Ytmh

I guess I'm a complicated guy, har~

Irony or not, as far as what other people say, it matters to me very little. Bringing up only a couple of examples is exactly what I meant when I said not every song in the entire project was made the same way. And, about publicity? If you're so careful about what you say about the project, as you say you are, why aren't you careful about what gets posted in the official website for quotes and the like as well? Do you think that it doesn't reflect on you, if you allow it yourself on the page (talking about Mr.Gluck's quote)? Might as well make up quotes saying it's fantastic, though what it says already is far more than that! It's not YOU saying it, right? That makes it OK, apparently. Since you're the project coordinator-leader-whatever and you even have your own title there under your forum nickname, why didn't it occur to you that these types of things get obviously traced back to you if it's on a space you personally control (e.g front page of the project!) And as far as your distinction of positive statements and hype? If it's on the official page, it's hype, period. It's a way to catch people who may probably be more interested in it because someone said it was good. This sort of thing turn people away unless they were really set on listening to it in the first place. I know it certainly made it pretty difficult for me to listen to it and try to remember it's really just a bunch of guys doing songs based on a videogame. Oh, for FREE too. ... But well, I suppose you didn't do any hyping. Sure. Yeah, it's called maybe something else in Industro-speak. Sorry but I can't see how having ANYONE say "It doesn’t get much better than this when it comes to arrangement albums... brace yourselves for one of the most impressive and encompassing listening experiences in the world of video game music." on the main page of anything doesn't qualify as hype! What is it then? Positive reviews are positive reviews, but when you're using positive reviews to sell your product in this manner, you're generating hype in favor of it by pushing the review before the actual product, generating expectation and piking interest. You studied this, right? Fabricated hype is cheap, it cheapens the project and despite my criticisms I think the whole thing doesn't deserve such treatment.

It means that to me remixing requires one to have a direction, and an intention, and then see what stuff gets in the way and solve it. Say I want to remix the good'ol Mario 1-1 song, but I'm thinking here I want to do it for a string orchestra and do some other stuff with it. I have a lot of things to solve, which composition techniques am I going to use? Which form will the remix have? How far away from the original is it going to be? Should one be able to recognize the original easily or is that not so important? Because I also picked string orchestra as my instrument(s) I have to start also thinking how I can best use the strings, and seeing which sounds I want and how do I achieve them. It's very much sorting through whatever materials you have, instruments, musical elements, and then seeing "OK, so I'm ditching half of the song because I have enough from just the first ten notes." or "I'm going to take things from all over it, but put them in other orders" and so on. ETC, organization of the material. All of these things are challenges and they all present problems to whatever your goal is "But I want it to sound sorta like techno in this section, should I change instruments just for this or can I somehow produce the effect only with what I originally started?" or "This is not recognizable enough, maybe I should add more elements to fix it, but maybe that also mess up what I have going so far." There's also a pretty interesting point to be made about quoting the original. Should the remix itself actually stand alone and knowing it was originally inspired or uses bits and pieces from another song isn't crucial? How much should I quote the original song, and in what ways? There's also the whole thing with collage technique, where you can just transplant parts and pieces of the original intact and mix THAT around, with other things, or with itself. If, for example, you're trying to make a Requiem out of Super Mario's soundtrack, it's going to get tricky seeing how to employ the original material in ways which don't compromise the character of what you're trying to do. And stuff like "Should I quote the main melody as it is or should it be in minor instead?" is going to start popping up. I hope this helps explain what I mean, and why if you're remixing a rock song as a rock song, with a rock song in mind, this is a lot "easier" than the examples I presented since most of your material is there already by genre characteristics, and there's a lot less to do since the original composer already did most of the work. From that perspective, putting up something really well crafted and thought out in the same genre (I hate this word) becomes extremely difficult, since there are even more problems. So there you go.

