Jorito

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Time for a roundup! We passed our second-to-last deadline with great results, and as you may have seen in the opening post, we've seen a lot of updates, new WIPs and finished tracks! A quick overview: Tabby made great progress with the artwork, with a far advanced version of the front cover artwork that is nearing completion. \o/ New challengers! We've got a claim from Charles Ritz for "Did You See the Ocean" and a (temp) claim from @Rozovian for "In the Dead of Night". Initial WIPs from @Heavy Viper ("Spirit of the Night"), @Blake Inc. ("The Dark Star"), @Kylok ("Fear of the Heavens") and @Rozovian, and even though they are initial WIPs, some of them are actually pretty close to being finished already. Great stuff! Good progress was made by @Sagnewshreds ("Danger"), @Sbeast ("Prophecy"), @JonnyAtma ("Leave Time for Love"), @Jorito ("Fond Memories") and @PabloComa ("Calm Before the Storm"), they just need a bit more work to be finished. The tracks from @DS394 ("Steel and Snare"), @RebeccaETripp ("Still of the Night"), @Hylian Lemon ("A Curious Tale"), @Kylok ("A Wish") are (as good as) finished and they sound amazing. I bet you'll love them So all in all a LOT of great progress! Unfortunately not everybody was able to check in for this deadline, but most people were good in communicating about it, which is much appreciated. There is one more deadline left, and this is the big one, the really really really final deadline, followed by the release of the album. Final deadline is September 3rd, 2017. Even though we only have 1 more deadline left, we'd like to encourage you not to wait until the very last moment. If you have something ready sooner, and/or if you'd like to get some feedback on your work, please don't hesitate to share with us. We're here to help. And don't worry about forgetting the deadline, we will be in touch with you about it Best of luck with this final lap, go kick ass and give Secret of Mana the tribute it deserves!

Audacity is only for audio editing and recording; it's not a DAW. If you want to get a feeling for a DAW, either try Reaper or free trial versions of the various big DAWs (iirc at least Cubase, Studio One and Bitwig have demo versions available, there might be more).

Also submitted something. Turned out better than I thought, even if the project was so heavy it brought my computer to its knees. And I guess you can hear I played too much Persona 5 these past weeks

It's that time again where I get to remind you of an upcoming deadline! The next deadline is July 2nd, so about 2 weeks from now. We already had a few people check in with us to update us on when they expect to have a new version, but for anyone who didn't do so we'll be expecting something Also I figured this would be a good idea to update you guys on some other things. First of all is artwork. We had a few changes here, but the good news is that we found a new artist! Please welcome Tabby aboard as our primary artist. She worked on the &Knuckles album earlier and we already saw some cool sketches for the Mana album artwork-in-progress. Can't wait! Also we have another new finished track; DS394 just handed in his finished remix of "Steel and Snare", and with its title "Steel and Wubz" it definitely delivers on the very interesting EDM promise. I think you'll love this track See y'all around deadline time in 2 weeks!

Even if the sounds in your keyboard are not up to par, you can simply use VSTs for just the sounds. Having good keyboard skills will be a big help towards a good sound, because you can record your midi performance live without having to rely too much on quantization or putting in the notes in the piano roll with a mouse. That way you can still retain some of that live, human feel without being limited by the onboard sounds.

It's tough to give exact numbers, but my feeling is that it's leaning more towards sampled than real instruments. The amount of tracks with purely real instruments is probably not that high, but there's a lot of tracks that have a mix of sampled instruments with real instruments (e.g. a rock track with real guitars and bass but sampled drums, an orchestral track with a live violin, an electronic track with vocals, you name it). Always a good way to make a track sound more lively and more human. I second what Meteo is saying, just use what you have, play around with it, have fun with it and see what comes out. If it sounds good, it is good

Hm, this might be interesting, might snatch a claim if it starts rolling again

Also don't forget to check out freesound.org for the occasioanal sample and/or inspiration.

Critical listening and transcription are very useful tools to learn how stuff works. There's a lot to be learned from music you already love. Pick one of your favo tracks, listen critically to it. What is the core genre? How is it structured? What different instruments do you hear? How does it flow from part to part? How are the instruments placed in the mix? Also try transcribing (by ear) the song (or parts of it) yourself to get an intimate understanding of how things are done. This is a biggie and takes time, but it's worth it. If you haven't done it before, start with just the chords or the bass of a slow song. These are just some options, you can go as deep as you want with it, and for me personally it works a lot better than analysing sheet music, learning notation or music theory, simply because I'm pretty much a hands-on kinda person.

Tapping into what Gario said, contrast and also song structure. If you're able to transition from an intro to a verse, you are probably already subconsciously doing a transition. Doing the same from verse to chorus isn't much different. You need the piece of music to drive you along to the story you want it to tell, and contrast and structure are great ways of helping you tell the story. The reason I bring up song structure is that it can be helpful to create these transitions. If you have a verse, chances are you want to have a kind of chorus or a prechorus or a bridge after that. Knowing what you want to do next can help you think of what kind of transitions you would do. A chorus typically has a bigger sound, so you probably are going to add some extra instruments (which you may already start to bring in at the last part of your verse). A bridge is usually quite different from the rest of your song, so you might go half time, drop a lot of instruments and use a pad and swap the lead instrument around. A pre chorus is usually pretty short, so you know you have 2-4 bars to do something and make it count. That's not to say you need to cook up a song structure up front, but it might help. My tracks typically grow organically and I would find it hard to label something as a verse of chorus, but subconsciously I do apply the concepts highlighted above. A variation of that theme is a trick I stole from zircon... whenever you have finished a section of a song, think about whether you feel it needs to become more intense or less intense. This also depends on the story you try to tell; for a calm song I'd probably add a more intense section after a few calmer parts, for contrast, and vice versa. Of course 'more intense' and 'less intense' also imply things you can do to make them more or less intense. More intense might be making your bassline go from eights to sixteens while you have the drummer hit the ride cymbal and maybe play around with some sus2/sus4 chord variations in a different rhythm, less intense might be long sustained notes and a slower melodic line with more space between the notes. Lastly I would say that the genre you pick also can be a great help. How to other tracks in that genre that you like transition, and is that something worth stealing/copying? A stutter works well for EDM, for rock you might have a reverse crash and for jazz you might end up with a drum break. Hope it helps somewhat, despite not having any theory pointers for you. I just do stuff, I leave the theory to others so they can explain to me what I did

