Mega Man X: The Sigma Fortress Remix Gauntlet 2015

[Esperado]

This is exactly why music confuses me sometimes. 

[Usa]

 

Sigma Palace theme kicks in at 0:50.

 

 

Actually, it already starts around 0:33, and the harp arpeggio starting at 0:11 was also borrowed from it. But since the source was mostly chord backings and not much melody, I guess it was easier to miss

[shadow24]

So why does part of the cyber maze song remind me of Wild Arms? Anyone know?

[Sir_NutS]

I hit randomly notes on my keyboard until something sticks.

My turn for that this week.

[Eino Keskitalo]

Actually, it already starts around 0:33, and the harp arpeggio starting at 0:11 was also borrowed from it. But since the source was mostly chord backings and not much melody, I guess it was easier to miss

I tought the harp arps were definitely among the most ear-catching elements of the source, but yeah, not very melodic (the upwards-downwards arp is almost just a scale up and down). Very interesting and challenging source for the voter as well, I had real trouble hearing it in many of the submissions! : )

[WillRock]

I tought the harp arps were definitely among the most ear-catching elements of the source, but yeah, not very melodic (the upwards-downwards arp is almost just a scale up and down). Very interesting and challenging source for the voter as well, I had real trouble hearing it in many of the submissions! : )

 

 

I admit, having to mix that source made it MUCH easier for me to pick out what people used, and even then, I'm pretty sure I missed a lot when I did voting. Shame cause it might have affected my voting if I didn't hear legit parts of source usage but what can you do. 

[Jorito]

I'm guessing that it'll be a lot easier for round 6. At least source usage in my track is pretty straight forward because I had plenty of melodic material to play with

[SuperiorX]

So why does part of the cyber maze song remind me of Wild Arms? Anyone know?

 

hah! I hadn't noticed that until you said something, but the opening drum hits are reminiscent of the Battle Theme and the Cyber Maze melody A reminds me a bit of the main melody in Zed's theme.

[Yami]

This week's Sigma Theme is Sigma Fortress 2 from Mega Man X.

 

At first I wasn't sure how to combine this with my theme, but now I have an idea

[Shadix]

 

hah! I hadn't noticed that until you said something, but the opening drum hits are reminiscent of the Battle Theme and the Cyber Maze melody A reminds me a bit of the main melody in Zed's theme.

 

 

Cyber Core Maze reminds me of Touhou music. This is reflected with the direction of my entry. Ironically, I discovered after making my entry that this actually IS touhou music. 

 

This is too meta for me

[shadow24]

hah! I hadn't noticed that until you said something, but the opening drum hits are reminiscent of the Battle Theme and the Cyber Maze melody A reminds me a bit of the main melody in Zed's theme.

Thanks for figuring this out. It has been bugging me all week lol. Now im looking up wild west themed touhou music. That niche does exist.

[DarkeSword]

Music is up.

[Ivan Hakštok]

I'm going out of town later today and I'm returning tomorrow evening, so if you guys want a listening party before Thursday, someone else should host it.

[Sir_NutS]

Jorito & Tuberz : This one hit me right in the funk.  fucking great.

 

EDIT: I really needed a top 5 instead of a top 3 vote this week.  Sorry ladyWildfire & Mak

[Pavos]

Why is it "Caine Train (Rainy Turtloid vs. Cyber Maze Core [X5])" instead of "Caine Train (Rainy Turtloid in Cyber Maze Core [X5])"?

[Jorito]

Jorito & Tuberz : This one hit me right in the funk.  fucking great.

 

 

Great to hear we (Eino included!) were not the only ones hyped about it

[Ghetto Lee Lewis]

 

Why is it "Caine Train (Rainy Turtloid vs. Cyber Maze Core [X5])" instead of "Caine Train (Rainy Turtloid in Cyber Maze Core [X5])"?

 

 

Apparently Rainy Turtloid has done so much cocaine he thinks the entire world is out to get him.

