DarkeSword   Administrators 🎮

Nintendo's finally announced details and has shown off a lot of information and footage related to the new Zelda game, Breath of the Wild. I'm very excited about the open-exploration approach to the series. Looks gorgeous, sounds amazing, and looks incredibly fun.

yeah I have all the music, I just need to prep the release.

I played D&D on-and-off for many years with a specific core group of friends. One of my oldest friends, Sarah, has run campaigns in her own personal setting since we were in high school, and I, along with other friends, have played many characters that helped shape the setting; one of my characters has essentially entered into legendary-recurring-NPC territory at this point. It's been a massive source of creativity in my life wholly apart from my composing/arranging hobby. I've spent a lot of time writing stories and engaging in both D&D and freeform RP to flesh out characters. Sarah's DMing style leans more on the storytelling side of D&D over the mechanical, board game combat side, so it's always been a great way to engage in great storytelling. It's not even the typical funny stories you hear from folks playing D&D either about how they managed to kill their whole party or about how they just screw with people; it's more like, there's so much character development and real drama that it's become one of my favorite fantasy settings, on par with Dragonlance or LotR. Haven't played in a few years because we're all adulting now, but I miss the crap out of it. Might bother Sarah to get a game going soon.

It also fun when you're playing as Mercy and you pair up with someone who knows what they're doing. Hit that damage boost and rake in the kills.

Supports, honestly. Lucio and Mercy will make you a teammate magnet. Zarya's ability to share a force-field also works. Spam a lot of "group up."

This is unnecessary.

Symmetra really is more of a support/defense hybrid than pure support IMO. The shields and teleporter definitely fit "support" but setting up a defense matrix with all of her turrets can really be effective defense. It also helps to move turrets around so that the other team is constantly caught off-guard.

Nabeel's been showing me how powerful everything is over the last couple of months. I'm looking forward to this. I have an album that I'm working on and I want some SNES textures in there. I'll have to update Kontakt though, I'm still on 4. xD

I played a lot during the beta and am trying to play a little every night now that the game is out. Have been a Symmetra player for a while now, really fantastic things you can do with her; multiple turrets covering one spot is key. Had a fantastic run as Pharah too last night keeping the payload 2 feet away from the final point. I think the other team got frustrated because they were steamrolling until then.

I'm working on Pokken Tournament.

I feel like the arranging and part-writing certainly makes up for the production issues. Oboe feels a little exposed, but that's a nitpick for me. I think this is lovely. Very mysterious. I'm on board. YES

One thing I notice people getting overthinking in the compos is figuring out the keys of the tracks they have to arrange together. In my opinion (as the guy that conceived the source-versus-source style compo), figuring out the actual key is far less important than figuring out the mode, regardless of what the tonic is. It doesn't matter if one of the sources is in Bb Minor and the other is in F Minor. The Bb and the F don't matter. What matters is that the two tracks are in the Aeolian mode (aka natural minor). When the mode is common, it's incredibly easy to make the sources work together with each other, you just transpose the material from the sources (melody, chord progression, etc.) into a common key, like C minor or something. It gets tougher when you have something like Ionian (aka major scale, e.g. C major) and Aeolian (e.g. D minor) sources being combined. Now you have to think about how you want to push them together. Do you flat the third, sixth, and sevenths of the Ionian source's melody so that it's Aeolian now (i.e. play a C major song in C minor) and then transpose to a common key? Do you keep the Ionian source Ionian (e.g. C major) and shift the tonic of the Aeolian source down to the relative minor (i.e. A minor)? These are options and techniques you can use to push two different sources together and keep them from clashing. Remember, you can write an arrangement in any key you want. A song can be played with any note as the tonic. Think about the classic Star Wars melody: G, D, C B A G, D Except you shouldn't think of it that way. You should think of it as: 1, 5, 4 3 2 8, 5 Where 1 is any of the twelve notes. C, G, F E D C, G Bb, F, Eb D C, Bb, F You see what I'm getting at? Worry less about the tonic and more about the intervals and relationships between the notes and where they fall in the scale. When you start thinking about melodies and chords that way, one of the barriers to doing multi-source arrangements disappears.

If you want to write a remix for OCR, I suggest not using a MIDI, because here's the thing: that's not your work. The transcription and sequencing was done by someone else. Plus by using the MIDI, you're essentially circumventing the entire sequencing process. There's a lot more to sequencing than the notes; there's velocity, timing, and everything that goes into creating expressive lines. If you want to be a composer/arranger, you have to train your ear. You have to get better at figuring things out by listening to them. The way to do this is to practice. Ear training is incredibly important. How are you supposed to write anything original if you can't translate what you hear in your head to your DAW? If you use an existing MIDI, are we gonna know? Maybe, maybe not. We've figured it out before. I've always been a proponent of ear training and doing things by ear. MIDIs are a helpful tool when you're starting out but they quickly become shortcuts, crutches, and ultimately hinderances to your artistic growth.

