Jorito

Just submitted my entry. This one was quite a bit of a struggle to get the arrangement and flow right, and I also tried to learn some new stuff to make things even more challenging for myself. Anyway, hope you enjoy a nice bit of retro 80s synthwave cheese, looking forward to the other entries!

Sad to see you go, but I appreciate the heads-up. Hope to hear from you again before the deadline!

I got a wip already, it's just that I'm not happy with it yet. I hope/expect to have some time in the next days to work on it. Regardless you'll get a wip from me end of the month.

Excellent choice, it's a lovely tune. Dibs hereby granted, looking forward to your first WIP!

Great to hear, I've marked it down for you. Happy remixing!

Just submitted my track. Had a lot of fun playing with the 2 source tracks, they were a great combination! Also big shout out to @HeavyViper who was able to record the guitar parts for me at the drop of a hat. Thanks a lot mate!

Another quick update... "Into the Thick of It" has been claimed by @Thirdkoopa, who sent us a 5 minute long WIP in the blink of an eye. Welcome aboard!

I was more refering to Thirdkoopa, but I see now why that wasn't fully clear. But for the people reading along: you don't necessarily have to come up with a WIP if you want to claim a track (though it would be appreciated!), it's also fine to show us some of your other completed works.

If you want to make a claim and you're not a posted remixer, be sure to drop us a note with some samples of your work. You know where to find us, right?

High time for some updates! First, let's welcome our co director @HankTheSpankTankJankerson, of @LongBoxofChocolate fame to the roster of remixers. He claimed "I won't forget" and I'm already excited to hear what he can do with it. Another update is that sadly we had to release some very old claims from years ago. On a positive note, this opens up a few very great and popular tracks, yours for the taking. If you were on the fence, there's probably something interesting for you in the list of unclaimed tracks, so don't procrastinate and start claiming! Lastly this is of course an excellent opportunity to remind you all of the upcoming deadline, in a bit less than 3 weeks (March 5th). We hope to see some great progress in your WIPs and personally I'm especially interested in the first WIPs of @Rexy, @audio fidelity, @Sagnewshreds, @jnWake, @pu_freak, @JonnyAtma, @Fishy, @dannthr, @evktalo and @Kylok to see what they come up with. Good luck!

Fully agree with DS and Gario on this. Definitely the form; it helps a lot if you just pick A as your first source, B as your second source. And of course you can just use a part of that source's melody, no need to do the full line. My Megaman track "Never Gonna Give (Up The Funk)" is a good example of that; it uses a part of Cyber Maze Core for A in the verse, another part for the bridge, a part of Gravity Beetle for the chorus, and another part of Cyber Maze Core for the solo. You can even get away with playing the 2 leads at the same time frequently. For me, having a loose idea about form and some 8/16 bar blocks that have the source material in it so I can shove them around in my DAW is a great idea to crystallize that form. Those can be pretty basic blocks, with just some drums, bass and snippets of the leads of both the sources. It's a great way to mix and match the sources and try out ideas because you quickly get a feel for what flows well and what doesn't. A variation of Gario's rhythm and beat patterns is that you can frequently re-use an arp, a bassline or some short melodic figures quite easily. Especially if you have some of those basic blocks, it can be a quick way to fill our your arrangement more and to include more reference to the source. Oh, and for the folks that worry about music theory because of all the scales, intervals, tonics mentioned: I don't know a lot of music theory, but I've learned to trust my ears and feeling and my taste. If the theoretical and technical side of things is not your strongest suit, don't forget that you have team mates to bounce your ideas off and get quick feedback. Just trust yourself and let your team mates help you out in the things you're still learning. And yes, how to combine sources can definitely be one of those things. I'm more than happy to help out my team mates with this at least

What the guy above me says When I saw the team schedules, I already suspected DS would match us up. Now let's go and have some fun!

AFAIK, there's no way for that. When I needed to know who signed for the Sonic album, I just asked Liontamer for it and he helped me pretty quickly. But I only asked him once, near the deadline, and I can imagine it'll become annoying if people ask for an update every day

That 100Mhz shouldn't make much of a difference. Both are quad core, too, so essentially the choice is between i5 or i7. I7 gives you more cache (which translates to better performance) and hyperthreading (which enables you to use 8 core in stead of 4, whether or not that is helpful for music production I don't know). But I'm no expert on processors, so $0.02.