[wildfire]

Here's the source usage for Cyberfunk:

 

0:00-0:28 - cyber maze core [guitar]

0:29-0:56 - splash warfly [synth]

0:57-1:25 - cyber maze core (guitar), splash warfly [synth]

1:26-1:54 - cyber maze core (with hints of splash warfly) [guitar]

1:55-2:22 - cyber maze core (synth, guitar)

2:23-2:55 - cyber maze core (synth)

2:56-3:27 - cyber maze core (guitar), splash warfly [synth]

[DarkeSword]

 

Why is it "Caine Train (Rainy Turtloid vs. Cyber Maze Core [X5])" instead of "Caine Train (Rainy Turtloid in Cyber Maze Core [X5])"?

 

 

Because I screwed up and didn't check the file names as thoroughly as I should have.

 

Once the competition is over I will be going through and verifying and redoing all the tags and file names to make sure everything is completely correct, and will drop an archival release of the whole competition.

[Shadix]

Hey Darke, I have a crazy idea for future competitions like this that might be unfeasible but I wanted to drop it by you anyways. Obviously my entry this week was a joke, but I noticed with the way the voting is set up that there is an opportunity to make this a more rewarding experience for everyone involved.

 

It'd be interesting to see something where people could rate a mix out of 5 based on different categories, like production, arrangement, source usage, mastering, etc. Maybe bring in one of the OC superstars that aren't participating in the competition like BGC, Zircon, Will Roget, yourself etc every now and then to give some external professional insight on the mixes on a round. Either just adding this to their top 3 picks of creating a simple form for people to check box out.

It would allow people to see where their mix falls short and the areas people liked. Right now, and I had this happen with the Wily competition too, but it kinda feels like you submit your track into a blender and its not heard from again unless you happen to get voted for or participate in the listening party. Luckily people volunteer feedback in the thread, but you kinda have to hunt for it.  Its why my team mates dropped after the first one and I think thats why people might struggle to be motivated to keep submitting with the long format nature of this competition.

 

The consistent feedback could help everyone improve on each other and know what areas they should focus on. Under the current voting scheme its extremely unclear what qualities people liked in a track or why they prioritize certain tracks over others, because different people are listening for different things, but the system doesn't really give any insight into what those things are.

 

Overall, introducing a more categorical system for voting I feel would be beneficial to OCR as an organization as well because it can help you guys refine your content creators to publish the highest quality of mixes. There are a lot of really talented folks in here that have areas, that, with proper focus could turn them into truly top tier composers/musicians. I'm no exception. If any of those guys go on to become great film\tv\game composers, you guys can take pride in knowing you helped foster that talent.

[DarkeSword]

Please keep in mind that right now, the draft, the submissions gathering, the encoding, tagging, and uploading; the voting, vote collection, and tallying; it's all done manually by either you guys or by me. There's very little that's automated about this process for gauntlets, and it's why scoring hasn't gone up yet (I have spreadsheets to help me tally but it's still some manual labor on my part to get everything in there).

 

In my spare time, I'm working on a database-driven web application that will help me manage and automate practically everything having to do with the competitions I personally run on OCR. This is a large-scale, complicated software development project and I'm still in the data design phase of the whole thing. These kinds of ideas can certainly be incorporated into that, but it's a long ways off. I don't anticipate this application being done any time soon.

 

It's also worth noting that the more complicated you make the voting process, the less likely people are to vote at all. VGMix had a lot of these problems with their review system. They attached scores and weights to reviews (through meta-ratings on reviews) which ended up intimidating people from participating, which led to a total crash of the entire system.

 

Building the kind of things you're asking for into the current competition's scoring system is pie-in-the-sky; it sounds great and I understand the intent, but to be honest it's needlessly complicated for the purposes of this competition. If you're interested in detailed feedback about your track, please feel free to ask for specific feedback either here or in the Workshop forum.

 

Nonetheless, I appreciate the comments and aware that feedback can be an issue. Perhaps next Gauntlet we do (rest assured, we will be doing one next year), we can have a one-week break in between blocks where people can be encouraged to review and dissect tracks from the previous three rounds. Maybe setting up a separate review thread per round could also be beneficial next time.

