The Vodoú Queen   Members

it's been a while yeah? Hope y'like.
 

In the shadows, we stay busy. ;-)
Joining us as a Sage, we now have @Treyt, who's shown off a lot of skills, enthusiasm, and potential since his fateful forum post nearly three years ago!
We're proud to announce some staff promotions with the twin magic of Sages @pixelseph & @paradiddlesjosh stepping up to become two of our newest judges! We had some fun internally joking that they were a package deal, yet I'm happy to say they both independantly have done well and proven themselves capable to help us out in this new capacity on the panel!
We've also honored to have another judges panel addition in @jnWake, who cut his teeth in OCR way back and has massively grown since becoming a Dwelling of Duels regular! All three of the new judges should help us NO every VGM arrangement submitted to us with more speed, politeness, and class. ;-D
Be sure to use our resources in the Workshop forums and our #workshop Discord channel and you may just get some feedback from our new staffers!

Childhood nostalgia at its finest and distilled into something simply opulent, lovely, and beautiful. Great work, you two. ♡

Just a heads up I won't be able to do this or participate for the foreseeable future. Need to back down and out for personal reasons.
I am sorry guys. I hope this does happen soon and you all have fun with it. ♥ I look forward to voting on your creative mash-ups, at least. :)

This to me is a nice ambient remix with attitude behind it.  Nice medley!  I am not big on mastering myself, but saw one or two very minor areas of improvement (one with the bass at a slightly different frequency, just me), but nonetheless a great remix!  Great work!

Oh gosh.  Nine minutes, ok wow.  I think I am going to organize my thoughts into bullet points.  It still may sound stream-of-consciousness, but bear with me.
Too ambitious:  These arrangements are humongous; this one is the longest one yet, of the ones I have heard.  Starts with a ton of voiceover work, nearly two and a half minutes of spoken vocal before anything really melodic arrives.  That may be cool for a story-type video or audio drama, but it isn't really great as a standalone arrangement for OCR. Stiff sequencing:  The piano beginning after the two minute mark is very robotic, having no humanization at all.  The organ has the same problem when it arrives.  The choir, when it is exposed such as at 4:34-4:55 the choir sounds like an oppressive wall of sound rather than an emotive element, due to having a fast attack and long release, no swells, no motion to it, just a block of fake-sounding, overly loud, choir sound. Mismatched melodic and rhythmic patterns:  There are many written patterns in this soundscape, and often they are clashing melodically as well as rhythmically.  At 2:45 as things are just getting started, there's a drum beat and brass and a synthy thing, none of which sounds good together and the patterns are confusing rhythmically and melodically.  At 5:43, the soundscape is simple and sparse, but the patterns being played by drums and bass/synths just feels awkward.  Starting at 6:18, it finally makes sense and I can hear and feel a nice 6/8 time signature.  However when the choir joins back in at 6:36, it feels less groovy and more wall-of-sound.  At 7:08, once again I cannot connect to the pattern until 7:22 when the drums return.  But at 7:22, there are backing chords that aren't helping me make sense of things, and the melody writing feels so hectic and random. Melody lines lack melodic contour, as the notes jump around randomly.  An example is 4:07, the melody is so jumpy all the way until 4:33.   This may be literal source writing, but it doesn't fit nicely with the other writing here, it sounds forced, like the melody is being shoehorned into this part of the track.  At 7:22 all the way to the end, again the lead melodic writing is too random for me to follow, it lacks proper melodic contour and ends up sounding super confusing.   This may be verbatim source writing, but with so many sources combined like this, it does not work melodically or rhythmically.  The choir starting at 8:21 is playing a pattern that is way too busy for a backing element/pad, and together with the random sounding bassline and lead writing, it is making my brain melt trying to follow along. Too many source songs combined:  It is too difficult for mere mortals to sort out all these combinations, lead from this source, bass from that source, choir from something else... and it doesn't always work together melodically or rhythmically.  And these are not simple sources, they are complex orchestral pieces each unto themselves, so combining writing from two or more of them at once is going to be an almost impossible task. Tons of spoken vocals, often interrupting the flow.  Not a dealbreaker, it just adds to the piece sounding overdone. The mixing is fairly decent considering how many elements play together at any given time, but it is nearly impossible to get a clean sounding soundscape with so many instruments in similar frequency ranges playing together so much of the time.  As it stands, the mix sounds majorly overcooked to me. I am so sorry to be giving such detailed feedback that I'm sure will be viewed as negative, but I will say again what I said on an earlier track I voted on.  I recommend starting with much shorter/simpler source songs, and build out an arrangement with a simpler instrument palette and simpler writing, with fewer patterns playing at any given time, while learning about combining sounds that work well together, and writing that compliments each other rather than conflicting or making the patterns too hectic.  You definitely have strengths in arrangement crafting, just gotta revisit some basics to make it work right.
NO  
 

