Hiring of Musicians

[Kirill429]

Hello OverClocked ReMix users, arrangers, musicians, fans, and everyone else reading this,

I'm a little new to the site, but not new to the community. I've worked with Materia Collective on numerous cover albums, and I'm a violinist and composer by profession. As I'm listening to more and more covers, I realize how much demand there is for live performers on these tracks. However, let's be honest, none of us have the money to hire live performers for all of our parts, and having mock-ups is acceptable here. 

That's where I was thinking: I'm a violinist, I could knock out about 10-15 of these recordings/day if they're written in a way where the arranger or composer knows exactly what they want from me. Because I can do so many, I can also charge less per recording, to make the same amount of money/day as someone doing 1-2 recordings per day. I usually do professional musicianship at $80-$150 per hour, but because of the volume and excellent cause of this program, I'd be able to charge about $3-$9 per recording of violin part. I think that's really really doable for a lot of our arrangers. 

I'm wondering if we can start a community of rough, for-hire musicians to improve the production quality of OverClocked ReMix remixes etc.? Who would be interested in organizing something like this? I can advertise this idea to my colleagues at Material Collective, and I'm sure some of us would love to have a steady working gig of recording for an hour or two a day and getting paid something for it. 

Is anyone interested in a service like this? Discuss here, and feel free to email me at kirpol@gmail.com or find me on Facebook. 

Kirill Polyanskiy

[Kirill429]

Think about it this way: This allows for an arranger to have a string quartet of live-recorded parts to their specifications for $20 or so.. $5 per player.

It would be up to the arranger to write out the parts neatly enough and articulately and as unambiguously as possible in order for the musicians to play it.

Maybe start-up a forum of submissions to be checked to be ready to record or not. These "cheap" musicians would be in demand, so they wouldn't have a ton of time to look over parts to start out with, so having a couple of string players on-staff to make sure the parts are readable would be pretty cool too.

[Ridiculously Garrett]

I like the idea, not sure that this would fly with OCR though??? I couldn't tell ya.

[AngelCityOutlaw]

I don't really see what the point would be in a separate community.

There is already a sub-forum for recruit and collaboration in which you can find musicians. Plenty of talented instrumentalists have performed on remixes for free, so you'd have to be damn good for someone to consider using a paid alternative. 

I also don't see why anyone would want to pay a musician for a cover tune from which they derive no benefit other than personal satisfaction. OCReMixes promote OCR, are free advertising for the game being covered, and with the monetization on YouTube as I understand it, contributes to keeping OCR going and possibly some to the copyright holder as well. 

I just can't see such a service being successful here; especially not when the forum activity has become so low.

[Kirill429]

Thanks for your input. I guess I thought this community was large enough to support 30-50 full-time musicians through this. And yes, I'm talking about professionals such as myself, my colleagues from music school, and those with an extensive music education who don't usually work for free doing some of these kinds of gigs. Maybe I should reach out to larger composer-based communities and forums instead?

[JohnStacy]

I have a catch-all policy for my rates for things:

1.  The project has a sufficient budget and will be profitable which I charge full price for, an undisclosed (higher than $50) amount per recorded minute per track (4 horn parts would be 4 tracks).  This is mainly soundtracks, albums and projects that usually have a source of funding.

2.  The project has a small budget, and may be profitable but the music is of high quality, well written, and very idiomatic and thoughtfully written.  This is small time soundtracks, albums, and projects that are funded by the people working on them exclusively.  I charge a very small amount for this, more in the area of $20 or less per piece/track.

3.  The project has a small budget, and may be profitable but the music is of questionable or worse quality, poorly written, and not idiomatic or thoughtfully written.  This is small time soundtracks, albums, and projects that are funded by the people working on them exclusively.  Usually I'll decline these gigs unless it's somebody I know.

4.  The project has no budget, and is either limited or not profitable.  This includes OCR and some Materia Collective things, as well as passion projects people do because they love it but not to make money.  I'll record for free for these, mainly because I really love playing and also helping people realize their dreams who can't or don't care to afford a professional musician.

A lot of people at OCR don't care enough to hire professional musicians, since a lot of the music they do is electronic, samples, or they know people who can do what they want already.  This community is hella large, but for the most part it's completely recreational or doesn't require live musicians.

[Kirill429]

Alright, thanks for the awesome input!

I'm going to try and coordinate a start of the kind of community I'm envisioning. Not through this platform, because that doesn't really make sense, but perhaps through a new website or something. I'll figure out details and other things and I'll post on this forum post where to find me/us when it's up and running.

Thank you guys so much for the valuable feedback! 

[HoboKa]

I've commissioned some vocalists before, for Terranigma and Soul Blazer... So I get where you're coming from Kirill4249 Also, contrary to what other people say, it's kind of a good idea to offer $$$, as it's the best way to ensure that a project comes through, unless the collaborator in question has a skewed moral compass.  I don't see any harm in hosting a thread here, but an additional website is an interesting idea. 

