :P), that bass pattern that plays in the beginning betrays something interesting - there's a constant flat 2nd scale degree. More likely than not this is added for color, but contrapuntally it's always moving in an upward direction (when normally tonal music will tend to move toward where the accidental is going - lower'd notes move down and raised notes move up). It's not impossible to have this sort of thing in chromatic tonal music, but it's an unusual use of a b2 scale degree (even with a bII6-V#-i motion the b2 scale degree tends to move down to the #7). I'm not saying this is DEFINITELY a modal track because of it (there are very few truly modal arrangements out there), but if it were a roman numeral analysis would make no sense; modal music deals purely in counterpoint, since as a writing style it predates chordal structure as a standalone device.
With that in mind, however, I will note that there is no important chord motion until 0:20 (virtually every scale degree outside of 1-3-5 are obvious passing motions, not significant chord changes), so to be fair to modalists out there this does start out pretty modal in structure, even if it's not idiosyncratic with the general modal style of pre-Baroque music. Even that change at 0:20 (which sounds a bit like a V43 chord to me - 2nd scale degree in the bass) it's a pretty weak chord - if one is arguing this is a modal piece of music it'd be easy to interpret this as a bunch of neighbor tones lining up together to make something that only looks like a V43 chord. Had it remained with a lowered 2nd scale degree I'd start to be convinced that this is indeed a modal piece, but the 2nd scale degree was indeed set to normal for a regular ol' track in E minor. Really cool modal elements in this so far, but a modal piece this is not. Arguably, though, this may still not be a tonal piece in the traditional sense, either - more on that in a bit.
That little dropping line starting at 0:24, while not otherwise special (it's just a decorative little descending line), does illustrate the more common usage of a lower'd 2nd scale degree: it drops down to the tonic (or in some cases, dropped down to a raised 7th scale degree). Minor theory detour incoming: this is the entire premise of augmented 6th chords in relation to the dominant - having a raised 4th scale degree AND lower'd 6th scale degree (which, when the lower'd 6th scale degree is in the bass creates an "augmented 6th" between those two notes) creates a HELL of a lot of pressure for those notes to resolve into the 5th scale degree (normally leading to a pretty strong cadence). That's neither here nor there at the moment (the track isn't using an augmented 6th chord in here), but I figured hey, a little interesting non-VGM music theory on the side can change things up a bit. Not much else going on aside from that until 0:34.
At this point I will say this is the first really significant chord change (to #III, or G# Major), and does it EVER hit you hard. With no significant harmony change prior, and with that degree of double mixutre (the combination of both primary mixture [borrowing from the parallel major] and secondary mixture [raising/lowering the resulting 3rd scale degree]), such a chord change nearly sounds like a modulation in it's own right (with the small jumps to #IV between). I can see where Hank's going with this: if seen as a modulation, then these would be acting as IV-V to the eventual tonic that is D# Minor at (since we're dealing with E minor initially, the enharmonic equivalent of Eb makes a little more sense strictly in theory - #7 makes more functional sense than b1)
While it's a pretty cool detour in it's own right, the Schenkerian in me is resisting the urge to call this a full modulation since the target chord not acting as an important chord change in a larger tonal TONIC-(PREDOMINANT)-DOMINANT-TONIC structure that defines tonal music as a whole. If the temporary focus on a different tonic doesn't create a structural section in a piece it acts as a tonicization rather than a modulation. Many use these terms interchangeably, but they're not the same (something I found out painfully upon repeatedly having it beaten into me at UNM...). In fact, due to the nature of VG music it's quite rare to experience a true modulation - most VG music doesn't extend to longer structure pieces to justify the use of that tool (with perhaps FF6's Dancing Mad being a possible exception - I'd have to check that for myself to be sure).
In an interesting twist, we don't get any more chords at 0:43 for a while, as the bass, melody and textures all double one another at this point, though it can be implied that the chord is D# minor due to both the tonicizing chords prior and the fact that the F# (the 3rd scale degree in D# Minor) steps down to D#. Without the notes in front of me it's tough to say definitively, but from there the notes seem to be making motions to reset the piece back to the tonic again (the bass gives hint to this: when it stops following the noodling of the melody it lands first on G [3 of E minor], followed by D [7 of E minor]). It's clumsy in my humble opinion, but it gets the listener back to E minor once again, ready to loop the song.
With all of that in mind, I would argue that this song isn't tonal in the traditional sense at all - it never functionally moves to a predominant or anything that even resembles a dominant. I'd love to say that it was diatonic, but that's not true, either; there's so much mixture, tonicization and chromaticism that it's hard to ever really define WHY we consider this in E minor. It's not modal, but it's certainly contrapuntal (that is, it follows basic rules about voice leading), and it's certainly uses traditional triadic and tetradic chords (in other words, it uses the basic major/minor triads and the rudimentary 7th chords that follow). Yes, folks, I'm going to make the argument that this is an non-tonal piece.
*GASP*
Settle down, folks - we're not talking twelve-tone atonality, here. This is more an example of where the late-Romantic/Impressionist period handled tonality - with utter disregard! When a song dances around a central note/chord with otherwise nonsense harmonies as far as harmonic structure/circle-of-fifths is concerned, you'd normally classify it as a centrist piece of music. It's not "tonal", so following harmonic patterns is nonsense, but it's not purposely avoiding a tone center, either (like Schoenberg or Webern did in their time). It's something in between - a note (or notes, in the case of bitonality) is obviously the reference everything else is taken from, but it doesn't utilize harmonic form to structure the piece.
Pretty cool stuff, here.

