*NO* Pokémon X 'POKÉMOTION'

[Chimpazilla]

Hi OCR, I'm submitting my first Dj CUTMAN track in about eight years. Hope you like it.

REMIXER NAME: Dj CUTMAN

REAL NAME: Chris Davidson

EMAIL: /

Website: www.GameChops.com / www.VideoGameDJ.com / www.DjCUTMAN.com

USERID: 32956

GAME: Pokemon X/Y (also found in Pokemon Black/White)

REMIX TITLE: POKÉMOTION

SOURCE: "Unwavering Emotions"

COMMENTS:

This is a very special track for me. I started working on a simple house remix for Grimecraft's POKÉP mixtape [ www.gamechops.com/grimecraft-pokep/ ], when the idea grew much larger. It started with a funky Daft Punk bassline and a simple sample recorded from my 3DS. As I worked, I felt this piece needed a larger sound that the sample could not provide. I re-programmed the piano line via MIDI, and sent it through Kontakt's a beautiful concert grand piano instrument. After that, the mix grew almost on it's own. I reached out to my sister, Emily Davidson, [ emilyplayscello.com ] to record some classical cello to fill out the largely synthetic mix. Her recording filled the song with a beautiful expressive sound I would have never been able to capture with a synth. Finally, I reached out to my friend and bass-player RobKTA, the man behind Club Needlemouse, [ gamechops.com/robkta-club-needlemouse ] to re-record my MIDI bassline with something more organic. The results blew me away, and after bouncing (several) mixes off of bLiNd and spending countless hours mixing, I finally came to settle on the final mix.

Since most of my material is sample-based, I don't often have the opportunity to submit to OCR. I hope the judges enjoy this song as much as I have come to :]

-Chris Davidson

Management & Mastering

www.GameChops.com

Edited February 26, 2015 by Liontamer
closed decision

[Chimpazilla]

There's so much to like about this mix! The piano tone is lovely, the playing expressive. The funky bassline is terrific! The cello is a very nice touch, sounds great.

I may be alone in this thought, but the clicky kick doesn't seem to quite fit the mood here, I think slightly less click would suit the other instrumentation better, more thump and less click. Not a big deal though, small nitpick and personal preference.

Source aplenty, and the track has nice dynamic flow. Love the glitching. Mixing is very good. My only gripe is that even with all the little details and interpretation, the writing still ends up sounding pretty samey, especially since the piano is always the lead, and the chord progressions never change. The little details carry it for me, though. Cool track.

edit 2/10/15: Larry is right. That piano line is VERY similar to the original audio, even the backing strings are nearly identical. Even if this has been carefully re-sequenced, it IS too similar. As lovely as this sounds, I'm switching to NO.

NO

Edited February 10, 2015 by Chimpazilla

[Flexstyle]

EDIT: After considering this very carefully, I'm just going to retract my vote. I can see both sides and would rather not be a deciding voice in this case.

Edited February 19, 2015 by Flexstyle

[Jivemaster]

Production wise this is pretty solid, which we can expect from Cutman. There is some decent low end (the bass guitar in particular is very groovy), and there is some nice use of the frequency spectrum. The elements are quite clear. Source wise this also ticks the boxes.

I'm actually not as ecstatic as the other two when it comes to arrangement on this one. For the majority of the song, we have that piano line upfront and centre - and while it sounds great, it doesn't change all that much. In fact from listening to this a few times now, the piano only plays 3 distinct 4-bar parts, with 1 of those playing a lot more than the others (the main tune which the track starts on). Sure different background elements come in and out along that 4:37 journey, but because that piano is so samey all the way through with hardly any velocity or note changes, it's harder to pay attention to and appreciate the work that has gone into those bits (like the strings and the little blippy synth later on).

