*NO* Metal Gear Solid 'Ghosts of Shadow Moses'

[djpretzel]

Hi Dave! Hi Judge's Panel!

Long time no see! Hope everyone is well and dandy!

Ok, lets get down to brass tax.

I'd like to submit a remix called Ghosts of Shadow Moses, from Metal Gear Solid for Playstation. The song remixed is called Discovery, its a song that I hardly even remember from the game, despite having beaten the game well over 40 times, but its on the soundtrack.

Both the remix and the original can be found in

MM I put alot alot of work into this mix cause I really didn't want to submit something again until I really thought it had a chance. This was written in Reason 3.0.4 using pretty much a bunch of subtractors, and alot of time.

I've always liked Discovery ever since I rediscovered it on the OST, and I thought it would work well as some sort of an arpped trance lead, which as you will hear, I converted it into.

I know that things that are highly repatitious usually dont make it onto the site, but please keep in mind that I've tried to keep it on par with major trance construction principles, with proper intro and outro and such, to make mixing easier. I didn't take it to the extreme this time, but its still noticable.

Anyways... I hope that you enjoy it, whether or not its OCR material or not! and also:

My remixer name is Siamey

My real name is Heath Morris

My email address is djsiamey@hotmail.com (although im using my site's account to send this one)

My website is http://www.siamey.com

My userid would be 10956 I guess

Thanks for your time, see ya on the boards.

[zircon]

At first I wasn't feeling this one - the introduction is a little dry and generic. However, it really picks up from there. I was impressed by the production values overall; once the full arsenal of synths and drums were playing, they all fit together REALLY well. Not to mention that none of the sound choices were particularly cliche either (and easy trap to fall into with this genre). This is right up there with sgx and bLiNd in terms of production.

In terms of arrangement, given that the original is so minimal and simple, there's only so much that can be done with it. It seems to me though that Siamey did do a good job with what he was given. The song doesn't radically change the melody or the chord progression, but there's enough going on to qualify as a unique interpretation and rearrangement. I like how it's not overly repetitive and it feels like it's actually going somewhere, whereas a lot of dance/trance subs we get are the same 16-32 bars over and over with no changes to instrumentation or dynamics.

YES

[Liontamer]

Metal Gear Solid Original Game Soundtrack - (03) "Discovery"

Thanks a lot for providing the original. Hearing it, I wasn't sure how one could pull a substantive arrangement of it off. Like Andy, I wasn't impressed with the introduction, which was rather sparse and unprocessed, but things started taking shape more after :30 and began arranging the source material. The various synths and their delays initially felt like a slew of different ideas without much cohesiveness or direction, but after the string synths came in at 1:11, the structure and direction was clearer, i.e. that this was actually still in the buildup phase.

I felt like things were building up to something for 1:52 only to not be given a dramatic change. THAT finally happened at 2:19 when a very synthetic woodwind synth provided the melody. Electrosynths brought in at 2:47 could have used more unique/creative processing so they didn't sound generic. Same with the thin yet rapid-fire drums used briefly from 3:01-3:13. Those kinds of things just made the track seem lacking.

3:14-4:09 had a rather straightforward club style adaptation of the source material, with authentic sounds and rhythmical alterations. Felt like you could have gone beyond the call for that section, which was well adapted, but not particularly creative or interpretive beyond the mere genre adaptation.

I don't get why zircon said the sounds weren't cliche; not everything was, but at the same time there were a lot of sounds/synths that sounded like the club music they'd play on Top 40 stations during the live weekend parties during the mid-to-late '90s. In any case, things were dry from 3:14-on until some delay was added at 3:42 to fill the track out a bit better and provide something that hit a little harder. Solid enough stuff for the last section at 4:09, though I wish it didn't basically repeat the :58 section; you could have played around with it a little bit, that's for sure.

Not a shot against Heath, but I really wouldn't put it up their with bLiNd or SGX; nonetheless, it's put together very capably and sounds authentic. IMO, there are some brief but really bleh sections that I really wish would be tweaked, but I agree with Andy that overall the arrangement evolves a great deal for tackling something so minimal. I'm admittedly lukewarm on it and have liked some of Heath's other work much more, but borderline YES is the word of the day.

Yeah, so TO was mentioning how he wasn't feeling the connections to the source tune in the arrangement, and after more consideration, I'm agreeing with him. The source tune is pretty minimal, but there's more substance to it than what's being arranged here.

The strings at 1:11 are a really liberal take on the strings from :55 of the original, only Heath's had a progression, rather than basically playing the same note over and over again. That's a connection that I heard, but that is in fact too liberal to be of much consequence in the big picture.

At 2:47, you do some straightforward trance-style adaptation of the source melody, but it only lasts until 4:10 and it's not particularly interpretive. 4:10-5:31 just plays off the string similarity again, and the overall approach just doesn't take the content of the original and work with it enough.

You've got the production down, but the arrangement substance is ultimately lacking when I take another look. Develop the arrangement of the source material further so it doesn't feel like an afterthought in this piece.

NO (rework/resubmit)

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EDIT (7/15):

1:18-1:24 in Siamey's mix does in fact coincide with 1:00-1:13 in "Discovery"...both start with the same two-note interval (D and Bb) and move to the same two-note interval (D and A).