So, this project bugs me. I'm here, you know, totally thinking "Yeah, I loved FF7, and the music was nice. This will be fun at least!" and I sat down and listened to the thing. Sure, I got bored halfway through the first disc but I kept listening anyways. Nice production values, it's really trying to get that polished sound out and sure thing it does! It's very nice of everyone who participated to work on something like this and I appreciate the effort. My main beef is that it was hard for me to objectively listen to this as "just the music", because the whole "THIS IS THE BEST THING EVER TO COME OUT OF THIS PAGE!" and "HA! NOW THEY'LL TAKE VIDEOGAME MUSIC SERIOUSLY!!!!" and so on and so forth. I think that's putting way too much context into just a bunch of songs, sorry to say. This isn't breaking any ground anywhere in terms of the music itself, it's just a bunch of people who did what they know how to do pretty well and it works on that level just fine. Tacking so much meaning to it almost made me want to simply not listen to it at all, since I expected pretty much what I DID hear, and I knew I'd be sorely disappointed to expect something like what the hype and descriptions said (and they are pretty vague and full of blanket statements, so that also leads to, you know, interpreting them in whatever way you want!) I think it's pretty childish to have so much talk of what this project "should mean" to the remixing community and the site here and all of that. If everyone is so confident in the piece of work then let it speak for itself! It would certainly be a lot more professional, and if it is really as good as anyone says it is then it would also be nicely humble! For example, I personally think PianoSquall's quote on the main page is extremely disorienting. How is anyone going to take that seriously? Saviors? Come on, I'm trying here to distance the music from all the nonsense attached to it, but stuff like that isn't helping. So with that out of the way for now, I'll say a little something about the music itself. I said I got bored, and what I meant is that while I see what people here were shooting for, it simply felt like I've heard all of it before millions of times. No, I don't mean that the FF7 soundtrack is old and tired. I'm talking about the actual composition of the arrangements. I'll point out the biggest example, which is the so famous One Winged Angel. I basically was interested in this project for the major reason that I wanted to see how they'd tackle stuff like this precisely due to the popularity of the original. It's a real challenge, I'd say, to take the source material and do something that stands up to its level yet is not the same. So, a lot of the other tracks felt like, in some way, lesser versions of these problems. My problem was that they didn't distance themselves enough from the original material. So when I started hearing the project, it was at first a little interesting, but I quickly started to realize that there was no work done at all to develop the musical material beyond the simple "different rhythm, change instruments, repeat" approach, to put it in very simple words. Of course this isn't the case for all of the remixes presented, but I just kept feeling that so much more could be done with what there was, and since this is a very well known soundtrack it would've been a great opportunity to break some new ground. I think that to really get a kick out of a project that tackles such a difficult soundtrack is to try to push into directions which people aren't expecting, take the source material and really work it and bend it. What I mean is, why couldn't, for example, the one winged angel song been composed and worked in, say, free atonality. You could take parts of the motives through the song, establish them as head-motives and work it in many different ways. It doesn't mean it has to sound like Schönberg or any of those guys, but I'm talking that there's just so much more than jazz, rock, techno or 19th century classical music. And specially considering the original soundtrack itself IS presented in those styles, it really seems to me as lacking imagination and creativity. So back to the point I made about the context again. If the remixing community, this website and all of that really wants to make a mark anywhere, it's going to take a lot more than this. A whole lot more. I personally can't recommend this project as an example of anything other than an effort by a significant number of individuals really just have a great time and do stuff they liked. At least that's what it sounds like, and I think that's a good thing. It is certainly sounding like everyone had a good time making this and all of that. But it's also just as hopeless to really go anywhere for the same reasons. So I can illustrate my point, listen to Gradius in Classic II, Act II. This is excellent use of the material, with many modern techniques and excellent use of the instruments. See also the orchestral album for Samurai Spirits, released by SNK many years ago. Fantastic reworking of the songs, which must've been a pretty big challenge since that soundtrack is extremely stiff! In closure, I again would like to point out that I appreciate this effort to a great degree, and I think it's not bad despite what my personal opinion is. However, to me, remixing is about solving problems. So what problems did this solve? What issues were tackled and solved? This project really had a HUGE issue to begin with, that of it being FF7, and all of this. Was that really tackled the best way it could've been? Does this project stand as tall as the original material in originality, composition and creativity? Those are difficult questions to answer, but in the end it's what distances something that really makes an impact by itself and something that just lives off the impact of something else. If you want to talk about the project, say things about it and push it on Digg and everywhere else on the internet, I'm sure many more people (specially musicians) would be more interested in what the remixers have to say about those questions, and the actual work behind the compositions. Heads up, that's all.