Seemingly a non sequitur intro; not recognizing anything for a while until the melody at :59, but there's lots of runway here, and the string-like lead sounds OK, like it's blended with chiptune. Abrupt change in the SFX at 1:10; doesn't sound good when it's jumpy like that. Lone synth at 1:23 sounds awesome as hell, like VRC7 chiptune stuff, then it's joined by another line at 1:37. The sample voices are cheesy to me; not offensive, but not fully cohesive. The piano line's VERY stiff though. In contrast, the VRC7-like line had a vibrato-like effect on it that humanized it (rather than sounding like inhuman sustains for each individual note). That said, I really like the tone there of that chippy lead, and there's lots of room for expansion and variations.
Wait, hold up. :'-( After the (abrupt) change in instrumentation at 2:42, things fell apart, IMO. Brass sample was very exposed as unrealistic coupled with a spooky-line that doesn't really mix with the gravity of the sampled voice work, then adding in some lonely-sounding kicks, then a change to a very mechanical-sounding organ line at 3:03 and some bizarre FM-synth writing around 3:08 that was kind of atonal. Sleigh bells added at 3:20, huh? Then very robotic-sounding organ and drums that both needed to sound denser at 3:28 and this texture is scattershot. Then a bubbly, brighter FM line's brought in at 3:39, then some castanets at 3:51 with machine gun triggering on them (no velocity variations) that exposes the sample, and just none of the sound design has synergy, no flow, no direction. Not sure what part that it coming in at 4:06, but the timing on that's also very quantized and devoid of any fluidity.
At 5:01, I'm digging the more understated instrumentation, but once it gets louder and more involved. I also liked the electronic string sound from 5:15-5:24.
Back to overly quantized writing at 5:43. Some sort of blippy percussion stuff added at 6:18 that doesn't have synergy with the string stabs, which aren't particularly melodious. Choir at 6:35 adds a lot of mud, not a lot of direction. Whatever buzzing line was introduced at 7:12 just cluttered up the soundscape; if it's meant to sound distorted, OK, but it comes off as messing up the texture rather than adding any stylistic flavor to it. The organ like at 8:05 seems like it's doubled by some sort of weird robovox-type lines, I'm not sure.
Not sure what can be done here. Past a point, I didn't hone in on how well the voice clips fit because there's so much that's not working that it didn't need to be focused on. I can see why prophetik said they're overkill. Same for the source usage; I ultimately didn't need to track it or even grok it because it was a moot point due to these other issues. Even if this wasn't so stiffly timed, the instrumentation doesn't click or mesh together either. It really doesn't matter what the genre is, it can't be in state of musical rigor where everything sounds quantized, otherwise it's a non-starter.
The only difficulty in offering this feedback is the possibility that it's taken on a personal level as opposed to assessing this piece of music. It's always offered in the attempt to lift you up to a higher skill level instead of tear you down. You often have good ideas, and have had plenty of arrangements you've helmed approved. I stand by the strong praise for your Lufia II album track, which was awesome.
It'll sound like I think you shouldn't or can't make good music; it's a matter of understanding where your weaknesses are and instead actively playing to your strengths. To me, it feels like some of your work very much needs needs a governor in the form of a co-arranger/co-pilot focused on musicality, production, and cohesion. And, as I've said before to HoboKa, I don't believe your current pitch perception is where it needs to be to effectively executive very interpretive arrangement concepts; to stay effective, color more in the lines with melodically conservative approaches, and make your instrumentation, ornamentations, and sound design be the primary ways you personalize your arrangements. In the meantime, spend more time on your pitch perception, and study up on how to make sequenced music sound more fluid.
NO

