Villainelle

I'm with Vigilante's opinion in the judging forum. The riffage and instrumentation is great, smooth and evocative. Unfortunately, the monotonous drum loop gets on my nerves. Just a little more variation could've brought this mix way up. Anyway, expecting even better mixes from this guy in the future. Keep at it, man.

Congratulations to the Mass Effect 2 music team for your triumphant work. The score of Mass Effect 2 plays a large part in lifting the game into an intense, cinematic experience that will linger in the minds of gamers for a long time to come. Questions for Jimmy Hinson: Could you talk about what the workflow was like with Jack Wall and his team? How much did you know about the plot and details of Mass Effect 2 while composing? What kind of direction were you given from Bioware? What was it like playing Mass Effect 2, a hugely-anticipated game with a passionate fanbase, and hearing your own compositions during gameplay? Questions for Jack Wall: How did you end up adding Jimmy Hinson to your team? Were you familiar with his video game remixes before recruiting him? What do you think of video game music remixing communities like OCReMix? Are you a gamer? What are some of your favorite games? All the best, Leah Raeder

This one's tough. The instrumentation is lovely, and at certain points, particularly when the singer drops into a lower range, the vocals work very well--for example, the latter part of Japanese bridge. I think the problem may be that for the majority of the track, the singer is singing far outside of her range, leading to a strained, monotonous quality that desperately tries to hit notes, rather than evocatively explore them. As Monobrow said, there is a lack of control of the voice at these points. It is a bit harsh on the ears. Cheers for the singer's effort and courage. Hopefully you continue to practice and gain control over your voice, as you would any instrument.

Transporting. Everyone's contributions shine through, though the cello ends up stealing the show.

Finally, someone remixed Wandering Ghosts! Phenomenal work riffing it up here. Yeah, the percussion is a bit hissy, but it's venial. Props props.

The racing arpeggios in this track capture that epic, timeless, lonely feeling of big space that Metroid evoked so superbly. This mix is transporting. Love your work, Jimmy.

I thought Rama did? http://www.ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=6723 But yeah, a higher profile one might get some more attention.

Hmmmmm. You guys need some sweet official OCR album art. Imma hook yous up.

Happy birthday, Dave. Thanks for one of the best sites on the web.

The harmony is really weird in this. I'm not sure much of it works. There's also no real sense of progression.

The production on this track is so pristine and palpable it seems to crystallize in the air around you. Charming arrangement full of subtle percussive touches that reward repeated listens. What a gracefully majestic return from McVaffe. Moar plz.

My deepest condolences to Reuben's family. Your son touched the lives of many thousands of people across the world through his music, art, and life. He lives on every time we listen to that music and remember him. May he know the same joy and peace he has given us.

I watched a few minutes of Every Story, v2... Hate to be harsh, but I stopped watching because there's minimal editing here. These are mostly just long segments from the original CG scenes. There's no sense of narrative/storytelling, no real emotion evoked. And we're not even getting into effects, transitions, anything... Narrative basics: Think about what you're trying to convey. Imagine you're telling a story, or describing an emotion or idea in detail, etc. Take the footage you have and cut it around interesting elements: a smile, a hand reaching to the sky, etc. Order those into a new story following the music. Think of it like a collage. Technical basics: http://desktopvideo.about.com/od/desktopediting/tp/editrules.htm Hope this helps. I gotta get back to working on my entry.

!!! I am totally in for this. I just won a logo contest recently and got a taste for it. And while the cause was nice, the prizes sucked! VGM merch == win. Some advice for you guys, though--you should REALLY have people submit a vector image, not a raster. Any time you resize a raster image, even if it is by a very small amount, you introduce artifacts. Sizing it down is still not safe; edges become blurry and proportions can be lost etc. GL, hope you get some good submissions!