I also noticed the kick and hat are on a constant loop, and those bongos play a very similar 1-bar pattern every bar throughout. The bass is also quite loopy as we progress through the song, although to be fair it varies occasionally. This all adds up to the energy in the song being pretty much constant the entire way through, with us being subject to the same patterns quite frequently. The song could really do with a breakdown and change of energy at some point, with the piano making way for something else entirely.

EDIT: Revisiting this after fellow judge analysis - the strong loopy nature of this track and minimal original elements are not enough for this track to pass IMO.

NO

Edited February 11, 2015 by Jivemaster

[OceansAndrew]

Yeah, this feels nice to me, but it's pretty repetitive. There are a lot of nice touches, like the filtered white noise, and the cello brought it to the next level, but the variation is so subtle that it gets lost, and the main aspects of the song repeat over and over. I think some harmonic or melodic shifts would be nice, and lengthening the transitions with a little more polish.

It's good, and i've enjoyed listening to it four times now, but I think there needs to be more polish and have some additional melodic and harmonic personalization.

No, please resubmit

[Palpable]

The kick/bass seemed a little too fat compared to the thinner mid/high frequency instruments, but that was about the only production issue I noticed and it wasn't much of one. It was a really solid listen and I side with the judges that thought there was enough detail in the writing to keep it engaging. On a surface level, the song uses a few ideas over and over, but at any given moment, the bass will play a funky one-time lick or there'll be some subtle glitching. There's tons of moments like that if you start to look for them. I really enjoyed this.

YES

Edit (2/26): Vote changed to NO.

Edited February 26, 2015 by Palpable

[Liontamer]

The way the loop point of the sampled audio is exposed at 1:48 when the sweeping sound in the original just cuts out is a small thing, but it IS sloppy.

Anyway, this is just accent instrumentation layered over the original audio, slightly sped up, and IMO is a violation of our standards. Let's even give it the benefit of the doubt and say (read: pretend) the source tune is recreated not sampled; compared to the source tune, it still sounds the same, there's no meaningful difference in the instrumentation, tone, or textures of the source tune, and the supporting instruments come in at the same time as the original. It might as well be the verbatim original with a slightly faster tempo, and no other substantial arrangement.

2. Your arrangement must be substantial and original.

• Submissions must be different enough from the source material to clearly illustrate the contributions, modifications, and enhancements you have made. Acceptable arrangement often involves more than one of the following techniques:
  
• Modifying the genre, chord progression, instrumentation, rhythms, dynamics, tempo, or overall composition of the source material
  
• Adding original solos, transitions, harmonies, counter-melodies, lyrics, or vocals to the source material
  
• Taking the original game audio and simply adding drum loops or using an existing MIDI file and assigning new instruments does not qualify as substantial or original arrangement.
  

Other than a slight tempo increase, there are 0 meaningful changes to the source tune itself, and none of the added instrumentation directly arranges the source or provides enough substance to stand apart enough from the original. It's an enjoyable track, but a very simplistic arrangement.

I think the key difference between this and "Power Glove (It's So Bad)" is there's nothing creatively done with the sampled source tune audio. It's a perfectly fine track, but it falls outside of what we can accept for OCR. It's not enough to merely take (or recreate) original audio and lightly build around it, you have to substantially arrange the source tune.

NO

Edited February 10, 2015 by Liontamer

[djpretzel]

Let's resolve this conclusively...

As I worked, I felt this piece needed a larger sound that the sample could not provide. I re-programmed the piano line via MIDI, and sent it through Kontakt's a beautiful concert grand piano instrument. After that, the mix grew almost on it's own.

Comparing with the audio... is it being used verbatim, or has the piano been re-programmed? The guitar and strings, ditto?

Let's get scientific here

To me, it sounds like the original isn't JUST sped up, but that the actual timings are altered... however, this CAN be done w/ variaudio and time-stretching, etc.

BETTER CALL SAUL... err... zircon. Let's see what he thinks. Reopening. All artist claims should be dealt with in good faith, trust but verify, etc.

