Sir_NutS

FUN. Loved the speed pick up in the last half. The piano was totally awesome every time it was on. HUAH! HAH! YES

Beautiful. The soloing is sweet and attention to detail is top notch. The structure is kinda broken up by the pauses, but they add a really nice touch to the arrangement. The harmonies are woven in really well to complement the melodies. This was super enjoyable, and fans of songs with jazzy sensibilities will enjoy this greatly. YES

I've listened to this a few times now and I can see where some judges are coming from. The atmospheric parts of this song are sometimes burying the leads, and in some cases, the leads and harmonies are competing pretty hard for space. I do think that not all of the mixing here is bad though, the drums are coming pretty clearly, and things are fairly separated in the stereo field. I believe this song could be better with another pass on the mix side, but I also believe that what we got is good enough, and enjoyable. This remix takes the original atmospheric tone and expands upon it by adding more interpretation that feels a bit jazzy at times, and I was pleasantly surprised by the directions the artist took with some of the variations. It takes its time to develop ideas but doesn't drag on. This was a very pleasant listen and I think the mixing issues didn't take away much of that enjoyment. It's arrangement/tone/ambience vs some mixing issues for me, and I think the former tips the scales in its favor. YES

I'm all up for this, it's dirty, it's intimate, and feels personal. I think it could've gone farther when it comes to the manipulation of the lead melodies, and it feels a bit on autopilot at times, but I liked this and everything seems good enough to beat the bar. Didn't feel the ending was a problem. I love scratchy EPs and this song has it front and center and delivers. YES

I am very familiar with this song, as is probably 90% of people who play videogames, and I am having a hard time connecting all of this to the original as well. Surprising how small changes make a huge difference. However, I don't actually think that's a bad thing, in fact, I quite liked it!. However for an OCRemix this feels a bit too disconnected. Also I think other judges have gone over the panning issue near the intro, which I didn't think sounds very good or fits the arrangement much. It's not easy to transform a jingle into a full-blown track like this, and I think you did a good job on that front. My big issue is with the VERY distracting panning and the crowded section around 1:17, in which the production gets a bit too dirty in my opinion. If you clean the mix up in the busy sections and bring the overly distracting panning down, I can give this one the thumbs up. For now though: NO (resubmit)

I've been wanting to do a trancey/electronica remix of this song for years, if only to compete with blind's classic "Industrial Fear". This remix didn't blow me away, but it is solid, and enjoyable, and mostly fault-free. It does enough to distinguish itself from the original for me, and overall, is a fun, albeit vanilla experience. These drums tho, they sound a lot like Fruity Loop's default library, which in context here sound fine. Maybe they aren't exactly that, but they did bring me back to that classic, mid 2000's OCR sound. Nothing wrong with that, as a lot of my favorite mixes come from that era. A lot of people enjoy conservative mixes rather than others that bring the originals in wildly different directions so I think a lot of people will also enjoy this too. Off to the front page with you! YES

This is fantastic! such energy and feeling of fun and speed, just what a sonic track needs. The vocals could've used less processing so they fit better with the rest of the track, but it's not bringing the track down for me. The swing-y feel of the vocals are a great fit for the track though. Now, about that ending. What happened there? it's like the track wasn't finished, specially with such a short fade-out time. I wouldn't have a big issue with this if it was a longer fade-out but man this is way too short. This is a very hard decision for me. I think I would be willing to give this a pass if the ending was changed. It seems the ending didn't stop the other Js for passing it but I'm not completely on that camp. I would really like if we could reach out to the artist and ask to double the fadeout time, at least. This may seem nitpicky and I may be alone on this one but I don't think this leaves me with a feeling of a finished song and I don't think it can be on the front page as it is. NO (Conditional on ending fix)

Man, I really dig this arrangement. The piano is really lovely, however I must agree with the other J's on some issues. The track sounds muffled and some instruments lack clarity. The panned violin wasn't a huge issue for me, I understand why it's being done (it follows the piano very closely and would probably clash a lot more if put in the center) but it does feel lopsided to listen to when there's no counterbalance, specially on headphones. I also had no issue with the synth instruments, a track doesn't need to be straight-up edm to have these type of synth sounds. They didn't feel out of place for me at all. To be honest, my only big gripe is with the overall clarity of the production, if it can be cleaned up and balanced a bit more, it'll be golden for me. The arrangement is great and intricate, This is super close for me, but I'd like to hear an improvement on the production side. NO (Borderline, resubmit)