Here's my bonus entry, by the way. (I did this very quickly last night, so some of the EQing and note lengths are a little off, but whatever

You're right - it's to do with the attack speed. I really need to investigate how to improve quickly articulated strings - not the first time I've had this problem! Thanks for having a listen

Congrats all. Thanks for the bonus mix, satoka. I think a few of the faster note runs are getting lost (due to the sample articulations having a slow attack?) but other than that it sounds pretty nice and epic. 

Thank you guys for necroing the thread, but if you really wanna do something cool, let's necro that there album   I know I know, I'm supposed to be the cheerleader and keep all the roster of dudes engaged and all that. But.... I  dunno if I got the Shia Labeuf in me right now. If you guys wanna send WIPs or even better, WAVs, and people make claims, we can keep this going either until it's done, or we're done, such as with a fork in us. 

Results
The Hobokrap got 1st with 15 points.  RonaldPoe & Silverpool tied for 2nd with 12 points.   I don't want next round's pick:  Ronaldpoe and Silverpool, PM me your source-picks for Round 91.  It's gonna be a double-source round  
Comments
Sleeping schedule has been stupid.  But better now than 3 days later lol.  I shoulda rolled as a BONUS.  Kinda self defeating that I throw my hat in my own ring and wind up winning. Not really my intent to steal the show... Also, Ronald, if you had voted, you'd have been tied with me.  So you should really vote no matter what- you can never predict how people are gonna vote!  
 

I voted too!

I was expecting a simple cover, but you offered something quite unique and interesting. I was summarily impressed with the variation of the melody(s), particularly around the one minute range where it turned from Lavender town in Golden Sun into its own song. Maybe I'm just a sucker for the the old feel of Golden Sun, but the relatively archaic sound font doesn't really feel that obsolete here. The quiet sadness of Lavender Town mixes quite well with the awe and mystery of the Sanctum. The name "Souless Sanctum" kept popping up in my head.
At 1:39, when the string section comes in, it is a little deafening to the other parts, though. Maybe soften it there a bit, or make the other parts more pronounced. Wish I had more technical feedback, but I can at least say I enjoyed it. And am fairly sad that you don't intend to submit it to OCR. A really kewl concept you have here.

Voted!

Latest version up! Thanks for feedback:)

I'm using LMMS. It's free, and I don't know if others do this, but it allows me to directly use SoundFonts, and I don't have to worry about bank switching. Some soundfonts are put together differently than others, and my noob self can't figure out how to use them correctly with proper notation software. LMMS is a step sequencer, and I'm still getting used to using that, instead of something like Sibeleus or Musescore. It's a learning experience that I have honestly enjoyed:)