I just gotta add something to this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_mode I think here it explains in pretty good detail how modes work and how they sound like. Generally modal scales have certain special attributes which identify them. It's generally an interval, or something of the such which gives the mode it's character. Modes were generally written back then for regular person's voice, so they don't feature many jumps and the like. It's also one thing that gives modal scales their character, when one sees the rather simple and scale-like movement by degrees rather than using jumps. Mostly to write in a mode one must then understand what characterizes it, and then if one intends to further write in style, one must start thinking that this was regular people (not trained singers, etc) that sung these melodies. As such they can't be too complicated or long. One major trait that characterizes modal melodies and such is that there is generally no leading note. That is, the seventh degree of the scale is generally not a major seventh interval. So there, this should be enough. Study much~

In early romantic and viena classic styles the cadence is always ending in the tonic with the bass note the tonic. IE, no inversion. It's basically just how it was done back then, there are examples of otherwise here and there but the general case is that always the cadence must end with the tonic in root position (tonic in bass.) In the viena school it was very typical to see Dominant to tonic 1st inversion -> subdominant -> dominant > tonic root position, as a conventional cadence. Even so as repeating the last part various times for effect. (Look up Mozart's concertos for examples of this. Beethoven is also a good example, Schumann and Brahms both use this same rule. But late romantic is more complicated harmonically. A good example to see this in practice is looking at Schumann's Album for the Youth and Kinderscenen.) As seen in the last piece from Kinderscenen, it's completely possible to also make a cadence which avoids ending in a classic dominant -> tonic way by means of transposition of the tonic triad, but of course the end WILL have the tonic in the bass (root position) always still. There are cases where the 1st inversion will also be used as a trick(false) cadence, and it goes into whatever else, only to come back to the root position for the end. But this example is not so often found in the viena classic school or in early romantic. It's always important to remember that the reason the tonic is standing in the bass is to give the resolving end chord in the cadence a sense of tonal balance. If the first inversion is used (with the 3rd in bass) the 3rd will want to always move and it gives the chord an unstable nature (and thus its use as a trick/false cadence chord, but more often the tonic parallel (relative minor, or major as the case may be) is preferred in the romantic period.) Under no circumstances an ending chord in these schools will end in a 2nd inversion of the tonic, as the 2nd inversion was only used in very specific ways such as during specific movements of the bass note in relation to the soprano, and also when it is a passing chord in a progression (not in the central beat figure.) It was also used when a cadence used suspension, in which case the 2nd inversion went to the dominant in the suspension, and resolved thus in tonic root position. Later on, with Debussy and those guys the cadence starts taking a much less strict sense. So much so that like in some of the preludes or images, or in many of Satie's works, the cadence is only signaled by use of rhythm or melodic intervals, rather than harmonic functions proper. This work also is impossible to properly analyze in harmonic terms, so these methods don't come as a surprise. The seventh with suspension is also another issue, but as function it serves nothing more than the same function as the dominant chord would. The dominant 7th is always used in the same way as the dominant chord when it is found in root position (8357) but the use for the inversions is much more case-specific depending on what composers are analyzed. The dissonance of the inversions due to the sharp 2nd produced and the consonances produced above and below the 2nd give each inversion a specific character. In this manner it is safe to say that, when the dominant 7th is used, care must be taken as to where it can resolve and how it should resolve. If an inversion is to be used, it must be with justification, like the inversions of the tonic chord the dominant 7th inversions were used by romantic (specially late romantic) composers in very specific ways. There are other things that sometimes show up, and are considered "ok", for example when in the final cadence progression the leading note appears in the alto or tenor, it is POSSIBLE for the leading note to move DOWNWARDS into the 5th, only, if only, the proceeding function is tonic in root position. This is not so often found but it is one of those cases where the leading note can go either way. But when the leading note is in the bass or soprano it MUST always rise. It is thus simply not done to construct a proper cadence because of this that ends in a 1st inversion tonic, due to the nature of the rising 7th. (The dominant in root will have the 5th move downwards into the tonic (or upwards depending on where it is, but always in this fashion.) This consonant interval jump of a 5th in bass to the tonic gives the progression dominant > tonic (root) a very stable ground, so it was preferred.) Another thing that is important to mention about dominant 7ths is the fact that they can appear "verkurz", or shortened. In root position that is to say, for example in C major, the 7th degree chord of B D F can be considered, depending on its function, as a shortened dominant 7th (which means the root note G is omitted.) This is also a possibility, in which case the characteristic dissonance produced by the minor 7th in the chord is gone, and thus the need to resolve strictly to the tonic is also lessened. But this is really something that goes case-by case. General rule is still that dominant goes to tonic regardless of the shortening. If it is shortened it is also likely that it can go from 7th to regular dominant. Go look up some of the works I mentioned, you'll find tons of examples of these things being used there. I hope this clears it up better.

