Mega Man: The Grand Robot Master Remix Battle 2011

[WillRock]

i am surprised that our battle is as close as it is. i don't want to sound mean - i like his track a lot! but when most of the actual posted remixers - gario, abadoss, willrock, etc - vote for mine, and a bunch of lurkers vote for his, that says something to me. it says that the people who think it sounds cool but might not know the source the best voted one way, and the people who understand the music and can hear the extra stuff that was added in with mine voted the other way. i don't feel that his uses the spring man theme much at all, and it seems that most people didn't bother to listen to the original source. all the parts that are mentioned as being awesome are just stuff that's inherent to the solar man track, which is bloody awesome. he didn't really add anything to it besides a drumloop and different instrumentation.

that's not really a remix at that point, unfortunately =/ draconiator, you're clearly a skilled musician - mastering that particular style is something i have next to no skill in - but your focus was clearly on your track and on production instead of the arrangement itself. if you beat me - which you might, there are a lot of people voting for mastering and OST awesomeness instead of arrangement like they should - you really need to work on getting the arrangement to actually be a reinterpretation of the theme instead of just dumping the midi into a synth and boom-tissing the rest of it. you also need to work in the other track more, since you basically ignored it. i know spring man sucks, but that's the point. it's supposed to be hard you can't get better if you only remix schala and terra. you've gotta do catfish's maw and spring man and all the other crappy tracks out there. that's why i never take a project mix until all that's left is the junk. it forces you to work with less, and you learn more at a faster pace that way.

i realized after writing this that this sounds abjectly harsh, and i don't mean it to be. drac's song sounds great as a remix of solar man. i don't think it stands up as a 50/50 split of both themes, though, simply because it's nowhere near 50/50.

and yes, i'd be happy to do a remix with you =)

Prophetik, your a cool guy and I respect you as a musician, but you're right, you do sound pretty harsh Just let things run their course and leave well enough alone, it looks more like you're just trying to get more votes because you feel your arrangement is better :/

Also, Rozo and Sir_NutS voted for Draconiator, they aren't lurkers and are posted remixers. It probably isn't my place to say this but you basically said everyone who votes against you is wrong and that draconiators mix isn't even a remix at one point. If I was him I would be offended at your post. Its probably not my place to say this and I apologise for making this rather accusatory post, but I feel this needs to be said.

EDIT: Don't get me wrong, I do understand what your point is, I just think the way you've put it across is kinda unfair on draconiator.

[TGH]

guitarheroe, do yourself a favor and make it upbeat. it's hard as hell to make catfish's maw make sense when you're doing within the genre restriction i did it in for LAProject.

I was thinking along the lines of either really dark and drenched in reverb, or all-out dubstep 0_0

But first I need to learn how to wub-wub and yoi-yoi and all that jazz.......I mean dubstep......

[SilvernixSP]

And I stress the importance of "most importantly how well the artist incorporates both source tunes into his remix." People do need to remember that when voting on any of the mixes.

This is exactly why I din't have difficulty voting for prophetik. Sorry, that's my opinion.

[Brandon Strader]

I didn't really hear Spring Man that obviously in either mix, and I know one of the mixes uses midi guitars and bass and the drums sound terrible, so the vote was easy.. I find it kind of lame that you're upset how the vote is going considering the effort put into yours was far less than Draconiator's.. and Draco posted ad nauseum about making the mix and his source usage, it may not be the most obvious but it's there... You got to realize how hard your song is to listen to right? With the fake guitars+bass and downright bad drum sounds, trying to pull off a rock sound.. all that mud.. it's barely listenable.. maybe I heard the source better in Draco's because it was audible and clear.. I think you're being very offensive to Draco :-/

[orlouge82]

i realized after writing this that this sounds abjectly harsh, and i don't mean it to be. drac's song sounds great as a remix of solar man. i don't think it stands up as a 50/50 split of both themes, though, simply because it's nowhere near 50/50.

I think many votes favored Draconiator's polish, not necessarily the arrangement of the source tunes themselves.

I really had to listen to find Spring Man in Draconiator's mix, but, like I mentioned in my vote, it was very prominent in yours, and I loved the treatment it got.

If you really want to seal the deal with the votes, just get a bunch of your friends on OCRemix to vote or get the ones that aren't to join and vote. They just have to vote for every match-up for their votes to count.

[prophetik music]

I think many votes favored Draconiator's polish, not necessarily the arrangement of the source tunes themselves.

I really had to listen to find Spring Man in Draconiator's mix, but, like I mentioned in my vote, it was very prominent in yours, and I loved the treatment it got.