Line-wrapping? Screenshot?

Exactly this. Everything you hear throughout your life builds your musical vocabulary. If you're trying to write a sad sounding piece of music, what do you do? You think of other music you've heard that makes you sad and try to do what that music did. Sometimes it will sound very close.

Nice embellishments on what's a pretty simple/sparse source. Feels like a Sonic version of what we did with Super Cartography Bros. No problems here. I'm bumpin'. YES

We don't have an agreement with Square Enix in regards to this album.

They added romhack support to Workshop. This is insane.

3 and 8 are already happening.

I'm not up to date on it but I like it. I like the return to funnier characters. The western version of DBZ took itself way too seriously. DBS is comfort food. Not particularly great but evokes enough nostalgia for me. Don't like that they're cutting corners on the animation though. Maybe Blurays will see improvements.

Yes.

I wouldn't mind it (I've done multiple tracks, as has Sixto) but I want to see what kind of talent we can grab. Obviously the Eight Arms gives more people opportunities. Although...I just had a thought. Battle on the Big Bridge is often covered as rock, but I wonder if we can tap @Damashii!! and some other folks and do a rock-rap hybrid. Might be a little bit more unique; a Hip Hop vs. Metal battle.

Alright folks, time to get started on FIRE. Here are the classes and characters we're looking at: Faris The reckless and courageous pirate captain. Source: Pirates Ahoy! Gilgamesh The eight-armed sword hunter. Source: Battle on the Big Bridge Proposal: an eight-member rock super-group called "The Eight Arms of Gilgamesh" collaborating to create a denser, more varied take on the source. Beastmaster "Trainers whose open hearts and strong wills allow them to capture and control enemy monsters." Musical style: aggressive. Geomancer "Harnessing the power of their surroundings, they easily avoid pits and floors with damaging effects." Musical style: heavy and rhythmic. Ninja "Stealthy fighters who excel at surprising enemies and can wield two weapons at once." Musical style: fast and mysterious. Bard "Musicians whose dulcet tones soothe savage beasts...or kill them." Musical style: melodic and lyrical. This track has been assigned to RiverSound. Ranger "Nature-loving archers who can call on local wildlife for aid." Musical style: adventurous. As always, for each track, I need a proven artist who can write a remix that embodies the character or job. We can talk about what kind of music would fit each character class. I've included some notes as to what I have in mind for styles. I really want to do the "The Eight Arms of Gilgamesh" super-group for the Battle on the Big Bridge theme too.

Well, here it is, at long last. Kind of unbelievable that this is finally coming out. So why’d this thing take so long? What happened? Well, a lot happened, actually. I bought a house and moved out of my parents’ place. I started taking on more stuff at work. OCR got involved with the fighting game community and I started directing albums for tournaments. I started running my own remixing tournaments on OCR for series like Mega Man, and, speaking of Mega Man, I even worked with Capcom to direct OCR’s first commercial album. But with all this stuff going on, I also hit roadblocks creatively as a musician. I was still putting out tracks for the FGC albums, but I wanted my Mystic Knight track on this album to be something really great and bigger than what I’d done before. So I put things off until I could find time, and when I found time I couldn’t make it work creatively, and then I’d get busy again. Finally, it just got to be too much, and I said “I need to be able to tell people at MAGFest that it’s done.” So I sat down and, for a few nights in the week leading up to MAGFest, I pushed through all the creative roadblocks and finally got the track out. But of course, this album series is way more than my dumb track that took way too long to write. It’s filled with awesome music from a really talented bunch of guys. I’m grateful that they’ve been so patient with me, and I’m happy that you’re all going to finally hear their awesome arrangements. Now that WATER is finally out, we’re going to move on to putting together Volume III: FIRE. I’ve got big plans, and while it would be irresponsible of me to promise a release date, I will say that after everything I’ve learned about running all these albums over the years, things are going to move along at a better pace. Keep an eye out, and in the meantime, enjoy The Fabled Warriors: Volume II: WATER. Download it: http://ff5.ocremix.org Torrent: http://bt.ocremix.org/torrents/Final_Fantasy_V_-_The_Fabled_Warriors_~II.WATER~.torrent Listen on Soundcloud: Trailer:

A fire is lit within me, and I have decided to extend this series beyond five albums. Here are the names of the additional entries to the series: Volume VI: You said it was going to be five Volume VII: This isn't even Final Fantasy, these are Guardian Legend ReMixes Volume VIII: Okay this one is just a picture of a potato salad? Volume IX: Wind Again, but with new artwork, and an audio forward from Darkesword Volume XI: Wait what happened to X? Volume XII: Volume X Volume XIII: More Final Fantasy V ReMixes because we actually do like that game Volume XIII-2 Lightning Returns: Volume XIII Now accepting sign ups for Lightning Returns: Volume XIII.