opens with foley and voiceover elements, As Is Tradition for a VQ track. i don't know where the melodic material happening behind the voiceovers comes from. some more elements come in around 1:50 and there's some keyboard elements that are lacking in velocitization, but there's some interesting textures being used here as more and more orchestral elements come in. there's a transition around 2:40ish with some horns, and they don't sound great - really blatty and far away, i think there's some extra processing on them that's causing them to sound more distant and lacking in attack than you'd expect.
there's a hard shift at 3:03 to the organ as a lead instrument. there's a bass with some attack modulation on it, and a few other elements added in like some strings and bells as a percussive element. this instrumentation doesn't blend at all with the prior section, it lacks intensity as compared to the original and what's been brewing in this remix so far, and i honestly am having trouble mapping it to the original as more than just the chord structure if even that. the chords that enter with the vordt theme also feel transformed beyond where their relationship to the original is not apparent. most of these instruments have a lot of bass content as well and they've overlapping a lot (an issue i run into with organ often). this noodles through the chord progression, continues to feel muddy and indirect with motion, and then hits a big section of falling action at 4:56.
5:42 is the Holy Blade section. the representation here again feels like there's no clear direction for a while, with the instrumentation kind of all doing its own thing and not coming together to a cohesive thing until 6:20. i can hear the adaptation of the Holy Blade descending riff here much clearer, which is good. the original's intensity and verve isn't present, which is kind of an interesting albeit confusing correlation against the fairly intense vocal lines and speed increase at the 7 minute mark. the entire section starting around 7:20 is probably the most cohesive section you've got in the entire piece, but i'd say that also it's still rife with similar issues as before, like the big buzzy bass instrument taking up a ton of frequency range and a lead that's hard to hear what's going on, and overall it's wandering instead of feeling like it's got a driving melodic element that's leading it. there's a sudden break and then the end comes out of nowhere.
overall i don't care for most of the direction of the work at all. i feel it's way more focused on the voiceover than on the music in the first several minutes and a few significant chunks after that (like between a quarter and a third of the track feels voiceover-driven). separately i feel it wanders throughout without focus on a melodic element or even a timbral element - there's no direction, and so it's hard to keep track of what's going on. the majority of the work, it's not clear where the music is coming from - it's either so heavily transformed or reduced that i can't map it. lastly, in several sections including the organ part at 3:03 and the holy blade section, there's a lot of overlapping elements in similar frequency ranges, so it's hard to understand aurally what's going on where.
i'd be remiss to say that i just don't get a lot of the dynamics and 'story' of the work overall. there's some neat building action through the first few minutes, but the release of that energy is...the horn section around 2:40, which doesn't use it at all. then there's another big build into the organ section, and that almost immediately disperses the build into a chordal exploration that i had trouble identifying where it comes from. similarly, the end of this section falls off almost immediately into a big voiceover-focused section that actually has no music playing for several seconds in it. the shape and macro direction of the work is not clear.
these are not easy fixes. i think that making the correlations to the originals in the earlier sections will make the volume (and volume) of the voiceovers more palatable, even if i think most of them are gross-sounding (not a horror fan, sorry). i think that really taking a critical eye to the organ section at 3:03 and EQing and/or changing instrumentation and instrument ranges so as to avoid some of the overlapping freqs will make that section easier on the ears. i also think that taking a look at the sections where the references to the original are basically just chord changes (long sections, like the two minutes after the organ comes in, or most of the minute before that) with very modified moving lines above them, and finding ways to tie those clearly and directly to the original will help a lot. lastly, finding ways to more consistently handle the builds and releases of the energy you build up in some of these sections would help immensely. i kept feeling let down when builds and ensemble crescendos didn't go anywhere - it happens four or five times at least throughout the work.
it's going to sound like i didn't enjoy much of this at all. to be honest, i didn't! but it's not required for me to enjoy the piece in order to critique the technical and arrangement elements. right now the scope and vision feels too big. i think overall that this needs a lot of transformative work to reign in the wilder bits and focus it more, so as to be more effective at conveying what you're trying to convey. right now it's a wildly imaginative, visionary, probably over-extending attempt.
 
 
NO

For those curious about the status of this - we're still in production and we should hopefully be wrapping up all remixes this holiday season! More words to follow after the new year!

