prophetik music

Learned a lot from this thread for assembling my new PC. 

you're keeping the budget low so there's only so much you can do, really. i would definitely recommend a case that has front and back fans (front pull, back push) to keep air moving, but it doesn't need to be a complex decision past that. pick one with good reviews that doesn't complain about quality and you'll be fine. as for the motherboard, you need a mobo that supports your CPU and has at least one pci-express x16 3.0 slot and two fan headers. if you need wifi you'd need an uncovered pci slot as well probably (uncovered means that the gfx card isn't going to cover it up). the rest is pretty standard. in general i prefer msi motherboards these days but use asrock and gigabyte as needed based on prices and features.

radical dreamers is one of my favorite tunes in all of gaming music.
there's a few arrangement missteps like MW mentioned, notably at 2:03 (that chord should be major in both the original and in standard theory due to what precedes it). the section that follows is complex enough that some stuff gets messy - 2:24, 2:38, 2:45 jumped out at me. but the arrangement is dope and the great synth work and especially the percussion is just so great that i don't even care. so many great little things - the fake key change, the dynamic arc of the track, and the way you take such a timeless/sacred-goat melody amd totally chop it up in a great way with new themes are all fantastic.
from a mastering side i thought it sounds great. there's one or two times where i felt that it was too complex and everything lost clarity due to how much was going on, but i'd rather have that than it being super empty honestly.
this is a fantastic track. great work timaeus!
 
 
YES

i'd love to participate. these have always been fun.

I'm one of those people who's nursed a grudge against Chrono Cross since I first played it for it having the nerve to not be Chrono Trigger. Probably a bit unfair since I've never revisited it over the years. This album certainly makes me think about it more, as it really showcases the overall quality of the soundtrack beyond just the one song I remember (2-01, a version packed with such frantic awesomeness that it had to be over as fast as it was).
Chronopolis is chock full of both moments that are so cool they make me want to fist pump and go, "Hell yeah!" as well as moments where I can't help but grin and bop along, no matter how many times I listen to them. Getting another taste of jazzy Chrono from the OC Jazz Collective in 1-04 was a plus. 1-12 and 2-09 echoing the CT soundtrack are also good for the nostalgia. The two that make me grin the most, though, are in 2-05 when the melody hits at about 1:45 in, and the entire synthwave mix of 2-13 - which I loved on its own merits when I first heard it and now I love because its whole vibe makes me think about the dopey/amazing scene near the end of Season 3 of Stranger Things where Dustin has to sing with Suzy. It's perfect.
A fun thing in the evolution of OCR album projects is how many of the more recent ones highlight performers and craft music around their strengths in a way that I don't think had been done a lot before. This particular album has a lot of that going on right from the start with Hold Onto The Dream really sounding like a group doing the recording together. Another job well done from the first track to the last.

DDRKirby(ISQ) here with my latest original release, All in a Day's Work 5!

One Hour Compo (better known simply as "OHC") is a weekly composition competition event hosted at http://compo.thasauce.net.  The premise is simple: at a certain time each week, a theme is announced, and entrants are given exactly one hour to produce a song from scratch based on that theme.
"All in a Day's Work 5" is the fifth installment in the "All in a Day's Work" series.  The concept is the same as always: I've taken 24 songs that I've written for OHC and compiled them into a single album, literally the product of 24 hours of work.  All 24 tracks are presented exactly as they were submitted for OHC without any post-editing.
The album download includes a PDF full of detailed liner notes that you can check out for more info on each of the tracks!
Download now from Bandcamp (pay what you want): https://ddrkirbyisq.bandcamp.com/album/all-in-a-days-work-5
Physical release also available!

i didn't have these, thanks cyril!
i did get the following from another member of the boards:
Public Address 1-7 (three one-hour parts each) Hearts on a Shoreline/Thoughts on a Shoreline Spectrum (2008 New Year's Day mix) five assorted tracks (Drifter, Seeker, Traveler, Voyager, and an untitled one) i'm uploading to gdrive my copies, which are 192kbps CBR. i'll update when that's done.
edit: link

arrangement wise, i loved what you had! i heard the FFXIII use of borrowed chords right away. there's a ton of power to this arrangement and it isn't just max-velocity orchestra soundfont on every note, which is appreciated. it just didn't have enough OST. there's some super-interesting new stuff that i enjoyed, and there's several sections that sounded like they were from the original but i couldn't place (like at 2:00 and a bit later at 3:07) which implies they're just borrowing concepts but not actual melodic content from the original.
ultimately, the solid production and energetic arrangement make for a great whole, but it's not enough original to pass muster here. add some source (even a different source!) and it's an insta-yes for me.
 
