Arcana

As someone who started compo at the same time as you, I have a few things to recommend... First, I think compo is a good idea, it forces you to come up with ideas. The fact that you cannot create what you hear in your head shouldn't deter you, since that takes practice. Not time, it takes practice. So do it often and try to ignore the fact that it's not what you had in your head when you sat down. Vinnie and Rozovian and The Vagrance touched on it - listen to music. Lots of it. Try to re-create what you hear. I think that even doing this in the small will work really well - that is, take one small, tiny element of a song and recreate that only. Whether it be a hi-hat shuffle, a catchy bass line, a soulful melody. Create just that and get used to how the creation of that works. It's much less discouraging to recreate one or two instrument parts than it is to try to recreate the entirety of a deadmau5 song. As for structure, it helps to map things out into different structures. Many modern songs have the following structure: Intro, Verse, Chorus, Verse, (Chorus), Bridge, (Chorus), Outro or some variation of. If you follow this kind of structure, you'll pretty much have a decent song layout. This is a great thing to fall back to if you just want to finish something that sounds pretty traditional. Try to listen in the songs you like how these parts build up. Do they use the verse-chorus-bridge? Do they use A B A? Do they just take a single theme and develop around it? Do they repeat the same 8-bar melody for pretty much the entire song and build on it? hmmm I don't know what else to say. Mostly, I think you should try to suspend disbelief and disappointment in being unable to create what you hear in your head in its entirety, and instead concentrate on really small elements instead. And from there, work up.

I donated using the Paypal link

It sound strange to say, but the level design in FF XIII reminded me a lot of the designs in Dirge of Cerberus (which was a surprisingly fun game even if it was extremely cheesy).

Well, technology-wise, if you post all of the messages using Facebook or Twitter, presumably you'd be able to use the appropriate Facebook API or Twitter API and suck all of the info down from those services. Or, if you wanted to go about it from another way, you'd set up OCR such that when you moved a new ReMix to the front page, it would have a field that says, "Teaser". When you submit it, it automatically stores the teaser in the database, but also sends the message to Facebook and Twitter automatically (using the appropriate API services). It would be like writing your own customized "Twitter" application. From a stylistic point of view though, I don't know where you'd put the info. Maybe beneath the date and the remixer's name, you can add that one line of text? Or, between the top rotating image-news thing and the Forum discussion, put a box with the "five most recent mixes"? As an aside, I think that the OCR front page is a bit strange in that the remixes appear to attract much less attention overall than, for example, the "Community Discussion topics". They're a bit off to the side and stuff.

You might enjoy some new-agey stuff like David Arkenstone, or modern Celtic stuff like Nightnoise or the Secret Garden.

If there was a way to insert one-line teasers for new remixes on the front page, they may draw more hits. I just noticed is that I often gloss over remixes on the OCR Front page. I see them but usually I don't click on them unless it's from a game I like or from an artist I know. However, I then go onto Facebook and then I see a sweet teasing description for the track. For example: "If they made a Wolfenstein 3D movie and managed not to screw it up, this would be the perfect music!" And of course I then think... "Film score? Cool!" So then I click and download it. Do you guys think it would be beneficial to have those one-line teasers somehow replicated or shown somewhere on the front page with the remix that's posted? I visit this site a lot simply for the forums so it makes me wonder when the one-line Facebook messages makes me want to download music more than the OCR front page does.

Well there's always been a handful of remixers who NEVER post on the forums but are very much alive and reachable. Some people simply aren't forum whores.

I'm bad at rhythms too. I hear something like, "Dummmmmm da da da daa- da dum" or whatever. I know what it's like in my head and I know what it SHOULD sound like, but I mess it up when I play on the keyboard because the tempo isn't right or something. Usually I end up fixing it manually. As Palpable said, quantizing does help. Prohpet also says true, the click-track helps a lot too. However if you simply can't associate the beats in your head with the tempo on the sequencer it may simply be a matter of practicing rhythms.

Can you cash Canadian cheques without ridiculous fees?

Guess what day it is today?

While you're at it, would you consider labelling "track" with the number of the OC ReMix? So it would be Track 2017, Track 2018, etc? I sometimes wished there was a way to listen to the songs in a "chronologically-posted" order. So for example if I miss out on downloading for a week I can grab a bunch and listen to them in order of posting. Obviously I wouldn't expect you guys to change the previous entries but it would be pretty sweet for the future.