Aight, so seeing Dhsu point out the interval similarity with the string work from "Discovery", as well as how central the arranged strings of Heath's are to the foundation of the track, I'm willing to go back to YES on it and admit I was wrong on how substantive that connection was. Thanks to David for the heads-up, as Heath's strings weren't new writing liberally based off of one note, but rather an arrangement playing off of a two-note interval.

Also, the progression of the writing first used from :30-:37, while not something that was really arranging Discovery directly, worked specifically with the strings coming in at 1:11. I think that confirms what Heath was saying in his complaint post: "With this song, one of the only reasonable things to do in a trance format is to reinterpret the chords into a sublead and play around with some little melodies using those chords while you build towards a breakdown where you introduce the main melody." Somewhat contrary to how Vigilante and DarkeSword asessed the track, that's indeed what Heath was doing here, so I defer back to my prior judgment. I think they should reevaluate the track, but at the same time I can see where they're currently coming from. That's the nature of a debatable mix.

I think the whole business of saying "trance is unacceptable at OCR", "remove it from the list of acceptable genres" is stupid and too far-reaching when the point with the judges going NO was that they weren't hearing all of the connections to the source tune overtly (which is what ambient basically mentioned as the real problem in his own comments on the situation; props, Alex, for not handling it like a baby like NeoS or realpolitik). This case had nothing to do with whatever genre the track was, and it's foolish to attribute a NO decision here to genre bias.

In this case the source material was minimal, but I better understand how Heath was meaningfully integrating the two primary elements of the source enough to carry the arrangement portion of the track. It may still feel too liberal for some of the other Js, and I don't disagree with how The Orichalcon presented his case, but I feel Heath handled the dicey question of arrangement fine. When you're working with something minimal, it's important to have the source material tangibly involved throughout the majority of the track, and I can't deny that's the case now. I certainly didn't mind revisiting this to fix my vote.

[Vig]

This is my favorite song off the OST.

Original doesnt come in until 2:25. Up to that point you lay a good foundation, although it fades out before the melody comes in, which is disappointing. Once the beat comes in again it seems like the melody could be any melody...doesnt have anything to do with the background track. the harmony isnt integrated particularly well; sounds clumsy.

This is a close one, because the track on the whole has a lot going for it, but once the melody comes in over the beat, it's not well integrated.

close NO

[Malcos]

I found the arrangement interesting, there were lots of changes and fills which meant that it didn't sound nearly as repetitive as a lot of submissions we get from this genre. I have to give the mixer a lot of credit for that. Production level is good. The source melody didn't fit in as nicely as it could have done, but then I've heard much worse. With that being the only main gripe, I think this is worthy of OC.

YES

[The Orichalcon]

God damn, this is template techno if I ever heard it.

Original doesnt come in until 2:25.

That just summarises the way I feel about this mix in general. It takes absolutely nothing to find a template of a techno song that happens to be in the same key as the source, and pasting the melody over the top, tweaking a few little things and calling it a remix. loopy techno beats, and a relatively clear and clean soundscape doesn't make this a valid remix. This is clearly lowering the bar and allowing groove-bias to overcome better judgement. If this passes, this will be one of the worst decisions in the history of the site. There have been hundreds of songs that have shown better arrangement ideas than this that have been rejected. Am I supposed to believe that having "t3h ph4t b34tz" is supposed to save a piece?

The majority of this mix has nothing to do with the source. This is pretty much a standard job of welding two completely different tracks together and hoping they stick. If you wanted to attempt to incorporate the source in more than 20% of the song, feel free to resubmit, but until then this is a NO.

[DarkeSword]

I'm in agreement with TO on this one. While I like the production on the piece, the arrangement is seriously cookie-cutter and the source takes a long time to come in. Like Vig said, this could really be any melody.

NO

[The Orichalcon]

This is ridiculous, Larry. You can't just keep chopping and changing your vote like this whenever someone makes a semi-coherent argument.

This was closed and gone, and it should've stay closed. This seriously makes the panel look bad.

[Liontamer]

This is ridiculous, Larry. You can't just keep chopping and changing your vote like this whenever someone makes a semi-coherent argument.

This was closed and gone, and it should've stay closed. This seriously makes the panel look bad.

I don't change my vote whenever someone makes a "semi-coherent argument", I change it based on new information I didn't know about or points of view I didn't consider. Like I said, I'm not going to hold to a vote I don't agree with out of sheer stubbornness. Those aren't my principles. If someone else did the same thing here, I wouldn't complain about it.

The Diggi Dis mix from a few months ago was pulled back after we collectively made the wrong call, so I feel no qualms about pulling this back to make sure this is a fair evaluation. Not in terms of genre bias (that's not what happened here), but of looking at the sub from all angles. We look worse if we let a potentially bad vote stand. This is a debatable-enough arrangement approach for a minimal source where it needs to be looked at more.

[Vig]

We look worse if we let a potentially bad vote stand.

[JJT]

Larry asked me to swoop in here and break the tie, so while I have internet access......

This is extremely borderline. That, of course, has been stated before.

I don't think this is that great of an arrangement. And it doesn't have a lot to do with the genre, IMO.

The first 2:25 just doesn't do much harmonically or melodically. I really can't see myself voting YES on any mix where this is the case.

Yes, the opening section alludes to a chord progression in the original, but it's completely devoid of a melody until two minutes in.

In closing, I don't think this is necessarily a crappy piece of music, and I can definetly see people enjoying this.

I just don't see this as an OC ReMix.

NO