I do everything on Sibelius, and only do minor tweaks when I export the midi to Reason. Mostly it's just a question of properly working with the instruments in reason, but I try to have a finished presentable score of the music in Sibelius BEFORE I export it. I also can't really work with a piano roll, I HAVE to look at notes and stuff. Though I have tried it always ends up me writing it on notes to check what I want to do. Too much work for me trying to change it. Lazy companies not wanting to write good notation software for their sequencers. (Cubase's is hilariously bad, sonar's too...) Also I really recommend anyone serious about composition to sit down and actually write their music outside the computer, because believe it or not the computer actually controls you if you aren't really used to writing stuff outside or having the score in your head previous to writing it. Loosen up the hand too in the process, so when you do get to the whole "making it sound" you are more in control/sure of what you're doing rather than improvising as you go along. Just my opinion anyways.

Or, of course, you can throw out the window conventions and go from D7 (v7) to the Tp (relative minor) or Sp (2nd degree), etc. You can do tons of stuff from a septaccord. Of course, if you ignore the conventions the leading note can screw itself and you can modulate by cycle of 7ths. It really depends what type of music you want to go with. viena classic style is basically focused on the I - V - I "authentic" cadence, basically going through variations of such (IV - V - I, or IV - II - (dominant of the dominant 7) - VI- - V - I) etc but the last example is a lot more romantic. But in essence, the septachord has 2 leading notes, one downwards and one upwards. In C the septachord is G B D F in root position, the F leads to E and the B to C. That is the resolution "proper" with the leading notes. If the F goes up to G, you risk doubling the 5th and that, without a proper reason, is considered an "error," and nevermind of course that if both B and F raise by the same interval you have 5th parallels, which is no-no. There are some specific cases where some resolutions are considered OK, but then you have to check who says what because different theorists think different things. In the end think only that the leading note of the scale (in this case will want to go to C, and F will want to go to the 3rd, e. If from the G B D F position you resolve to C (octave) C G E, you can avoid the issue of the doubling, but there are other rules to take into account. Of course, also this depends on if you have it as an open chord or not, what movements the voices make. Depending which movement you make, the resolution also changes. So long as you end with a I chord in root position the cadence will properly work, regardless of V7 or V. The V7 chord is generally used as artistic preference, there's no stronger or weaker. But go figure, there's a lot of arguments about it because of the double resolution of the dissonance, what goes where and what is the convention. etc. bi.

Well about the synth, I DO have much better string sounds, and I could as well do a little mastering and those johnsons. I honestly don't know if they'd dig it here, but well. It's sorta unlikely, but then again I have no idea if people submit these types of things often. Edit: Well hi thar http://iris.n-lp.com/music/Castl1mix3b.mp3 I did some fixing, so that's that. Too bad it's hard to get it just like I want it to without having real instruments. Oh well. Also I don't have a viola sample I can actually use without projectile vomiting.

Well then. I had some time today so I threw this together: Edit: Original removed because oh god, but here's the better version: http://iris.n-lp.com/music/Castl1mix3b.mp3 And of course, the original: http://iris.n-lp.com/music/Castle%20of%20Illusion%20-%20Clock%20Tower.vgz A few notes about the original and what I did; mostly I took the elements I saw (such as the 3 effect notes during the A part) and elaborated a little bit on each of the significant elements. I didn't use anything too "out there", just a little free reworking of the same elements. I took advantage of the modal aspect of the main melody (with the 7th not used as a leading tone except for the bass harmony which I didn't use, but was found in the original) to free it a little bit in terms of harmony and structure. Some of the rhythm is freer but the piece is still in 4/4, but accents fall syncopated. I haven't had time to write dynamics on it, but there are a few expression marks, but it's a little lost in the silly synth I'm using for it. But overall I think it's OK just to get an idea. I know this song may be a little weird a choice for this kind of thing at first for some but I found it to be extremely good to adapt in modern because of how clear-cut the elements are, without really being boring. The bass harmony in part B when it steps outside of the pedal notes is always without the tonal center (b flat), and that makes those parts by themselves rather interesting. Also the modal minor 7th (a flat) -> natural g is used to preserve the character without overdoing it. The glissando at the end may be a little tacked on, honestly I just found out how to sequence it properly! But alas, it's only in two sections. The original song is presented in pretty clear cut A B A form with a pretty modal-sounding contrast that doesn't really have enough of contrast to be considered part B, but regardless it's A B A. There are no drums in the original, nor percussion elements, which is also a reason I picked this. Well, the overall thing lasts 1 minute and 21 seconds, and I think that it's a pretty respectable exposition of this idea without dragging on for too long. I'm thinking that perhaps if this goes well enough I may try to do a small cycle of variations for the same song all in short durations. But we'll see. I don't know if this should go in what thread but since I already made this one and this is the topic about these things, I figure this'd go here better than elsewhere.

