ReMix:Rockman & Forte "Monsieur Mega" 3:40

We've migrated to NEW FORUMS!! This is the first of many changes (improvements, we hope!) that you'll be seeing on the site this year, which are being made possible by the generous support of our Patreon backers!

Have a poke around, and if you've never signed up, now's a great time! To celebrate we've got a debut from newcomer RoBKTA (Roberto Bazzoni), who's cooked up a delicious synth-funk retro space jam of the museum intro from Rockman & Forte:

"I started composing this remix as a tune for my 25th birthday, as this year I happen to share the same age as Mega Man's. I worked on it since March to finish it and refine it. I wanted to clash various elements and try something weird: you get DMX drum machines from the 80s, Fender Rhodes pianos but also "space futuristic sounding" synths and old console sounds. Too many inspirations came in while composing this, can't count 'em all, but I worked on it in a way I could experiment different things.

Is a weird kind of mishmash of genres, like I tried to get my usual sound into the dimension of the game, some kind of future-funk… I don't know. Has been quite a challenge, but I'm extremely happy with the result in the end. :) Hope that you'll enjoy it. And pick up the game: sure is hard but is really fun, in my opinion. ;)"

The average listener may only have a passing interest in the specific hardware (actual or sampled!) used in mixes, but in this case the Oberheim DMX drums are integral to the overall sound of the piece, as they're prominent, relatively unprocessed, and DAYUM did Roberto do an excellent job programming some funky beats that use those classic sounds well! Comparisons to Joshua Morse are justified, although this is distinct in a number of ways, not the least of which is the more pared-down & explicitly retro aesthetic. Emunator calls it:

"Overall, I'm a huge fan of this style, it sounds like you're channeling your inner-Joshua Morse in a lot of ways. Excellent rhythmic variation that breathes new life into the slower, simpler groove of the original source. Your chords are killer, really slick work there.

I'm not going to mince over the source usage in this track - it was a risky choice to go over a minute before introducing any of the material from the original track, but once you get to the meat of your mix, the source is present quite a bit and at the end of the day, this certainly feels like a proper remix, regardless of whether it checks out based on stopwatch. Good work dude, keep sending more stuff our way :)"

There's the objective and then there's the intangible, and stopwatching things sometimes doesn't tell the whole story :) Many judges commented on the drums - the graininess/fidelity of the hat samples and the relative volumes - but I have to assume that the artist was simply using a faithful DMX sample library, meaning that those were the original relative volumes of those individual components. This is kinda like when some judges commented on the lower fidelity of Mellotron samples in a couple of Brandon Strader's mixes; you get into this weird evaluative territory where the artist was intentionally opting for a faithful recreation of a (relatively) well-known classic piece of gear, but the production is being analyzed in a bit more of a vacuum. It's an interesting critical/evaluative phenomena to see unfold, but ultimately almost any submission is going to sink or swim regardless of these type of considerations.

This ReMix swims; funky beat, develops well, hard to not to find yourself moving around while listening, and a creative take on the source. Great to see our first submission from RoBKTA, who's got a lot of great VGM arrangements/mixes to his name (https://soundcloud.com/robkta) - be sure to check 'em all out, and here's looking forward to more!