If you really want to seal the deal with the votes, just get a bunch of your friends on OCRemix to vote or get the ones that aren't to join and vote. They just have to vote for every match-up for their votes to count.

@willrock - yeah, i know i came across strongly, but like i said - drac did a nice job on his track as a remix for this site. i just felt it didn't do as good of a job mixing the two themes together. i also know that rozo and michael voted for drac's track, which is why i said 'most', not all. i was more attempting to make a point with the direction of the votes than anything else =) and i'm not worried about votes, as voters will vote how they will without my interference or otherwise.

@heroe - dubstep? DUBSTEP.

@strader - midi guitars lolwut

@orlouge - i agree, i think people went for the shiny and overlooked what was underneath. but that always happens in compos, so i guess it's not a new thing or anything. i wouldn't want to pad votes, though. if i lose, who cares? drac gets a chance to play with solar man some more, and i get more time to play witcher 2. which is ridiculously awesome, by the way.

i've noted a few people saying that spring man wasn't obvious in the mix. for reference, everything with the poppy overcompressed electronic drums and straight lead (the one with no scoops) was spring man, and everything with the drier drums and scoopy lead was solar man. that's how i show which theme is what in these compos - i'll at least use two different leads to help differentiate between the two. two drumsets is a little different, but i was stuck in a rut and wanted to mix it up a bit to get over to solar man, so that's where that happened.

[WillRock]

@orlouge - i agree, i think people went for the shiny and overlooked what was underneath. but that always happens in compos

One thing I think I should mention is that in the final of the GMRB, I went up against txai, who despite having worse production than me by a considerable amount beat me. I wouldn't say that people go with the more polished tracks generally, since I managed to get the third round of the original GRMRB despite having worse production than all my opponents in that compo

[prophetik music]

txai's track was bloody awesome, i remember that. he beat me right before he beat you, in the semis, but his track for me i remember blew the mastering on mine away. you make a good point, though - i remember his stuff was pretty shady up till then. gawd knows that my mastering here wasn't that good. i'm terrible at mastering anything with a decent amount of bass because my monitors are relatively small. they get great sound for mids and highs, but they need a sub for the lower stuff and i haven't purchased one. i get stuck listening to everything on headphones, and even though one pair is open ear, it's not the same.

[orlouge82]

I didn't really hear Spring Man that obviously in either mix, and I know one of the mixes uses midi guitars and bass and the drums sound terrible, so the vote was easy.. I find it kind of lame that you're upset how the vote is going considering the effort put into yours was far less than Draconiator's.. and Draco posted ad nauseum about making the mix and his source usage, it may not be the most obvious but it's there... You got to realize how hard your song is to listen to right? With the fake guitars+bass and downright bad drum sounds, trying to pull off a rock sound.. all that mud.. it's barely listenable.. maybe I heard the source better in Draco's because it was audible and clear.. I think you're being very offensive to Draco :-/

0:42-1:42 is all Spring Man. 3:22-4:18 is predominantly Spring Man with a little Solar Man overlaid in a "remix." About two minutes of a four minute song would be 50-50 if my math is correct.

Yes, prophetik's mix certainly could have used a bit more polish, but I don't find it hard to listen to by any measure. The polish was subpar enough, though, that many people wrote it off immediately. The song wasn't one of his best, but the arrangement of it was excellent. The song would have garnered many more votes if it had the same level of polish that Draconiator's did.

[WillRock]

0:42-1:42 is all Spring Man. 3:22-4:18 is predominantly Spring Man with a little Solar Man overlaid in a "remix." About two minutes of a four minute song would be 50-50 if my math is correct.

Yes, prophetik's mix certainly could have used a bit more polish, but I don't find it hard to listen to by any measure. The polish was subpar enough, though, that many people wrote it off immediately. The song wasn't one of his best, but the arrangement of it was excellent. The song would have garnered many more votes if it had the same level of polish that Draconiator's did.

This. Pretty much sums up what I reckon happened here. From what you said, Prophetik, those guitars aren't midi, but I must confess, I thought they WERE

Fail on my part if not, but at the same time, gotta work on your guitar tone imo... something I didn't put in the vote

[Sir_NutS]

About the prophetik vs draconiator thing, if you read my vote you will see that I pointed out I rarely take in account production values over arrangement. And I did say that Draconiator did much less in the arrangement. However, and from my point of view, we are voting on the song we considered to be the most enjoyable, not necessarily the best arranged. In fact I don't think we can define what constitutes a better song just by arrangement, there are several variables, most of them subjective.

What bothered me the most was that the low quality of the production was very distracting and it really dragged down the song this time around. I do think that if you had more time to fix these issues you song would have been more enjoyable.