Excellent point indeed. In my experience, a Mac can last you for years, and as your wants and needs grows, you might run into limitations or at least a bit of discomfort if you didn't take this into account. Similar to Odai, back when I bought my Macbook Pro, I skimped on memory, thinking 8GB would suffice. Fast forward a few years and considering that you can't upgrade anything about the MBPs, it wasn't maybe the best choice. It still works like a charm, and if I keep the amount of memory in mind and stick with simpler instruments or bounce to audio, it's great. But if I knew I'd still be using it 5 years later, I probably would have sprung for the extra memory right away. Choices, choices...

Sure, I'll give it a shot. - Processor: typically the i7 can handle higher workloads than the i5, and depending on how you work and what kind of genre you're interested in that can be good to take into account. For music making, if you have big projects with lots of tracks (50-60 tracks is pretty common for me) or use (a lot of) resource intensive plugins (like Diva or Serum for example), you'd probably want to go for the i7. Same if you were composing orchestral music, then you'd typically have quite a lot of tracks as well as a lot of samples from the orchestral libraries, then you'd also rather have a bit more processor power. I never created a hip hop track, but I'm guessing you'd typically not have so many tracks nor will be running intensive plugins if I read your list. - Hard drive: a faster hard drive makes your computer more enjoyable to use, regardless if you use it for music or for the Internet or anything else. Also, if you were to use big sample libraries (like the orchestral example above), it means you can load the samples faster (so you don't have to wait 10 mins for a project to load) and it also means the computer can load the samples quicker and doesn't have to keep as much data in its memory. If you record and process a lot of audio simultaneously, it's probably also nicer to have a faster hard drive, but I never do that myself so I can't really help you there. - Memory: again, mostly if you were to use those big sample libraries. I used a Macbook Pro with 8GB of memory before my iMac, and at times it would slow down immensely and have problems playing back my projects because I ran out of memory. I'm not sure how efficient OSX is nowadays, but the operating system itself also needs quite a bit of memory to work smoothly and 8GB might be a bit on the low side in a year or 2. Anyway, with iMacs you can essentially only upgrade the memory easily, a hard drive upgrade is quite hard to do. And since you don't have a lot of upgrade options after you bought it, I'd typically suggest to get the best processor and hard drive that you can so you can enjoy your computer for years to come.

From personal experience, I'd say you want more than 8GB of memory nowadays. Especially when using a lot of sample libraries (e.g. Kontakt). By your description you might not be using a lot of sample libraries though. If memory serves me well, iMacs can still all be upgraded with more memory, so you could do that later. Graphics card shouldn't really matter for music production, but processor makes more of a difference. Depending on how many channels you are going to use and how CPU intensive some of these plugins are, I'd personally go for an i7 over an i5. I never used a Fusion drive, but I do run full SSD and the speed difference is massive. Once you tried it you will never want to go back. But if you haven't used SSD before it might not be too bad Lastly there's the thing about screen size, which is also something to think about. Sure, you can make music on a laptop screen just fine, but once you really start getting into it, having a bigger screen is a big plus, especially when dealing with a big mix or lots of plugins. Also depends on your setup, the available space and whatnot, but definitely take it into account. From the 2 options you listed, it's a tough choice. I think either would do just fine. Personally I think I would lean towards the 27" iMac because of the extra memory and the faster hard disk, unless money or time was tight; then I'd go for the 21" iMac now and upgrade the memory later. Hope this helps.

Also I'd like to point out that there's no such thing as February 31st, so if you are wondering why nobody submitted anything before your deadline, that's why. I'll try to get you a WIP before February 28

LOL, I was just checking the available tracks and stumbled upon Final Daos battle myself... it's one of the few tracks I know and loved, so if you could mark that one in red and put my name behind it, that'd be great

My biggest problem is that I'm not overly familiar with the sound track and open to recommendations/personal favorites to take a look at. Otherwise I'll go over the sources and see which one inspires me. Why am I here if I don't even know the game that well? Easy, great music and album projects are a great way to discover more games and more great music

I. am. tempted.

Anyone already working on Voyage - Home World? If not, I go work on a WIP but I need to mull a bit over the idea I have for this before I can start on it.

Checked out freesound.org already? I find it pretty good for those odd bits of sfx that spice up a track.

Hm, I'd probably just do an octave layer of the default Kontakt string ensemble staccato patch and call it a day. Worked pretty well for me a few times. Maybe EQ the highs a bit down and some sample reduction to make it a bit more lo-fi.

Awesome! Welcome aboard, glad to have ya