Off the beaten path a bit, but I have a secondary proposition.... Allow me to preface this by sayin', there's a lot of remixers *ahem* like me who don't have a talent for scribing notation from ear to paper (or ear to MIDI data, for that matter).  Additionally, I and several others have noted frustration in VGmusic's lack of MIDI data in many games, so there's at least a *small* market for that.  So offering that as a secondary service may be another arm of pursuit to get the ball rollin' - anyone else have thoughts on that?

[Kirill429]

I agree with you in saying that currently the only ways we have of making sure we get the best quality is either to pay the musicians or to know them personally well enough that they'll be able to do it for free as a passion project. In music school, I was taught that even though we enjoy what we're doing, we have spent money to get schooling and training, and that we have the professionalism necessary in order to charge money for our services. 

Well, I can certainly offer my services as a transcriber, engraver, arranger, violinist, and orchestrator. If anyone would like to personally contact me for projects feel free to.. I, like most musicians who offer a good-quality finished product, just don't work for free is all.  

I'll probably take all the engraving work I can handle, and offer my services for pretty cheap too because I want to market to arrangers who don't have the budget for projects, but still want to get as close to professional-quality scores as possible. I do want to have guides available on the website for arrangers and music writers in order for them to improve their writing, and to teach themselves how to get better. Eventually, writers will get to a point where they will learn enough of the shortcuts and house styles to be able to make their sheet music cleanly and efficiently so that performers like me and other musicians can easily sight read their music quickly, record it, and move on to the next piece. The point is to get quick-n-dirty live recordings of strings, vocals, and other instruments that sound awful on MIDI. 

[AngelCityOutlaw]

5 hours ago, HoboKa said:

Also, contrary to what other people say, it's kind of a good idea to offer $$$, as it's the best way to ensure that a project comes through, unless the collaborator in question has a skewed moral compass

I didn't suggest it was a bad idea

I agreed with John

On 6/13/2018 at 8:53 PM, JohnStacy said:

A lot of people at OCR don't care enough to hire professional musicians, since a lot of the music they do is electronic, samples, or they know people who can do what they want already.  This community is hella large, but for the most part it's completely recreational or doesn't require live musicians.

Projects here generally fall into point 4.

[Thirdkoopa]

I like where this idea is going; in particular because I think this would help composers learn how to engrave better for projects, musicians be able to do quick sessions to knock a ton out once they have enough parts in the "Ready" category, and transcription would definitely be good too.

Down to help. Forum administrator of 10+ years.

[Nabeel Ansari]

I think if you had this idea years ago when this community was musically active (instead of just socially active), it would've caught on. Now, the forums are dead and submitted OCR remixes are from people who don't really necessarily even really hang out.

I think also with the existence of Materia Collective, the idea of a supportive community of available live musicians is kind of already filled and there's no need to try and get that started on OCR. Furthermore, the reason Materia attracts musicians is because they do licensed, paid work. Their albums are commercial, paid albums with digital distribution to stores like iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, etc. OCR remixes are only ever free, never distributed, and the copyright issue is kind of always a grey area. I've wanted to collaborate with some Materia musicians in the past and they've always sort of shyed away from it, hinting at the fact that making music for OCR doesn't really seem like a good use of their time because it won't net them anything.

If I wanted to invest in getting good performances in my music, the OCR submission would be a secondary concern, not the primary. Our few paid albums would be the exception, like Megaman 25th Anniversary, Crypt of the Necrodancer, and the Tangledeep Arranged album (not sure if this one is "OCR", but most of the artists are OCR anyway so I included it).

[Meteo Xavier]

There's no point in nay-saying an idea that likely won't cost anyone much of anything substantial that isn't already part of the cost of ambition. Try it. It could fail and die out, but everything eventually does. That's no reason not to try something that, who knows, could revitalize a community that some people think is dead for some reason??? There's new music released all the time here and the boards still show a healthy amount of activity, so don't let anyone sway you into thinking things that are not about the community in a way that might break ambition.

Give it a shot. What's the worst that can happen?

[AngelCityOutlaw]

1 hour ago, Meteo Xavier said:

could revitalize a community that some people think is dead for some reason??? There's new music released all the time here and the boards still show a healthy amount of activity

Five years ago, there were dozens of members online just about round the clock, and conversations happened real-time in the majority of threads in community. Now, I've seen a week or maybe more go by before a new reply is added to the last-active thread. 

 

 

[Meteo Xavier]

So? It's not what it USED to be years ago, that's true, but this community is also still far, far from dead. It ain't dead until you type in ocremix.org and a 404 comes up.

[Kirill429]

Thanks for the support guys! I'm speaking to some people who can help me out, writing up a pr, and gonna get this thing off the ground.