Oh shi~, I should check this forum more often. I'll try to get something done for this if I have time. And you do have permission to post my alt album art, btw. Peace. Yeah, I'm definitely in. Did some brainstorming, quite excited. Just need to decide between Deliverance or Crossroads. Anyone know of good sources for high-quality, non-watermarked rips of the cinematics from the games? I'm guessing this is a dubious legal area, so if it's not okay to discuss on the forum that's cool. PMs would be appreciated though.

(Small size to diminish this tangent!) Radical Dreamer, you're not getting it. Read again please. Scope doesn't just mean sheer track count. Might want to re-read his/her "review" as well. Statements like "I don't know why this project feels so lackluster, so soulless," "perhaps that's my problem" (emphasis mine), "every track sound the same," "it's just not what it should have been," "there are better versions of many of these same tracks" etc. are empty, subjective comments. No discussion of what makes it "soulless" or what makes those other tracks "better." And with such close-mindedness it doesn't really encourage a dialogue with others, which is kinda, you know, the point of forums. Basically, he/she doesn't know why, but they just don't like it, and he/she felt the need to write a huge post to attempt to say so. Sometimes people see huge posts like that and mistakenly think that because they say so much, it must be well-considered. In this case it's not. But yes, all the praise the project has been getting is more than enough to drown out the inevitable whining and inarticulate scorn from the peanut gallery. Anyway, Imasock's song art is rad, I think I will do a few pieces for my favorite tracks T-T-T-T-T-T-T-TOO.

It's not a contrarian perspective. It's self-contradictory. You acknowledge that the entire album has a wide scope (one presumes of styles, moods, ideas, approaches etc.) yet then say that you don't like most of it. That doesn't make sense, unless you have very narrow taste in music and are close-minded about listening outside of your comfort zone...in which case, why offer us your opinion, knowing few works of music are pleasing to you? Considering which tracks you singled out for praise, I garner that you just don't like electronic music, period. You could have saved yourself a lot of typing by just stating that and going on to praise the ones in styles you like. Not gonna argue, bro, but what's the point of writing a long post about how you basically don't like electronica?

Yeah, did you guys all play the Aeris death scene with the sound off or what? I knew it was coming, and while it was sad, what really made me tear up was the effective combo of CG, music, and the segue right into the JENOVA battle without a break in the music. No other part of the game is as unconventional as that (excepting the Honeybee Manor hijinx); even the ending is directed/scored more traditionally. *shrug*

Holy shit. I admit it, I've been a WoT fan since grammar school, though increasingly disgruntled with it as the series has dragged on with diminishing quality. All complaints about WoT aside, he seemed like a pretty decent human being who took the time to respond individually to concerned fans on his blog up until his last days. This is very sad. His wife Harriet has been editing his books for a while (for better or worse ) and is pretty involved with it all, so she'll certainly take up the reins now. And as The Dennis mentioned RJ had already planned for the contingency of dying before it was finished by writing lots of notes. But what's especially sad to me is that there was a particular vision in his head of the end of WoT that will never quite make it to light (no pun intended) now, no matter how much he told Harriet and others or how many notes he took. In all selfishness I wish he'd been able to finish. Growing up with those books, the WoTverse has been a part of my mental landscape, and it has been starving for a sense of closure. RJ has said before that he's known how the series would end since the beginning, and it was just a matter of getting there. Well, dammit, now we won't have his own words about it.

OMG Sephfire, you make good music but WORST NAME EVAR

FIXT Made corrections to back cover per Larry's post. (BTW, alphabetized the w/'s on Mustin's track...wasn't sure why you mentioned them in reverse order but every other track's artists are alphabetized.)

Back cover finished, feel free to use.

Sorry if it's already been covered somewhere, but where did you guys get the idea to use the quote from Yoshinori Kitase for the vocoder bit in Adrenalyne Kyck? It flows oh so well in the song, it's chilling. (Also, why Y's? You bunch of womyn.)

This thing is so damn fresh and unexpected. OWA is laden with, well, heaviness...gravitas...bombast...and you guys just came out of left field with this irreverent kickass thing. Puts a big smile on my face every time it comes up. GOOD JORB