*NO* Super Mario 64 "The Maintaining of Absolute Buoyancy" *PRIORITY*

[Liontamer]

Contact Information
Your ReMixer name: Bowlerhat
Your real name: Jorik Bergman (she/her)
Your email address: 
Your website(s): https://jorikbergman.com
Your userid: 30366
Submission Information
Name of game(s) arranged: Super Mario 64
Name of arrangement: The Maintaining of Absolute Buoyancy
Name of individual song(s) arranged: Dire Dire Rocks
Your own comments about the mix, for example the inspiration behind it, how it was made, etc.

Hi, hello! Long time no see! Here’s a remix of mine called “The Maintaining Of Absolute Buoyancy”, remixing Dire Dire Rocks from super mario 64. It’s a big band arrangement, mixing both jazz and pop, featuring an open drum improv by Arno Grootaers and a tenor sax improv by Jens Böckamp. 

So, there’s this phenomenon which I personally experience a lot and endearingly call the “OCRemix effect”. Basically, every time I send a remix to ya’ll I’m really happy and proud of it, and then 1-2 years passes as it goes through the judging process and by the time it gets posted I absolutely hate it. I’m not saying this is the fault of OCRemix, because I know ya’ll work hard as heck, but it’s just something that always tends to happen haha. And the worst thing about it, is that my remixes always get such an amazing and positive reception, which then culminates in this weird mixed feeling of being happy that people are enjoying it and not being able to actually listen to it anymore myself. But the feedback is always super encouraging, so every time this happens I immediately start planning my next remix. 

Anyway, going back in time to 2020, my Zelda’s lullaby remix “To See Like Me” got posted and people loved it. So obviously I really really can’t stand it anymore, I hate the mixing, I hate many of my arrangement choices, and while I do think the band mostly played really well, it unfortunately doesn’t help enough with fixing these other issues I have. So, after this fresh “OCRemix effect” I passionately started working on an arrangement of Dire Dire Docks. Then, the pandemic hit, and I didn’t really feel motivated to finish it. Jump forward a bit further to the beginning of 2021, and I got a bit of motivation back and finished the arrangement. However, I didn’t really have any options available at that time to perform or record the arrangement. So, we jump forward another year to the beginning of 2022. I got funding to record some big band music in September, and decided to use it for my super mario 64 arrangement. However, at this point, some parts of the arrangement were 2 years old, and I hated everything again haha. So, I rewrote the whole thing. I deleted over 2 minutes of music, completely rewrote the ending, made many many changes to the rest of the arrangement as well and basically only a few bars ended up staying the same as it was originally. Then, last September we recorded everything, and now, at the beginning of 2023, 3 years after the release of “To See like Me” was posted and I started with the arrangement, we released the music. Which means I finally get to submit it here to OCRemix (yaaay!). 

I’m a bit worried about the source material percentage here. I would personally argue that everything in the arrangement is source material except for the open drum intro and the beginning of the sax solo. The introduction is all melodies which are derived from Dire Dire Docks, until at 1:42 the full original melody comes in. After that, kind of like in a symphony or sonata, I start doing my own thing with the melody, twisting and turning it in as many interesting directions as I can. Basically, my concept was to develop every single musical idea I used in the intro, and morph it into this 5/4 + 4/4 groove thingy starting at 5:00, which then climaxes at 5:35 and the piece ends. So all of the melodic material is related to the original super mario 64 tune. However, you could also argue that the only source material present in here is from 1:42 to 2:40 which is like, 15% lol. So, if the jury has this viewpoint, which I would totally respect and understand, I could potentially, with a lot of pain in my heart, cut out the open drum intro. I guess that would still not make it to 50%, but it would at least help a little. It would be very unfortunate of course, but for sure an option. 

To help with the judging as well, I made sure that all the other parts of the remix are as impossible to object to as possible. First of all, there’s a fancy video to go along with the arrangement. I’ve attached it to this email, and you can also check it here (https://youtu.be/Gm0VHXPkeP8) on Youtube. Then, the arrangement was recorded in studio, so the sound quality is very clean, and Stefan and I spent a lot of time on the mixing as well, ensuring that all of the little details in orchestration and such came out. Plus, obviously, the musicians playing are freaking fantastic. It was truly a pleasure working with them. I’d like to point out just how amazing they all are by listing our project planning:

We had a rehearsal on a Friday, in total 3 hours, to rehearse 2 pieces. “The Maintaining of Absolute Buoyancy” and an original composition of mine called “The Road With A Thousand Giraffes”. This other piece was a lot longer and more difficult than the super mario remix, so we spent most of the rehearsal on that piece. And that was it, that was all of the rehearsing haha, on Saturday we met up in the studio and recorded. We had 3 takes in total, and this is the 3rd one. All of the other time was spent recording the giraffe music. And we didn’t really fix any tuning or many mistakes post edit as well, 90% of the time mixing was spent on balancing and eq-ing and such. The band simply nailed it in the studio. The biggest issue I had was that I also really liked the 2nd take, especially Jens’ solo in there, so it was mostly just difficult to choose which take to use haha. So yeah, the band really delivered spectacularly in focus and talent and preparation and such. It was a huge honor to work together with them on this music. 

Of course, there was a lot of preparation on my end, getting the funding, booking the studio, collecting the band, writing the music, lay-outing the sheets, mixing the music together with Stefan, working with Gesa on the video, preparing the release… The list goes on and on haha. But I had a lot of fun, and now I have this hip Dire Dire Docks arrangement for big band and some music about giraffes, so I can’t complain.