Here's a little arrange of Silent Hill 2 'True', also containing short leitmotifs from 'Theme of Laura Reprise', 'Promise Reprise' as well as 'Silent Hill theme' from SH1.
First time I'm using guitar prominently in a remix (please don't kill me) and attempting to mix it with proper panning, etc. Not trying to fool any of the talented guitarists here of course. Just having a go at putting the fine work of OCR resident Sages, Seph and Josh to good use with this fun learning experiment.
Hope it's enjoyable somehow, and happy Halloween season to y'all! 🎃
 
The main source arranged:
 

Alright folks, got some news for this one - yes, the album is still moving along!
Even better, it's been submitted in it's entirety!
I've listened to the finished product with some of my fellow judge peers (as well as with Bahamut, the original director for the album) and it seems like it shouldn't have any issues under review, so I can finally say that this thing is happening, and it's happening soon. There will be some teasers and such in the coming months to get y'all excited about the album, but in the meantime I'll share what I think is the *second* most fun organ bit from the album. Ain't the whole song, but I did have a lot of fun making an organ part for one of my tracks so I figured why not spread the joy a little bit?
Actually pretty excited to have this submitted, and not just because it'll be a decades-long endeavor coming to a close, but also because the album sounds great. Will it be worth the wait?
... well it was a long wait so I can't be sure, but it'll definitely be worth spending some time with, that's for sure!

Need a vibe check, haha.
Did a lot of work fixing this track, primarily eradicating dissonance and clashing / fuzziness due to too much shit going on in a single section, so I've been ripping unnecessary parts away, refitting/re-engaging others, re-writing the entire drumline and bass from scratch and with better loop samples that fit rhythmically with supporting the beat and low-end, etc. Took a lot of time and care in analyzing the previous rejection decision, absorbing what Josh, Hemo and Seph said in a previous Office Hours, and employing some needed, professional outside help and discussion on the track. Doing my best to try and write-up my own drums and beats with one-shot samples, drum machines or MIDI, rather than relying so much on loops that aren't hand-crafted.
I hope it's a ton more feasible now and capable of being Panel-worthy.
Still being mixed insofar as fine-tuning but I've reworked the entire mixing and processing FX and automation lanes. It's about 90% done. No side-chain or mid-side...uh...anything yet, but I had to rip them out and do them from scratch and didn't have time before Office Hours today. D:

VQ - Shinobi III & Rise of the Robots - We Built an Edifice WIP (NEW).mp3

Here's an uplifting Hip-Hop / Breakbeat / World arrangement of 'Japonesque' from Shinobi 3 aka Super Shinobi 2.
Just a little project I had fun with and wanted to share. Hope y'all get some enjoyment out of it. (^-^)/
 
Remix based on this source, composed by Hirofumi Murasaki:

"Recording wind chimes" is not in the same space as using machine-learning algorithms trained on consentless work.
The first post of this thread also says don't share work generated generated wholly or in-part by UDIO. Come on man.

Don't try to throw the OCR mission statement in my face and think that that somehow proves your point. Nowhere in that mission statement does it say that we need to treat all forms of music in the world equally, regardless of whether it was written by a person or generated by a machine-learning algorithm. That's not there. We are dedicated to the appreciation of and promotion of video game music as an artform. This has, for the last 25 years, meant recognizing that the composers who wrote music for video games created art. They are artists. They are human beings who made thoughtful decisions about the music they wrote. They created with intent.
Can you use machine-learning tools to create artwork with intent? Sure. I pretty clearly stated in the announcement that I don't have a problem with machine learning as a technology, but that I don't want people to post music on OCR from services that trained their models on music that was not provided with consent from the artists who created that music. The technology is not the problem; the people building these services using resources they're not supposed to are the problem. These folks have not figured out how to build these services without plundering the collective creative works on the internet. No thanks.

I may come to regret what this will do to the crumbs of my remaining spare time, but I want to join in. I see this as a great opportunity to explore Koshiro's music, which I'm not exactly familiar with and thus is a good "neutral" ground for me, and also to work on my own production and arrangement skills.

Count me in!

Since I was in GSM2 and had some success (my team ended up winning), why not join this one. I'm unfamiliar with both series but I'd like to try anyway. Only problem is that I'm going to be out of town for a weekend in July (due to my birthday).

I'm not super familiar with either series and I've got a few events happening in July, but I'm happy to fill in for either team. Let's get mashin'!

I'm in! August is definitely doable

put me in coach!!
 
EDIT: won't have availability this fall for GSM3, unfortunately. but i look forward to seeing all of your tracks!

I am also interested, but would likely be unavailable towards the last few weeks since I am visiting Japan from the 2nd week in September.

I'll be busy on and off through August but my schedule should free up after that, I'd be happy to join either way.

I'm in!

As a Koshiro stan, how could I say no? 😉