To be honest future bass has a wide range of styles within itself that's really impossible to tell you "go do X for future bass". It depends on the artist and the sound you're going for. One thing I've noticed is somewhat common is the 85-90 bpm range, and the gated 1/8 chords. As for synths, if you want it to be aggressive, stack your saws, big chords, underlying bass doesn't matter much since texture will be lost. For stuff that's a bit more calm you'll have to be subtler with the synth choice for your chords. Drum structure usually follows the chord rhythm usiing the kick and snare. My recommendation would be to just listen to the type of future bass you want to make and extract the elements by yourself. That's how different styles within a genre are sometimes born.

Mike's early remixes were a huge inspiration for me to get into music and remixing. Glad to see him back.

The mix is clean, but the balance feels off, I think your compressor is acting up too much on your mix bus and messing up the dynamics, you can tell when some of your synths are obscured heavily even when outside of the "groove" window caused by the kick/snare. I think you can work on that and also, on the arrangement side, distancing a bit more from the original in structure and melodies. Synths could use more variation, but in all honestly you can make a good track with a few synth sounds if your arrangement is rock solid. Good luck.

I agree the mix gets very crowded, and that the arrangement is pretty good, though it does repeat a bit. The guitars are clashing with the synth frequencies for sure, but I'm not sure panning could help here, the guitars are already panned very widely, and the synths sometimes sit int he center, other times they rotate through the stereo field, and that doesn't help much. I think different synths that aren't as frequency rich as the saw wave-based ones here could work, or moving them up an octave. Either way, if the mix gets cleaned up a bit, I can see this passing easily. Right now it's just a bit too crowded, not too far from the bar, but not over it. NO (resubmit)

Yes I remember this. Lovely arrangement, I really enjoy this kind of stuff. The production is where I think the track could be improved the most. The strings and pads are pretty vanilla, and I think the drums could've been brought up more in the final section. I do think they accomplish their purpose for the most part, which is to complement the piano and add variety and fullness to the sections they're in, and outside of what could be perceived as volume imbalances, I think the mix is clean for the most part, and I don't hear anything too offensive frequency-wise. Reading through the other judges' comments now, I didn't feel the "full stop" effect they perceived, I think the lead-in from an extremely calm section to the next was ok. Overall I think this is very borderline and is a matter of great arrangement vs basic production, and I think in this case the value found in the composition takes it over the bar for me. The pacing was excellent as well as the integration of the different songs. Something to keep in mind for your next subs would be to use more complex textures for your backings. I'd like to see this up on the front page, though. Good luck! YES (Borderline)

Definitely join discord. The community is pretty active, and we have a workshop channel as well where we post resources and offer advice.

On another news the Judge Process thread has been updated thanks to @Nutritious. I'll try to keep it updated again.

All of these people have bars. Also Gamechops, tinywaves, etc. They all have bars, they don't publish anything and everything that they get sent. They just aren't as transparent about them, which is their prerogative.

Very high energy stuff. Kinda basic sound design at some points, but the production is clear. I liked the changeups you inserted at some points before transitions to keep things interesting. I wasn't a huge fan of the break in the middle, it was too long and barebones, The second section feels like a repeat of the first, though you did add some extra details such as the quarter-note gating , which was pretty cool. Overall I think this has a few repetition issues, and the synth design isn't stellar. I think the track lenght could've been cut down by about a minute and not much would've been lost. But what's here is good, the production is clean, and there are some fun ideas to be found here that can catch you off-guard, and the arrangement as a whole is very catchy and energetic. YES (Borderline)

