DarkeSword   Administrators 🎮

Dunno if most people here ever visit the WIP forum, but I remixed the Title Theme and Skytown. http://www.ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=12929

Try updating your drivers. http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=1&PFid=1&Level=6&Conn=5&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false&Downloads=true#RTL8185L

Sounds like an issue with your network card and/or drivers. To be sure, does the problem only occur when you're actually RUNNING torrents? What kind of network card are you using? How many torrents are you running at a time? uTorrent, generally speaking, is one of the best BT clients out there in terms of stability, so it's probably not the program itself, but how your computer handles it. I've had similar issues with bt clients before, but in order to help you, I'll need more info.

There's only room for one bhai-sahib on the panel, Mr. Prabhu. ¬_¬

Went over this already, but they don't take your used crap. You buy brand new things for them.

Agreed. Very mechanical. We are not robots! We are men of blood and bone! Seriously you need to give this some serious attention in terms of humanization. Get people to play it if you can. Like Larry said, there's no power there, no grace. It's like a player piano (sitting in a very reverby concert hall, I might add). Needs dynamics and humanization. NO

Ahhh, Bossa Nova. One of my favorite genres. Nobody'd better accuse me of bossabias though. > Love the groove, love the vibes. Percussion is also nailed to the wall. Nice. Would have preferred less snare hit though; rim-shot would have been nicer. Also, not feeling the B3 organ. It's out of place, especially since this already has a piano in it. A minor gripe. YES but not because of bossabias

Don't you just hate when that happens? I often listen to pieces like this and am on the edge of my seat waiting for those sizzling hats and rim-shots to come in and wreak havoc. It never happens and I end up with my butt having fallen asleep. Kudos on doing your stuff by ear, but you gotta take things to the next level with your arrangement. You started off alright, but all that building up never really paid off. There's a lot of atmosphere in this piece, but not much else. I can skip around the piece and not really know whether I'm in the beginning, the middle, or the end. There's not much in the way of variation here. You've got to utilize more ideas and bring more variation to the mix. NO

This feels so cookie-cutter and generic, not to mention empty. There's simply not enough going on to build an interesting texture here. There's a severe lack of harmonic support for more than half the mix. You need to move beyond the generic fills and builds of the mid-90s and sophisticate your arrangement and sound design a little more. This just isn't cutting it. NO

You're allowed to have more than one mix on the panel at a time, so long as you're following the Wait-3-Weeks rule for submissions. In any case, this is a wicked piece of music. I really love the crazy level of energy here. Nice job. I do agree that it's too liberal though, for the reasons that Andy and Larry mentioned, so I'm going to say NO. Don't get discouraged, and you feel like it, please tweak this and resub. It'd be cool to have it on OCR eventually.

Reeeeallly lacking in hi-range. Drums sound really weak, and the bass and lead aren't playing nicely with each other; that is to say, they sound mashed together. You need to think more about how they balance with each other; EQ will help with that. This piece also really feels like it's lacking something; I dunno, maybe you need some better harmonic support instead of just rhythm guitar. Maybe comping piano? This sounds more like a rock piece than metal, I don't think the piano would be out of place. Something bright. In any case, synth guitar comes in out of nowhere and really doesn't work at all in the rest of the texture. Needs work, but not a lost cause. Think about clarity and how you can tweak your production to give everything more definition. NO

Short and sweet with a surprising amount of variation, considering the length. I agree with Larry, the bombastic section at 1:39 wasn't as effective as you hoped. And yes there's a click at the end. I think there's a little too much reverb too, especially when the brass comes in near the end. All in all, I think this piece only serves as a preview. There's a lot more you can do to expand the arrangement, and I'd really like to see that happen. I don't think this is really long enough to be effective as it is. NO but please expand and resub

Not a fan of where the drums sit in the mix. The kick has too much presence. That's my only gripe. Everything else is really neat. Great lyics and great performance. I like the texture too. Electric recorder rocks my socks. YES

Sequencing is really mechanical. You really need to work on your producing skills man. I realize you're an arranger/composer first and foremost (and you're not a bad one), but I think you rely far too much on letting your sampler do your work for you when it comes to actually producing the music in waveform. If you'd handed out the sheet music to a bunch of musicians, this would have really been great, but right now it sounds like it's from a PC RPG for Windows 95. You have to do far more than just write out the parts. You're not just the arranger here, you're the performer too; you have to make this stuff sound believable. Humanization is so important, especially with music like this. As far as the arrangement itself, it's fine, though I think on the second go around it could use way more variation. It sounds a lot like BGM right now. It could use more dynamic contrast. NO