 
NO

i didn't realize it'd been this long since i've posted here about this, but i'm still doing this. so if you need a new machine to work from home with, or you want to use your upcoming stimulus/ubi check to play some phat games, let me know and i'll get you hooked up. i have more time than what used to be normal thanks to working from home, so i still am actively doing this.

i didn't realize it'd been this long since i've posted here about this, but i'm still doing this. so if you need a new machine to work from home with, or you want to use your upcoming stimulus/ubi check to play some phat games, let me know and i'll get you hooked up. i have more time than what used to be normal thanks to working from home, so i still am actively doing this.

the music for that opening section is really interesting. i love how they're combining themes and the "estuans interius" lyrics with such a different style than you usually hear it.

I've been around OCR since the logo was blue and I've got to be honest, I think you're being misled by the same UsErExPeRiEnCe clique that's behind most horrible UI decisions that actual users utterly despise. With social media and tech being the way it is today we're seeing more than ever an extreme gulf between what "experts" and self proclaimed thought leaders say customers and users want and the reality. You see this everywhere from phones to computers to pop culture, just compare the "critic" score to the user score on almost any major mainstream release on rotten tomatoes for the past decade.

i agree with rexy that the source fits this style really well. the original was already kind of doing that funk-house style, with a really present kit and a bop band behind it, and this definitely takes it farther down the euro road with the chord extensions you're hinting at in the guitar, combined with the acoustic bass and disco vibe. i also agree that there's just way too much sampled content in here. it's so busy, and that's saying something coming from me! the sampled sections clearly aren't in the same level of swing so there's conflicting off-beats, and the sampled content drags the overall fidelity of the track. i did like what the bass was playing, and felt that helped move it along. i'd recommend some space in there to let the instrument 'breathe' a bit. your groove got pretty dry pretty quick when it essentially played the same pattern for three minutes, so starting somewhere less full of notes and expanding throughout the track will help quite a bit, i think. lastly, while i really liked what the acoustic guitar was playing, it was so choppy due to whatever slicer you used to adjust the tempo that it sounds really disjointed. i really wanted it to speak cleaner and it just wouldn't.
speaking of mastering, i found the kit as a whole to sound like it was in an entirely different soundscape than the rest of the track. it was very present and wide (the shaker in the right ear was really irritating maybe halfway through), and the continued shifting of the rest of the track's level of fidelity as compared to the static drums was really distracting. you can definitely do some work to volumize the rest of the instruments to level them out.
there's definitely some fun moments in here. i'd love to hear more of the EP solo at 2:00, and i enjoyed the panned EP solos before that. i also overall enjoyed the presentation of the melody, and while more variation there would have been good, it was fun. i just can't however get past the constant sampling and lackluster mastering. part of french house is that the mastering really sparkles, which helps the common phaser effects and sampled old disco track bits shine through in spite of their age. i don't get that feeling here and it really makes for a track that isn't where it needs to be to pass.
 