I find that there's tons of music in FF XIII, and that in fact it's very fitting. The fact that it's atmospheric is appealing. I don't really find that music that sits out and is all like "LISTEN TO ME I'M IN THE BACKGROUND" in a game is awesome.

I agree that headphones aren't as good, but the reality is that even the most basic entry-level monitors are still REALLY expensive compared to a solid pair of headphones. Monitors will START at $300. If you're saavy you might be able to get a pair for $200. You can get above-average headphones for $150, and you can probably get something decent for $100. The cost difference is pretty large and if music is something you're not sure you want to be doing, it's much easier to justify a headphone purchase than a studio monitor purchase. That said if you get serious about music, monitors make your life much easier, and more fun, and make your mixes sound better, etc. This. Personally I've experienced much more frustration from composing and arranging than I have through production. Not only notes, but also song structure and song form, what ranges to cover, and what keys to use, and how to do cool music theory things like modulations and grace notes.

It is kind of late-ish, we weren't going to accept any new people. Do you think you could come up with a high-quality track in two weeks? If you can let me know

Yeah but spoiler There was also a lot "sprung" on you during the ending sequences that had absolutely no appearance before. The whole "smoke and mirrors" trick turning the party into Cei'th for example. I was also disappointed in the fact that even though Fang and Vanille's relationship really wasn't covered that well in the game, there was so much time spent on them and their relationship with each other. We really should have seen more of them if they were going to be so prominent to the survival of the world. As it turns out, I realised that they were both turned to crystal again but I didn't even feel shocked or sad. Unfortunately, neither did most of the main characters. Their death was nothing like, for example, Tidus's disappearance, which had a strong emotional impact even if you didn't really like Tidus because Yuna simply looked so heartbroken about it all. While the scale of the stories is something on a different level (Final Fantasy X is much more about love than FF XIII ever will be) it's really never that good of a thing when two major characters "die" at the end of the game and the player fails to care - and this is coming from someone who ended up using Vanille and Fang almost all the time in the main party. end spoiler

Two-week bump! If you haven't started thinking about this it may be a good time to schedule some time to work on it.

Did anyone else have opinions on the storyline of the game, especially the ending? I had a laundry list of complaints, as well as some confusion and am wondering what others thought.

What's your music background like? If you have a good understanding of composition and theory you're likely going to get a lot of good advice on the WIP forums. To be quite honest I think that remixing is much more dependent on how well you listen and how good your understanding of music theory, music composition, and composition styles are than on the actual production of the pieces. A lot of the video games here have sources that aren't production-intensive at all (I mean, half of the tunes are from the NES). Particular genres have elements of production that are more difficult than others though. Electronic music in general benefits heavily from tight production and synth design. I don't find it particularly hard to do but you will discover that over time you'll get better. Some instruments are hard to sequence well. Violins (especially solo violins) are pretty difficult to make realistic sounding for example. Guitar can sound bad if you don't sequence it well. There are however a ton of people out there who know how to play guitar and you can often get someone to play guitar parts for you if you intend to release a song. All music benefits from different production elements like filling the sound scape, proper panning, etc. If you want to get a sense of what a lot of people look for, sit down and go through the Judges' reviews as well as the WIP Forum reviews. You'll get a sense of what people comment on, production-wise.

This isn't technically accurate but it'll illustrate what happens from the user point of view. Kontakt is a sampler. It is a software plug-in whose job is to load up the right sound files and play them back when you press a note on your keyboard. In any program, you have a track. The track is set up so that it plays a number of notes in sequence. Basically, you'd load up program of choice, assign the instrument to "Kontakt", and then you'd double click on the Kontakt interface and load up the instrument that you want. At this stage you could load up, for example, VSL strings, or drums, or Shreddage. Then, you'll be able to drag and drop the notes on the track. This goes for almost every software that plays back sounds. If you used a software synthesizer instead of Kontakt, it would play back simulated synthesizer-like stuff (made from oscillators and the like) rather than music sound files. Shreddage is a library - basically it's a set of files that you would load inside Kontakt once you got the plugin set up and loaded. AFAIK there's no way to run it outside of Kontakt but Zircon would be able to give you the definitive answer. I highly, highly, highly recommend that you fiddle around with your program of choice before spending money on Kontakt. And, download the Kontakt demos from the NI web site. Doing so will help answer a lot of your questions about how the workflow works. Are you talking about choosing a song that'll "maximize" the chance you'll get accepted on OCR? Honestly I'd just do anything you want to do. Your passion is going to drive you for much longer than your "I'm going to be a posted OC ReMixer" will. It's not like you can't compose more than one song either so don't worry about what you start doing. Heck, you can go ahead and compose many songs at the same time. Personally I started out with remixing because I was obsessed with Suikoden music at the time but there's no right or wrong way to approach it.