Also: If you’re interested in checking out the other composition about giraffes, you can check out my bandcamp (https://jorikbergman.bandcamp.com/album/the-road-with-a-thousand-giraffes) or spotify (https://open.spotify.com/album/3N2nb7gRsmqLtqE849ejjS?si=0NdwujhaT8CzuSXkrPRfEg).

The line up: 

Alto (+flute) 1: Julius van Rhee
Alto 2 (+clarinet) : Evgeny Ring
Tenor 1: Jens Böckamp (solo)
Tenor (+clarinet) 2: Joachim Lenhardt
Bari (+bass clarinet): Heiko Bidmon

Trumpet 1: Florian Raepke
Trumpet 2: János Löber
Trumpet 3: Stephan Geiger
Trumpet 4: Marie Tjong-Ayong

Trombone 1: Philipp Schittek
Trombone 2: Matthias Schuller
Trombone 3: Max Steffan
Bass Trombone (+tuba): Els Verbruggen

Piano (+plus rhodes): Moritz Preisler
Guitar: Johannes Sour
Drums: Arno Grootaers (solo)
E-Bass: Louise van den Heuvel

Recording, mixing: Stefan Deistler
Recorded at Loft Köln
Video by Geza Gadow

The true OCRemix jazz fans will recognize 2 names in this list. Arno and Louise also played in “To See Like Me” and drove all the way from Belgium to Germany for this project. 

Another shoutout goes to Jens, who plays the tenor solo. I don’t think it has to be mentioned as it’s very obvious, but he absolutely killed it. Like, seriously, his solo goes so hard haha. I’ve had the pleasure of working with him a few times before, and constantly when I was writing the arrangement I had his sound and improvisation style in mind. And then it all came together in the studio and I just couldn’t be happier. I had a blast working with all of these fantastic musicians, who’re also all very nice and gentle people. I will be satisfied if at least 10% of these feelings come through in the recording. I love arranging video game music, as so many melodies are just so simple and beautiful. With this remix I tried to really treat the melody seriously, not focusing on showing off fancy chords and being complicated, but on melodic development, supported by the orchestration and groove, and resulting in a satisfying overall musical form. I hope it gets a pass on source material, and that y’all enjoy it! And, most importantly I hope that when (if??) it gets posted in 1-2 years I will still enjoy listening to it myself as well :). 

Lots of love

Jorik

 

Edited April 13, 2023 by Liontamer
closed decision

[Liontamer]

I feel you re: the effect of waiting too long to hear back re: a submission and having moved on to the point where you just hear flaws; I know it's not intended as a complaint, but that's definitely a negative part of the length of this process that we're always needing to improve.

For this track, this scenario hits me a lot like a different track that Bowlerhat merely performed on but was also very liberal, "Hey Saria, There's a Fiesta Down in Kokiri Forest".

Jorik essentially said "the source tune usage is apparent from 1:42-2:40, but not elsewhere", and I'd say she's accurate there. Though trying to couch the rest of the track as being influenced by the source tune, I'm not able to make many more connections. I appreciate the track in a vacuum, and love the performances and video, but AFAIK the treatment's too liberal. There's nothing inherently wrong with being very indulgent with a jazz or big band arrangement, but the OC Jazz Collective, for example, tends to stay grounded enough in overt references to the source material to not run into these problems when submitting music to be featured as standalone submissions to be considered with OCR's Submission Standards in mind.

The track was 6:13-long, so I needed to hear "Dire, Dire Docks" referenced for at least need 186.5 seconds for the source material to be dominant in the arrangement. We'll see what the others say, but here was my source usage timestamping:

1:06-1:11, 1:42.5-1:53, 1:54.75-2:06, 2:11-2:37, 5:17.5-5:22.5, 5:38.5-5:42, 5:47.5-5:49, 6:02.5-6:10 = 70.25 seconds or 18.83% overt source usage

Great piece of music, but the arrangement has to stay grounded in the VGM source material, otherwise I'll never vote for it. I don't care whether the source material's referenced during close to 50.01% of the duration of the track or nearly 100%, but it needs to unmistakably be the case that VGM arrangement dominates the presentation by being present for a majority of the track's duration, otherwise you lose sight of what's intended to be tributed vis-a-vis our Submissions Standards for arrangement.

I also appreciate the offer to potentially trim this to ensure the source material dominates the arrangement. If your vision aligns with OCR's standards, that's great, but it's never required or expected that you compromise your vision for your work just to get something posted here.

If you want to make a stronger case, Jorik, you'd need to explicitly point out the A-to-B connections of how this piece references the source tune at most times. Happy to be shown connections I'm massively overlooking, and if we needed to pull this back to revise our votes, I'd be happy to. But as far as I can tell (and without some comparative timestamping to explictly illustrate otherwise), the additional direct source tune connections are not there.

NO

[DarkeSword]

Beautiful track, right up my alley, that sort of dreamy big band sound, but after the initial treatment of the melody it just spiraled away. Source usage just isn't dominant here. NO

[MindWanderer]

Unfortunately I have to concur.  Great performances, really enjoyable as a piece of jazz music, but it's too far removed from Dire Dire Docks to be postable here. I'm sure we could boost it on social media if you shared it some other way, but we just can't host it ourselves.

NO