Echoing Jesse here: it's lacking in midrange and the balance is off. Instruments are blending together badly. I do like the arrangement; nice detache string work. The arrangement has a nice, deep, adventurous feeling to it. I feel like I'm exploring ancient ruins or some crap. Nice. NO resub

Sorry agreeing with Vig here. What you've got is nice, but it sounds like a collection of songs rather than one cohesive piece. I didn't mind it so much in the Flashback suite as the transitions worked alright there, but not so much here. I think the medly-itis in this piece really kills it. There are certainly ways to combine multiple source tunes into a single, cohesive work. This feels like a "Highlights from Out of This World" piece some pops orchestra would play. I think that as a single mix, it's really lacking in direction. NO

Yeah I'm with Jesse here. I don't find the interpretation particularly interpretive at all. There are some embellishments, but it's all too little too late. There's some balance issues between brass and the woodwinds at the end as well. Way too much reverb on the ending brass there. NO

Not a bad piece of music by any stretch of the imagination, but it certainly isn't very exciting. I'd have to agree with Jon's sentiments; "string bath/repeating piano pattern" aptly describes it. I'm not one to hate on simplification or minimalism, but really, this piece a simplified version of the original, and I think it suffers from that simplification. There's more of a structure in the original, more dynamic variation; your piece doesn't necessarily need so defined a structure, but the lack of dynamic variation really detracts from the end result. NO

Agree with Jill on the clipping; needs fixin'. I don't however, agree with Jill on the issues of the sour-notes in the guitar soloing. Notes like that in jazz improvisation are transitional and in this mix, worked in context. I'm not so sure I agree on the significance of the flatness of the notes either. I didn't find them all that distracting, and I think that's part of an organic performance. All in all though, excellent interpretation of the classic Lost Woods theme. Quite relaxing. YES, on the condition that the clipping is fixed. -- Well, it looks like we can't get a fixed, clipping-less version. Upon further listening, I can see how the intonation could be an issue and while it doesn't bother me as much as it might bother others, it's still there. Alas, I must say NO.

Where's the Sonic the Hedgehog stuff? NO

My beefs with the production are mostly addressed from my last vote. I still really like the arrangement. I think Zircon's right about the EQ issues; it does sound like it's put through a high-pass filter. Maybe we can fast track this? I'd like to give this a conditional YES, the condition being tweaked EQ. I don't claim to be an expert on that kind of thing (kind of sad, isn't it?), but perhaps some other judges can help this fellow out?

Gotta agree here, especially with Larry's points about little arrangement value. What's there may as well be directly sampled. It's not changed in any really meaningful way. Crowd-noises layered over the music may as well been drumloops. It's the same kind of thing. That ending is especially grating and doesn't serve to interpret the source material at all. NO

Donated Kirby's Squeak Squad for Nintendo DS to the Children's Specialized Hospital in NJ. I'm a big fan of this game, and Kirby was always one of my favorite series growing up. I'm trying to share the love with a new generation.

I suppose since I'm the guy who suggested this, I should chime in. I realize where Dave is coming from with his thoughts; yes, it's really important to donate towards research for cures. Child's Play, though, is about doing something more immediate for these sick kids. If you check out PA's letter's page (http://www.childsplaycharity.org/photosletters.php), you'll see that stuff like this is really important for helping kids who may not be terminally ill work through their illness. It's not a 'fuzzy feeling' charity my any stretch of the imagination. Like someone else mentioned, it's a quality of life issue. It's one thing to be really sick, but it's even worse when you're really sick and really bored and have nothing to distract yourself with. Yeah, it might be nicer to donate money towards research so that kids don't get sick in the first place, but how sure of a thing is that? People have been raising money 'for the cure' for decades, and while we've certainly made strides in disease treatment, I can't remember the last time we actually found a 'cure.' In any case, I think that a charity as focused as Child's Play is a great thing. Lots of people raise money for medical research, but Child's Play is more about helping those kids here and now. I think OCR being involved, even in a small way, would be a great thing.

Messing around will only get you so far. Understanding some basic theory behind synth design will help you UNDERSTAND what you're doing far more than shooting in the dark will.