When I joined the panel, the wait time for a sub to appear on the queue was about a year and a half. Yes, If you submitted your song today, the ETA for it to arrive at the queue would be around spring 2019. This year around july / august, if you submitted your song there was a good chance it would get on the queue (and possibly out of it) that very same week. So yeah, it's a bit faster now. I took this process over from Larry because the thread has been a personal grudge for me for years, since it usually went without updates for months when the queue was ridiculously long. I used to update it weekly or more often but since we had reached parity with the inbox (and I have too many responsibilities this year) I stopped updating it, since things are a bit slower now (the most recent mix on the queue is from around mid october) I'll try to update it again. This thread is a pain in the ass to update though, takes a considerable amount of time, so yeah. This has been a topic of discussion internally and is brought up a lot. To make this process visible it requires a better submission process and integration with the site. This is a major project which requires, you guessed it, a lot of time to implement, free time from the staff. I know you're perfectly aware of all of this but a lot of people, perhaps understandably don't see the amount of time that is put on the site behind the scenes to keep it running, release projects, work on evaluations, implement forum features, organize panels, etc. I personally would love to see this whole process to be updated, but it's not happening overnight with the current resources we have. I was very surprised by this as well, I thought we were rejecting far more than we were passing. But after thinking about it, it makes perfect sense. The bar has been around the same place for about a decade now, and it has become increasingly easier to make good music. I remember the FL compo mentioned by Larry, and at the time this compo was made, FL and most DAWs used to come with very poor quality samples and the tools they came with were pretty vanilla and basic (3xosc, i.e.). Compare that to the current FL studio which comes with many more powerful tools out of the box, plus a more comprehensive sample library of better quality. Same with other DAWs like Reason, Ableton etc. You can get Reaper nowadays for free/cheap, grab a bunch of high quality free synths/effects/samples and get going without spending a dollar.

Ditto. Also, usually an artist has his/her own stylistic vision for a song, and that's totally ok. It's just not what OCR is looking for. It's been said several times throughout the thread but OCR is not the end-all of videogame remixes. In fact nowadays there are several ways to get your remixes out there regardless of stylistic vision or quality. Not that I want to send anybody away at all, but OCR has had a quality and stylistic definition for what is an OCRemix for years and if you want your remix to be an OCRemix it just has to abide by that. Regarding the bar, it hasn't changed in years and it's in a good place where it is, this is my opinion now and it was my opinion long before joining staff. As an example to why I believe so, I didn't know about the "big bad koopa dubstep" remix posted in the first page until today. That people reacted negatively to something they perceived was not up to OCR's quality is actually a great thing. That means that people expect quality from us, and having the "bar" where it is has created a standard that people expect when opening a link featuring an OCR song. Regarding judging speed/amount of judges, it's now a fact that more judges don't result on faster queue, on the contrary, when there has been a small team of people who have a good idea of where the bar sits, the queue moves faster. The queue has been faster than it's ever been in years now. Sadly, getting it faster is not as easy as saying it. This is voluntary work, that people do it out of love for what the site represents, but voluntary still, which means that we all have other responsibilities besides judging, and as such we can't possibly have all songs evaluated as soon as they hit our inbox. This will likely never happen on a system that has actual people reviewing the submitted work, nor here, nor anywhere else. The current pace of "1 week to 2 months" to get a mix evaluated is, in my opinion, as good as it can realistically get. Some remixes take longer because of split votes, because the judges are human and thus can't always agree on everything. This is also very unlikely to change. Scrutinizing YES votes even more than what we do now (we require 4 YES votes for a pass, only 3 for a NO) would make evaluation take even longer. Complete counter to what we want. I don't personally dismiss criticism on the process, and from what I see neither does the staff. Otherwise we wouldn't be here, reading this. On the whole PS1 era samples for a song etc, I think Gario summed up my views regarding this pretty well. Plus, we don't require anyone to go out of their way and get the most expensive libraries out there. Jorito already gave an example of his own, but I also can think of Rebecca Tripp, who I'm pretty sure doesn't have the most expensive libraries but manages to get on the front page quite consistently, with orchestral, folk and ambient remixes. Outside of the symphonic realm, you can make ocremixes with free stuff, this is a fact, as I have at least a couple remixes on the site made 100% with completely free tools. We really don't require perfect production at all. Regarding mixer's comments, like Gario I try to avoid them whenever possible because they get in the way of an unbiased evaluation. Same with the other judges' votes, I try to just scroll all the way down and read them after I've written at least my initial thoughts (but before hitting submit). Sometimes there's a good story behind the mix and I really appreciate that (this comes to mind) or the mixer's write up brings up some interesting points about how the track came to be or production techniques used, or the other judges have pointed out things that need more of my attention, etc. All good stuff, but whether the mixer spent a year manually crafting the congas out of cow leather or if his intention was to make the song sound like an authentic Adlib Soundcard track without actually using an Adlib Soundcard has no bearing on whether it meets the expectations of being an OCRemix or not. Not being an OCRemix doesn't automatically means it's bad or it's good, it's just not what OCR is looking for. On the transparency side I'd be fine with that once (if ever) the process gets more automated on the submission side. If at some point the process itself becomes something integrated properly with the website instead of being a manual process at all points (submission by email, separate upload, manual inboxing, manual creation of threads, etc.) At this point it's a bit too messy to open it up and have it make much sense, IMO. It'll honestly be a lot of clutter plus probably more work for a staff that's already pretty busy. Finally, I should really be working on the queue instead of writing a wall of text.