So we just passed our second-to-last deadline, and I am very happy with the progress that we saw for this deadline. Not only do we have a handful of tracks that are nearly finished, we also saw a good amount of new WIPS and a few folks reaching out to get a bit more time for their updates. So thanks all, let's keep it up! Unfortunately we didn't hear from everyone, and that also means a track that previously was claimed has become available again. Anyone interested, I Closed My Eyes, the dreamy Game Over tune, is now up for grabs again! Next deadline is July 2nd. It'd be a good idea to shoot for a near final version of your track so you don't have to rush it towards the final deadline in September. Stay tuned!

I'm not a real keys player, but I've never really considered an 88 keys keyboard. I've worked with 49 and 61 keys a lot, I found 49 keys perfectly doable and 61 very comfortable. Hardly use the octave +/- buttons on it.

Track submitted! It's a pretty interesting entry I think, curious to hear what you guys think of it

Great Noted, and welcome aboard!

Fear ye not, I'll get you something for sure. I already got a WIP going like 2 months ago However, I will send it to you at the last moment because I want to work on it some more before I drop it, and preferably get the main arrangement done. As for compo incentives, I am not the right person to ask. Creating the music itself is my primary incentive, any other stuff I mostly consider bonus.

I just put it on my desk between the screen and the keyboard. That way I can easily use it while recording some parts and still access the keyboard to put it in record mode or to stop recording. You need a decent amount of space though (depending on your controller).

That's a pretty intriguing concept you have there, I rather like it. My fighting game history is pretty limited, mostly bits of Tekken, and I'm currently pretty much occupied with a lot of other things, but I'm interested to see what others think of the concept and I might even be able to chip in if it kicks off and my schedule has cleared.

So we're in April already, and I'd like to remind y'all that we have a new deadline coming up. The next deadline is April 30! Also a reminder, if you don't check in with an updated WIP or neglect to tell us if you can't make the deadline, we'll unfortunately have to drop your claim. So don't let that happen and check in with us, ya hear? @Blake Inc. and @PabloComa are in the clear for this deadline, they already reached out to us with their status for this check-in. Really looking forward to seeing the first WIPs from @Sagnewshreds, @JonnyAtma, @Fishy, @dannthr, @HankTheSpankTankJankerson, @HeavyViper and @Kylok. Don't let us down and in stead amaze us with the coolness you'll bring! Also looking forward to updated WIPs from @zykO, @Rexy, @audio fidelity, @Harmony, @djpretzel, @Jorito, @Kylok. You're off to a great start, so keep it coming. And of course a shout out to @Hylian Lemon, @Chernabogue, @Sbeast, @Starphoenix, @Thirdkoopa. You guys are nearly there and it'd be awesome to see you bring your track to its completion. Lastly @Yami and @RebeccaETripp expressed interest in claiming a track. If you're still interested, don't forget to stake your claim There's 3 weeks left to that next deadline, so plenty of time to bring the goodness!

Sad to see the project take a break, because some cool stuff was happening there, but I understand. Once my schedule clears up by the end of the year, I might be able to help out with some things, but for now I really need to focus on the other album projects first. Hope things clear up soon for you!

Also happy to see it finally released. It was a lot of fun writing some music for this album, hope y'all appreciate the hard work that went into it

For anyone curious about the lyrics in "Shovel Power" (such as they are), here goes:

Team Knight - Shovel Power (Shovel Knight vs. Tinker Knight) Team Robot - Lonely Cosmic Workshop - (Saturn vs. Tinker Knight) Team Robot - Tinkering on Pluto (Pluto vs. Tinker Knight)

Still of the Night and Arid Sands are still open, so if you wanna grab one of them (or even both), let me know. We'd be happy to have you on the album!

Since we had a deadline earlier this month, it's time for an update We've had some shiny new WIPs from ThirdKoopa, Rexy, Kylok and the Eino Keskitalo/Jorito duo and also a great update (two actually) from Chernabogue. Also, as you probably already saw, we gained some more interest and that resulted in claims from ThirdKoopa, Kylok, HeavyViper and HankTheSpankTankJankerson. If I didn't do so yet: welcome aboard, guys! Good progress overall, but unfortunately we didn't receive updates from all of you. For some of you that's okay, because you told us why you couldn't do an update for the deadline and what it means moving forward. Unfortunately there's also some people from whom we didn't hear anything at all... So, to prevent claims from being stalled with no tracks in sight, we'll do things slightly different moving forward. If you can't meet a deadline, tell us why and how you'll remedy it and we'll work it out. However, if you neglect to at least tell us why you're not going to make the deadline, your claim will be removed. Of course you can get it back if you send us a WIP, but if somebody else snatches the claim, you're out of luck. We're doing this to prevent tracks being stalled with claims but no progress when other people would have loved to remix them. Hope you understand, and let's show those pesky album director people how it's done for the April 30 deadline, hmkay? Peace out.