 
NO

this is a very ethereal original, and the approach with light winds and harp is a good way to represent it. i found the flute's slow vibrato to be notable but acceptable with the style, but the (truthfully far too) low scoring of the piccolo combined with that slow vibrato to be uncomfortably approaching tuning problems. it doesn't help that the picc's pretty loud - nothing can cover a piccolo to begin with, so having it so far in the front with little room verb is tough to hear. when the flute and picc play together the slow vibrato issue is exacerbated due to the performer not varying their vibrato depth or speed between instruments as expected, and then at :53 the intonation is real notable. further intonation issues exist in the clarinet at 1:03. 
these are, to be honest, all nitpicks and not enough on their own to really sway my vote. all of these issues described are scoring-related for real-world instruments - for example, at 1:03, you've got an exposed clarinet playing a concert G (A is fully open with the flutter key open, and is moderately sharp). meanwhile, the bassoon's B is naturally flat there. this is intended mainly as an example - while live instruments certainly add a beautiful spark to open soundscapes like this, you have to take extra time to focus on the real-world tonalities of the instrument, vs. what you'd hear in a perfectly-recorded sample pack, and score around those natural tendencies (or ensure that your performers are adjusting for them). all that said, the performances together as a whole are good enough.
it's important that i don't take away from the overall great job transforming the source here. you stayed safe but did a nice job translating the melodic portions to different voices without making it sound like a summer band pop song. the harpsichord parts are really touching, and they're well balanced in the mix - it would have been so easy to let something without dynamics like a harpsichord stick way out and you didn't let it. what's more, the overall mastering of the work is clean and clear, if a bit heavy on the picc as noted above.
as a whole, this is a beautiful arrangement that suffers a bit from some of the natural implications of working with live performers. despite how i may have sounded above, i do believe that the quality of arrangement and careful attention to keeping the melody moving through the instruments more than balances out the few missteps by your performers.
YES

Man, I hate this arrangement, lol.
I love the fact that it's on OCR - there needs to be more music on here that challenges my tastes.

Oh hey, finally something I can help with! I've got them all - what's a good place to host them?

they sure used to! i don't know as much about more recently.
the trailer looks very interesting. i'm definitely interested in the game to the point of being willing to buy the console if it doesn't go cross-platform (at least eventually, likely not right away).

I have read the comments on the youtube, and one comment really stuck out to me that I think explains why it is so divisive, mainly relating to the philosophy of creating new arrangements of video game music.
The comment, let me find it:
So this is probably the largest difference in the way I process game music vs how I think others do, mainly in the general public who do not produce music actively (casual listeners). This isn't a right vs. wrong issue, this is really more of a perception and philosophy difference/disagreement. This is healthy and should happen in any community that isn't toxic.

For the most part, game music for me is divorced from the game it comes from. I have been told on some of my previous work (back before I had an internet presence) that "this doesn't sound like a battle theme" or similar comments. At one point I did a stripper tempo swing version of Megalovania from Undertale. It went really slow, just to play up the sleaze. For the most part, it was *destroyed* by people who heard it, almost like I committed blasphemy.
OCR is full of creative arrangements, but the whole line is accessibility. For the most part, if you did a calm, ending theme as an upbeat 80s synthwave track, nobody would really complain about it because they can relate to the style. Something much more classically oriented that's out of left field like this doesn't really give much to relate to (unless you listen to a lot of music in this style). It is kind of like listening to some avant-garde jazz and not enjoying it because you don't really listen to a lot of it and don't really "get" its nuance (I am like this with most of the more distant subgenres of metal, for example).
When I do arrangements of game music, almost always I'm trying to do one of two things, and you can hear this from the things posted on this site.

1. Have some fun with a tune I really enjoy or remember fondly, combined with writing some fun stuff to play (Cazador, Journey Never Ends, unrelated but everything I do for Materia Collective falls under this category). This usually ends up being very relatable for most people.

2. Experiment and really push myself in something I'm not familiar with, or explore a style of music I enjoy (Protoman, Reflecting Pool, As Blew the Winds). These are mainly used to develop my skills, and I really don't give much consideration to the audience or making it an way that it means anything outside of itself. This is where the disagreement lies.

So in the most sincere way possible, I REALLY don't care that the Mario fanbase wouldn't listen to this and be reminded of Mario. That wasn't the point. That wasn't even close to the point.