What do you mean by perfect timing? The only thing I really worry about with respect to timing is doing Pparadigm shifts. Time it so the shift focuses only on my main character (good) and not so it goes through the camera shots for each of my three character (bad). I believe it's related to whether your ATB gauge is filling or not but I haven't figured it out precisely. Other than that, you just queue up your commands (or press Auto-Battle) as soon as your character's executed the actions. On "Normal", given 3 bars, you get a window of about 5 or so seconds to do it I think.

Yes, it's possible to teach yourself. And yes, it takes a long time. I don't think anyone would argue if I told you that learning the production side from zero to OCR-quality will probably take "years". As for which order to learn in - theory/music writing vs. production? It doesn't really matter. You kind of need one before you can do the other (you can't make a good mixdown if you don't have a song to work on after all) but it doesn't actually take that long to get up to a basic level with arrangement (probably a few months). As you might have figured out though, OCR is very production-oriented; a lot of the people who get posted tend to be really good at things like sound design and mixing. When people "talk shop" at OCR they tend to discuss the production aspect of things much more so than the arrangements. As far as what tools to use, you do have a lot of options. I'd recommend the following: - Good monitoring. That is, get a set of headphones or studio monitors that are known for their accuracy. There's a thread for what speakers or headphones to buy. Good monitoring is essential (those are Zircon's words, not mine). You can get a good pair of headphones that'll suffice for under $200. Generally, I consider them to be the first thing I'd recommend someone who wants to get into music to purchase because you'll start hearing things better. Also, they're something that you'll use even if you quit music (but let's not go there!) - Some audio program to work in. I think everyone else covered them quite well. However most of these are quite expensive ($400+) so try to get demos or the "basic" versions of the software first. As mentioned you can also spend hundreds and thousands of dollars on things like Kontakt (see my Kontakt thread also on this forum for info about it), East-West, Spectrasonics, and other things like that. To be very very honest with you I'd suggest not buying them until you're comfortable with the process of making songs and start feeling limited by things like free soundfonts and samples. Also, look for free versions of stuff. Kontakt has a time-limited demo that contains 600MB of samples. East-West released an unlimited-use package of about 17 instruments not long ago. Reason has a time-limited demo. Those kinds of things, in combination with free VSTs/AUs and default samples, should be able to entertain you for a year or two. FLStudio is about $150 or so. Garageband of course comes free on your Mac, so I recommend it to people who are interested in music. Logic Express (the version of Logic that comes with fewer plugins) is something like $200. Kontakt costs about $400, if you get the "bonus pack" with extra plugins then it costs more than that. It's not that bad for beginner to use but quite honestly I'd recommend that you make a few songs in the program of choice with the default (or free) samples before you go and spring for Kontakt. You might want to see the thread (http://ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=28540) on it as well if you haven't already.

The Phalanx gave me a hard time too when I first encountered them. I'd recommend getting Vanille's Eidolon first, then backtracking and doing Missions if you want to "level up".

To do the Fang/Vanille thing just switch between Saboteur/Sentinel and Medic/Sentinel for the whole time. That should work.

It sounds fine to me. There's not that much background noise or anything. You might tweak the tone and the EQ later on but the recording itself seems clean. Have you run your BX5s directly to your computer's line out vs. your Logitech speakers directly to your computer's line out? Have you tried headphones? Have you tried the playback on another computer or an MP3 player to see if the difference is drastic there? Finally do you have any weird stuff for your computer's speakers, like an EQ running in the background for your computer speakers or EAX or something like that which may color the default output? If your Logictech system is a 5.1 surround system it might be doing funny background things like "spreading" the stereo out to the different speakers or possibly overdoing the bass since you have a subwoofer, or other things like that.

Wait wait are you saying that I get the opportunity to sleep in the same room as Stevo? Giggity! Why aren't you all on this one?