[Palpable]

I'll put it out there that I'm not sure why we should care whether the audio was sampled vs. recreated. What matters is how conservative the arrangement is. If a recording with sampled audio is deemed too conservative, then the exact same recording with a recreated piano line should also be considered too conservative. Just my two cents there. I'm not sure we collectively agreed what is ok, but I made this same point on Foregone Rejuvenation.

That said, I definitely missed how conservative the piano and strings are, whether they are sampled or recreated (and to my ears, they sound sampled). They follow the original track exactly for most of the song. I stand by the fact that the detail work added is strong - the arrangement is not boring. But I agree with Larry that the piano and strings are too large a part of the arrangement, and that not enough interpretation was done here. Props to him for catching it.

NO

[djpretzel]

I'll put it out there that I'm not sure why we should care whether the audio was sampled vs. recreated. What matters is how conservative the arrangement is

A couple reasons:

1. Direct sampling of audio carries with it different copyright implications re: derivative works...
   
2. It speaks to the amount of effort involved - even if recreating a passage verbatim results in material that is unacceptable by our standards, we do know that effort went into AVOIDING direct sampling of audio... this doesn't necessarily hold a huge sway over the judgment, but it's akin to using extensive presets and loops that end up comprising a major percentage of the arrangement.
   

"As I worked, I felt this piece needed a larger sound that the sample could not provide. I re-programmed the piano line via MIDI, and sent it through Kontakt's a beautiful concert grand piano instrument. After that, the mix grew almost on it's own."

Here are the results of our analysis, with A/B comparisons:

• http://ocr.blueblue.fr/files/etc/proof/POKEMOTION_AB1.mp3
  
• http://ocr.blueblue.fr/files/etc/proof/POKEMOTION_AB2.mp3
  
• http://ocr.blueblue.fr/files/etc/proof/POKEMOTION_Analysis1.mp3
  
• http://ocr.blueblue.fr/files/etc/proof/POKEMOTION_Analysis2.mp3
  
• http://ocr.blueblue.fr/files/etc/proof/POKEMOTION_Layer.mp3
  

The first two examples are A/Bing between the submission and the original (beat-matched), and it's downright seamless.

UPDATE 2015-03-25: While unwilling to send us his project file, which would have provided a more conclusive look at the piano part in question, Chris did send us a short video displaying a quantized piano part, running through Kontakt, in the context of the larger Ableton Live project.

Kris and I believe we can hear, at the VERY end of this mix, some doubled-up notes, where the original piano part and potentially a quantized part coincide and there's a kind of phase cancellation effect. It's extremely subtle, but that's what it sounds like it could be... None of this changes the fact that, in the above A/B comparisons, you can clearly hear how the piano line is essentially verbatim from the original. The part that Chris illustrated in his video was quantized, but the attacks of each chord in the original are not. Had the quantized part that Chris added been loud enough to actually hear, the phase cancellation effect observable at the end of the piece would have been more noticeable throughout. In other words, if there's indeed a programmed Kontakt piano part being layered in this mix, it is mixed VERY low and is essentially obscured past recognition or substantial effect. If it were prominent enough to actually hear, then the A/B comparisons linked above wouldn't be seamless at all - there'd be a noticeable change in piano timbre when switching between the mix and the beat-matched source. This is what alerted us to a potential concern regarding the artist's claims about the mix, and it remains true.

Nevertheless, I had written some words here that were too aggressive in construing this situation as involving intentional deception. For this I apologize. It remains unclear to me why we would have been expected to hear the effect of such a piano part, which is essentially completely obscured by the sample of the original recording, but it is entirely possible and even probable that this was simply a miscommunication and not any sort of misdirection. I alone made a bad faith assumption that was ultimately unnecessary & counterproductive, and again I express my regret for this assertion.

The mix still fails to pass OC ReMix standards, primarily due to the extensive reliance on sampled material that well exceeds our threshold for how much of arrangement we want to be coming directly from the submitting artist.