What analoq said is pretty much what I had in mind. Not gimmicky, but stuff that works within the personal style and idea. I think that if I were to approach something, remix-wise, I'd probably try to see the possibilities I want to work with from the get-go. It's not because I can but because sometimes getting away from all the piano-pseudo romantic stuff and guitar solos is constructive. Also it may produce pretty good results. But then, what is it that sounds good and what is good music, I have no idea. Another thing about modern languages is that to a lot of people (a LOT of people) they sound god-awful. But then these people don't really understand what is going on musically. Therefor the split in modern music between pop/old tradition based stuff and the modern stuff from the 20th century. Personally I think that if the materials allow for a working of something in various styles, maybe a post-modernistic "synthesize and apply" method may be worthwhile. That is to say, grab from a lot of places and lay out the materials-techniques together rather than just "this is style blah, here comes style blah2." I'll experiment with a lot of these concepts soon (whenever I have actually any time) and post the results. I think it would be best if I used only 1 single song to based it all on, so it can be much easier to compare. A modern cycle of variations for a single song, or something like that. Or any other ideas are also welcome.

No. You don't have to like the track at all. But to claim the association to Marble Garden Zone is minimal by any theory is both irresponsible and inaccurate. At best it's bullshit, so I called it bullshit. That's nice, but regardless of what you consider bullshit or not, I stated my reasons. What can I say? I don't find any of the character (in terms of the melody for example, which in this mix IS different as it uses different intervals) from the original song in this, so to me they could as well not be related, and that's what I meant. What was taken away, in my opinion was what gave the song its character. That's what I tried to explain, of course if you think otherwise that's fantastic and fine by me. However, I'm not going to say something which I simply don't find in agreement with what I hear in the song.

I suppose I should just say "OMG AWESOME MIX!!!!!!!!1" and get it over with, like the rest of this review thread eh?

Hai guyz, I was wondering. How much acceptance people have to contemporary "classical" music? I was thinking that there is a certain lack of more modern languages in the music on this site and I was wondering if I could as well do something. So far, the problem is that basically I'd need to completely break up the song into elements and in the end build something new from it so it'd not be honestly a remix. It'd be an entirely different composition with basic elements taken from the original (tone material, maybe rhythmic elements, etc.) For example; the games that do use these languages (vagrant story, SOR3, etc) are far too complicated to "remix", and I don't think it's worth it since the originals are best left alone. But, then what CAN I grab to mess with? And the other question is, say I DO end up writing a 12 tone technique+whatever thing based on or using materials from a game's song, I don't think they'll consider it a remix here. It's an interesting question because a lot of game music simply doesn't translate into modern musical languages basically because they're strictly tonal and moreover structure is very defined. So how much of it is a remix if I take just the tonal elements (for example the way I build a tone row, or serialize components) from the original? It'd be a shame if "remixing" was a term so limited here that basically it only covers a tiny little (old) part of music theory and musical language. If anything to put a little more creativity into the mixing process, and in essence really trying to make something of substance with the raw materials. I'm not of the idea that remixing has to be "paying tribute to" or "making the originals better" since to me chiptune should stay chiptune, and I like the way things sound just fine in their original format. The criteria for judgement should be also how the original material is worked and reworked, and how much of it is just copy-pasting and how much of it is careful selection. Take for instance a classical chiptune example that gets remixed over and over; the MM3 intro song. In this composition particularly you have a lot of rhythm elements and tonal elements. The thing is very tonal, pushing towards end of the 19th century romantic into the harmonies that later went into jazz. It's not textbook but almost. So then, what if we took those tonal elements from just the introduction chord/harmony and serialized them (or built a 12 tone-row inspired in such), and then used a similar structure but changed the rhythms. So for example the song would progress from slow to upbeat all the same, but the harmonies would be rather detached from the original tonal basis but technically would still be based on the same material. It would sound different, surely, enough so that most people I guess would not consider it a "remix." But in my opinion, it's exactly this kind of elaborate reworking of the materials that would be very interesting to see. Not just 12 tone or serialism, or any of those things, but even for example a reworking in 18th century counterpoint or Palestrina-inspired vocal counterpoint, etc. So what is people's opinion on this? Honestly, I think the community could benefit from a bigger diversity of musical languages, particularly modern ones. (Yuzo Koshiro used a bunch of this himself in the SOR3 OST, in two particular tracks which are extremely modern in musical language: "Beyond Oasis Early Tune" and "Bad ending" and Hitoshi Sakimoto has a lot of influence from Stravinski and the like, as clearly seen by some of this VS tracks, such as Rosencrantz's theme, etc.)