Oh boy, I remember this!  Sir Nuts linked me to the decision thread not long after I got added to the Judges and asked which way I'd vote on it.
Here's what I thought: once the melody started at 0:21, the source clicked for me there and then.  The harmonies and effects contributed actively towards subtractive arranging, which is heard as the main arrangement attraction.  The horn performances and manipulations were spot on, added to that textural thickness and are all cleanly placed out in the mix.
And do you know what else this track brought to mind?  It reminds me of the Tortoise section of Camille Saint-Saens's Carnival of the Animals suite.  Saint-Saens used the main melodic riff of Offenbach's "Galop Infernal" (otherwise known as the Can-Can) and slowed it down by 2.5x, while here the source is brought down to 4x its speed.  This arrangement is a more extreme case, but at the end of the day, the BGM is dominant and has an interpretation approach seldom seen around the VGM scene, period.  If I were on the panel at the time, I would've been in the Yes camp.
Nevertheless, you did boldly, and I hold mad respect to the result that popped out.  The original Super Mario Bros has tunes covered a vast number of times, but this is a sign that proves there's still room to make something unique out of it.  Nice work!

And...
The vision of the site has always been to have a big enough tent for both; we could have fewer headaches, and probably more followers, if we stuck to popular games, or genres, or gave flagrantly disproportionate emphasis to either, but then I'd have to punch myself in the head every day and die w/ regrets, etc.

just stamping this one in. i agree completely with the last three votes in that it's a great concept, and a fun arrangement, and ultimately too muddy. 2:20's intro of the choir pad is where it really goes off the rails. there's simply too much going on in the same range.
i am really looking forward to this coming back with more aural separation. that's the only thing holding it back for me. opening up your max beyond -3db and doing some grunt work with your EQ and gain will really make this an easy vote.
 
NO

you took what is essentially a 30-second loop and made a 5:15 arrangement without changing tonality, tempo, style, or significantly changing your chosen instrumentation throughout, and it isn't terribly boring. bravo. this is a stellar attempt that only falls a little short.
from the arrangement side, as others have noted, there's just too many times that you say the same thing. your attempts to mix up the instruments carrying the melody are notable, but there's only so many instruments that can carry it, and you exhausted them by halfway through. so, my suggestion is to explore other historical forms of variations. your arrangement uses some standard theme and variation forms - it's not quite a passacaglia since the bassline never really changes, but you use some of the concepts. my suggestions here are to explore some of the other historical techniques - things like changing or modifying the tonality of a section (Ive's "Variations on America"), dynamic variation (Ron Nelson's "Passacaglia on B-A-C-H" is essentially a 9-minute crescendo), or significant and systemic rhythmic variation (Mozart's "Twelve Variations on 'Ah vous dirai-je, Maman'" - Twinkle Twinkle Little Star!) really can help with taking something that feels samey and turning it on its head. as an example only and not a suggestion, i guarantee that exploring some modal harmonies - even the relative minor! - would really quickly spice up and allow a return to major (and a recap of the initial theme) to hold more water without feeling repetitious.
from a mastering side, i echo nuts in that it's simply too quiet. now, yes, i did just say that significant dynamic contrast can be good - but, this track screams for compression. well-sampled instruments that are properly velocitized can be slammed with compression and still sound like they have dynamic contrast due to the natural changes to the instrument's timbre that occurs when it's played louder. i'm not asking for some huge punchy compressor to bang the crap out of your bassline, but proper compression can really breath some life into the opening and middle sections that are quieter without altering the delicate balance you're trying to create.
this is a real good effort, as i said before. it needs a mastering pass badly, and some more attention on the arrangement side to prevent feeling like it's two minutes of content scraped over five minutes of bread. another look will really help bring this up to your more recent standards.
 
NO

Congrats! 

Congrats to both!

I want to especially give a shoutout to @prophetik music, bro. You've been around in this community for so long, contributed so much, and I know that I personally grew SO FUCKING MUCH as a musician from working with you!

We scoured the land for the most evil people we could find to join us, and we're proud to add @prophetik music and @Rexy to the judges panel.
I'm personally aiming to finally have that submissions queue go to 0 by the end of this year, and we're excited to have their help.
Revel in their fresh perspectives and presence now before they become entrenched in the system and simply become part of the evil mass of musical oppression that the rest of us have morphed into.  (a.k.a. WELCOME!)