Both songs were pretty good in their own way, and as I said Draconiator's song grew on me after a while. But I certainly wasn't looking for the "shinier" song, but just the most enjoyable. The bad production just was too distracting to be enjoyable.

[orlouge82]

This. Pretty much sums up what I reckon happened here. From what you said, Prophetik, those guitars aren't midi, but I must confess, I thought they WERE

Fail on my part if not, but at the same time, gotta work on your guitar tone imo... something I didn't put in the vote

One of your songs' lack of polish (rock and a hard place) also may have killed you in the GMRB Zero Bracket final round (although Txai's song's (New Laser Swing) polish and arrangement was excellent. I remember that round was a tough vote for me because I actually thought your arrangement was slightly better than Txai's but his song's polish was markedly higher than yours. I would be very eager to listen to a finished version of that song (rock and a hard place), since I have the version submitted for the compo on several playlists of mine already.

Even though the quality of the polish is even lower on your submission for this compo, it's still a close vote, and you could easily still win. If you were to win, the lesson learned from this close call would be to make your mixes sound shinier, because your arrangements are always top-notch.

[Rozovian]

Dude, it can be worse, like in the GMRB semifinals:

I´ll vote for WillRock. I didn´t like how Rozo changed his style (or the final direction of this arragement) so radically. I don´t know why a lot of times the composers change his style in the last rounds (like Gecko in the final round of the Robot Master Competition).

So if I'm reading it right, I lost a vote because I had a different style than the previous rounds. Different from the first round where I used Omnisphere and my relatively fast desktop machine, and different from what I made with my Omnisphere-less underpowered old laptop and iirc only Logic's own tools and freebies; those two tracks are soooo alike, apparently. Guess how tempted I was to throw a tantrum over how that's not a valid reason to vote for the other guy, and how the two tracks done before weren't that much alike anyway.

Ultimately, this _is_ a popularity contest, and even tho critical listening is encouraged, it's not enforced.

[DarkeSword]

I can't really enforce the way people vote. I provided some guidelines for people to think about.

IMO, arrangement should be the most important one. This competition is more about creativity than technical proficiency.

To be perfectly honest, I don't like when people post long, drawn out production critiques in their vote, because it's not really the place for it. This isn't the workshop, nor is it the panel.

[ocre]

It's the majority of the time that artwork has to speak for itself rather than the artist being there to explain what they did. I'm hoping people are voting on what track they enjoyed the most, as Sir NutS said, and not for whose name they think is more recognizable or what artist they think is more popular. It's also up to them to have listened to the source tunes in order to determine if the remixer has utilized them both (and while the rule is simply to 'use both themes', I myself vote based on how WELL they were combined). The voters will determine whether they think the work meets their satisfaction. I generally don't think it's in good taste to campaign for your entry. Let it speak for itself. Not everyone who votes is going to be a musician that understands all the fancy tricks you used.

[prophetik music]

From what you said, Prophetik, those guitars aren't midi, but I must confess, I thought they WERE

lol. i didn't say that it wasn't midi - it's shreddage, actually, so it's like half and half. i know that i just used one double-tracked guitar track with some terrible GR4 preset as the distortion. so there's that i know there's tons of tricks to getting an awesome guitar tone, but i just didn't have the time really to plug them in. i think i might go back and mess with it for the heck of it, though, at some point when i'm not trying to plan a five day trip.

[BlackPanther]

Oooo someone else who used Shreddage in this contest? I saw that you made a post on the workshop forum so I'll be keepin an eye out so I can learn some things as well.

[Chernabogue]

Can we have a cool Proto Man bracket pic? :3

[OceansAndrew]

lol. i didn't say that it wasn't midi - it's shreddage, actually, so it's like half and half. i know that i just used one double-tracked guitar track with some terrible GR4 preset as the distortion. so there's that i know there's tons of tricks to getting an awesome guitar tone, but i just didn't have the time really to plug them in. i think i might go back and mess with it for the heck of it, though, at some point when i'm not trying to plan a five day trip.

So you are saying you didn't have the time to even enter properly and you expect to win? We are super bros, so I can be straight with you, but you need to check the entitlement at the door when you are competing.

Either you put out your best work and let it speak for itself, or you don't enter. Admitting that you half-assed your entry and still feel you deserve to win, based on your own personal criteria is incredibly disrespectful to your opponent. (edit: it is also pretty disrespectful to yourself)

<3 you, bro, but man up.

[Rozovian]

Everyone, remember that you have to vote for all matchups in the round for your votes to count.