I was updating it at least 2-3 times a week for the past year or more. But seems like people don't notice when things are working well I have a lot of responsibilities lately so I've slowed down with judging and updating that thread, I thought that since songs are judged quickly now, it wouldn't be an issue if that thread doesn't get updated much, so my bad.

FWIW, I rarely check remixer names before judging. If I do, it's after I've written my evaluation or because it was very hard to miss in the post when I have to click the link. I don't really care about who you are, and in fact I don't think the other judges do either. Joel is my best buddy and if he has to say NO to one of my tracks, he does, as he should, and as he has. I don't really care if it's djp himself sending a track in. I'd actually say, when the remixer's name and past is considered, the panel is harder on established remixers because we expect them to be at a certain level.

Woah, this is clean. Atmospheric yet very melodic stuff. It's minimalistic in its approach to instruments but not in arrangement, as the mix evolves with several layers of melodies. It all feels very natural. I specially liked that the bell resonances were left with space to breathe and expand while keeping the mix clean, and I also liked the underlying low droning tones. A lot is done with the interpretation as well, which is quite impressive considering the style this is going for, but there is indeed a lot of re-arrangement going on. This is a very zen, original arrangement that I'm sure will not be for everyone, but IMO it has all the right ingredients to make it to the front page. YES

The arrangement is pretty straightforwards, but it works. I would've liked to hear more variety in the arrangement than just the added solo break, but I think the new layers of melodies work well to make it something more than a cover. The mix is good, with the exception of the lead violin which does feel buried in the mix. This track passes for me, however I would've asked for a conditional on raising the volume on the violin. It is after all, the main focus of the track and is carrying the main melody by itself, to be honest this is one of my favorite mega man tracks of all the classic series and the original really kicks ass but the issues with the violin lead makes it sound a bit meh at some points. So this would be a YES (conditional). I would like to add that mix quality is but one aspect of the evaluation, so pointing out that other mixes have worse mixdown is pointless. We know that, and those other mixes may have other qualities that make up for it. Either way, the attitude of an artist has no bearing on our votes, but it's just nicer if everyone is... nicer, y'know?

Arrangement-wise this is was a very good effort from Ms. Tripp's. It's not very easy to make a full song out of such a short melody, and it shows she really tried not make the remix feel overly loopy, as every repetition is different from the one that came before, there's a lot of layering of instruments and melodies and the theme is expanded upon mid-way through. I do think that the expansion over the original could've been more extensive to make up for the short duration of the melody. By the end it did feel like the arrangement was starting to spread itself too thin, but thankfully it ended before it truly became an issue for me. Regarding the production, it seemed ok, with the woodwinds sounding a bit unrealistic at some spots, and overall, I don't think this is Tripp's strongest offering yet, but I don't see that many issues to keep it away from the frontpage. It is a close call however, as it just edges above the bar for me. YES (Borderline)

Ah, I remember listening to this one. Very smooth groove, and clean production. Stephen's clips, pondering as Shovel Knight add a lot of personality to the track (I should know that!). The sax performances were well realized and the track just flows really well, never gets boring. I think the synth lead could've been a little less stiff and had more flair and funk in the performance, but that's a minor complain from me. The arrangement is great as we've come to expect from Jorito, mixing the sources pretty seamlessly. YES