 

On a related note, this December 18th will be 6 year anniversary of the first Grand Robot Master Remix Battle, which is the first of the large scale choose-your-theme competitions that everyone has enjoyed so much over the years. I'm happy to say that I've seen so many awesome artists who've either gotten started or gotten better by competing in these large scale events, many of them honing their skills to the point of going pro and making careers out of music. I'm not pretending to take any credit for any of that, but I will say that I'm proud of everyone that's given the compos a shot and have managed to push their skills higher and higher.

[Sir_NutS]

A few points about what Darke said:

 

As a very active member of VGMix back in the days, I gotta say the problem with the voting in VGMix was that for lesser known or new people, they were less likely to get any ratings or votes than known people because most people were waiting for these known remixers to post something up to upvote it over everything else in a matter of minutes/hours.  Which in turn made new remixers/obscure games get buried minutes after posting.  Moreover, new remixers who posted less-than-great music, were much less likely to get reviews/votes on subsequent postings because people dismissed them as being bad, which didn't take in account that which each piece of music that one person does it's very likely that person will improve.  So the system was heavily weighted towards people who were already good and well known.  I don't think people got intimidated by the scores as everywhere you post music you will probably get feedback which, if you're new, won't be very favorable.

 

Regarding the suggestion about the votes I do agree with Darke that it's needlessly complicated.  What we need is an even easier voting system, something automated, as I'm sure could be something close to what Darke might have in mind.  If we have an automated submission system we might also have an automated voting system, a page with all the remixes for the round and the ability to vote on that same page as you listen.  That would be the easiest approach.

Like Darkesword said, ask for feedback, I know for a fact that there are a lot of helpful people around, I try to give feedback if asked, although I'm not the most knowledgeable person.  Even some of the stuff I've learned over the years has been thanks to the feedback from people in this very competition.  And believe it or not, I've learned quite a few things in this competition we are right now just by talking to the artists about their tracks and mine.

[wildfire]

We could try using some pre-existing service like SurveyMonkey. I don't know if it's truly free or if it would actually work for our needs, but it's a thought. There's also Google Doc Forms.

[Troyificus]

Hey guys, due to some severe family related stuff I won't be remixing this week, Cash will be taking my place instead. 

[DarkeSword]

As a very active member of VGMix back in the days, I gotta say the problem with the voting in VGMix was that for lesser known or new people, they were less likely to get any ratings or votes than known people because most people were waiting for these known remixers to post something up to upvote it over everything else in a matter of minutes/hours.  Which in turn made new remixers/obscure games get buried minutes after posting.  Moreover, new remixers who posted less-than-great music, were much less likely to get reviews/votes on subsequent postings because people dismissed them as being bad, which didn't take in account that which each piece of music that one person does it's very likely that person will improve.  So the system was heavily weighted towards people who were already good and well known.  I don't think people got intimidated by the scores as everywhere you post music you will probably get feedback which, if you're new, won't be very favorable.

 

I don't want to get into the weeds here, but my point wasn't that VGMix was intimidating for artists, it's that it was intimidating for reviewers. They had an admirable goal of encouraging people to review remixes by introducing an RPG-like XP system, but people could essentially upvote/downvote reviews which introduced a whole complicated weighting and scoring system that reviewers themselves had to keep in mind. The whole thing was too much work for most people who just wanted to leave some feedback and that's why people just didn't review that much.

 

Anyway the point is that you can't over-complicate these things. Goodness knows that the Gauntlet-style competitions we run here are already kind of complicated. With regards to voting picking a top three is already hard enough; providing 5-point scoring on a variety of categories for each remix is just going to discourage people from even voting at all.

 

I want to avoid using off-site services for these kinds of things right now because I want the competitions to be something that we do here on the forums so that people come to OC ReMix and participate in the community. I also need that verification that people who are voting are part of the community and not just ringers that people have brought in from other communities; ballot stuffing has been an issue in other competitions, which is why the Competitions Code of Conduct exists in the first place. For the application I'm developing, the goal is to have some kind of authentication bridge that will link your OCR account to the app's own user accounts. Still a long ways off.