(great, important notice as the last post on the page... when it should be visible as the first on a page, or... something)

[Draconiator]

i am surprised that our battle is as close as it is. i don't want to sound mean - i like his track a lot! but when most of the actual posted remixers - gario, abadoss, willrock, etc - vote for mine, and a bunch of lurkers vote for his, that says something to me. it says that the people who think it sounds cool but might not know the source the best voted one way, and the people who understand the music and can hear the extra stuff that was added in with mine voted the other way. i don't feel that his uses the spring man theme much at all, and it seems that most people didn't bother to listen to the original source. all the parts that are mentioned as being awesome are just stuff that's inherent to the solar man track, which is bloody awesome. he didn't really add anything to it besides a drumloop and different instrumentation.

that's not really a remix at that point, unfortunately =/ draconiator, you're clearly a skilled musician - mastering that particular style is something i have next to no skill in - but your focus was clearly on your track and on production instead of the arrangement itself. if you beat me - which you might, there are a lot of people voting for mastering and OST awesomeness instead of arrangement like they should - you really need to work on getting the arrangement to actually be a reinterpretation of the theme instead of just dumping the midi into a synth and boom-tissing the rest of it. you also need to work in the other track more, since you basically ignored it. i know spring man sucks, but that's the point. it's supposed to be hard you can't get better if you only remix schala and terra. you've gotta do catfish's maw and spring man and all the other crappy tracks out there. that's why i never take a project mix until all that's left is the junk. it forces you to work with less, and you learn more at a faster pace that way.

i realized after writing this that this sounds abjectly harsh, and i don't mean it to be. drac's song sounds great as a remix of solar man. i don't think it stands up as a 50/50 split of both themes, though, simply because it's nowhere near 50/50.

and yes, i'd be happy to do a remix with you =)

Slightly offended by this post. I use FL Studio 8, not some kind of MIDI software. As far as my usage of Spring Man and Solar Man in the verses, here: http://tindeck.com/listen/pynt I thought that was a good thing to do.

That is the usage with the actual sources. I'm not completely angry, just insulted that you said I use MIDI software when I clearly do not. Here's the project file if you don't believe me: http://www.box.net/shared/oalkhrio2o

I also used Z3ta+, Vanguard, Sytrus, and something called DSK TechSynth, and I put 1.5 days of work into it.

I still want to work with you Prophetik, but this posted/unposted crap has to stop.

Carrie Underwood is unposted.

Nickelback is unposted.

AC/DC is unposted.

Tiesto is unposted.

Of course they don't do remixes, but you know what I mean.

[Chernabogue]

Everyone, remember that you have to vote for all matchups in the round for your votes to count.

(great, important notice as the last post on the page... when it should be visible as the first on a page, or... something)

Quoting Rozo for great justice and to make this more visible!

[Rozovian]

Slightly offended by this post. I use FL Studio 8, not some kind of MIDI software. As far as my usage of Spring Man and Solar Man in the verses, here: http://tindeck.com/listen/pynt I thought that was a good thing to do.

Dude, most DAWs use midi - it's a standard for notation and communication between devices. He's saying you did something close to a midi rip. It's not a knock on the software, he just feels your arrangement wasn't as good as his. And he's upset about you getting so many votes despite that.

[Draconiator]

Dude, most DAWs use midi - it's a standard for notation and communication between devices. He's saying you did something close to a midi rip. It's not a knock on the software, he just feels your arrangement wasn't as good as his. And he's upset about you getting so many votes despite that.

To put it another way, I use FL Studio 8, not Cakewalk Home Studio 3 (what I used to use)

[prophetik music]

To put it another way, I use FL Studio 8, not Cakewalk Home Studio 3 (what I used to use)

yeah, still not what i meant. rozo's got it =) although, if you used cakewalk and made it sound that good, i'd be in awe.

So you are saying you didn't have the time to even enter properly and you expect to win? We are super bros, so I can be straight with you, but you need to check the entitlement at the door when you are competing.

Either you put out your best work and let it speak for itself, or you don't enter. Admitting that you half-assed your entry and still feel you deserve to win, based on your own personal criteria is incredibly disrespectful to your opponent. (edit: it is also pretty disrespectful to yourself)

<3 you, bro, but man up.

<3 you too big spoon. i'm not expecting to win just because i enter, of course. not even koelsch1 was that entitled. but there's no reason that i can't feel that something that's 80% of what i can do is still better than someone else's 100%. that's the nature of competitions, isn't it? i didn't have time to do my best work, but i'm not going to just wimp out because i was out of town most of the week. it'll just be not quite what i had hoped for.

i said before that i wasn't trying to be a dickweed or something. i thought drac's entry was good. i just felt it wasn't really a fitting entry based on the criteria of the competition.

either way, we've kinda hijacked the thread at this point, so let's avoid continuing this here =)