ReMix:Final Fantasy IV "Time Flies" 6:30

Time flies while you're having fun, or in my case, being consistent AF getting the OCR community's tremendous ReMixes posted! We've paced at an effective streak of 141 days, one track per day since I quietly kicked off this effort on New Year's Eve last year. One of the tremendous developments of 2024 for OCR has been Xaleph joining the staff alongside Pixels & Paradiddles in our new Sage role, as the trio (along with judges Hemophiliac and Emunator) have been guiding the community in weekly Discord audio gatherings to discuss music topic and review tracks. Part of the wisdom Xaleph brings to the table is something Emu's also been newer to, i.e. working quickly & efficiently with collaborators, which Xaleph undoubtedly pulled off in his collaborative Game Set Mash!! sprint with Aeroprism alongside ZackParrish and Xaleph's own musical progeny, Audiomint:

• Arrangers/Composers: Xaleph, Aeroprism
• Lead Guitar: ZackParrish
• Vocals/Lyrics: Audiomint
• Rhythm Guitar: Xaleph

Xaleph led the efforts in streamlining things for yet another tightly structured Final Fantasy psytrance fusion of themes, FF4's "Red Wings" with FF8's "Compression of Time":

"The plan was pretty simple for us and it evolved into a much more complex song. I'd start off the song, Aeroprism would have the slower mid part, and then we'd combine things at the end. This worked great, except we had a 15-minute-long song. I spent a lot of time working with Aeroprism to move his parts to combine them with mine sooner. The goal was to follow the rules of the competition where it's a mashup and not a medley. Even still, there is a "Red Wings" part in the intro and a "CoT" part in the mid, where I put in some "RW" parts to keep the song cohesive. I kept true to the 7/8 (we notated 7/4) and 6/8 parts (we adapted part of the "CoT" to triplets in 4/4 or just like 12/8, I guess... but the end part to 6/4), so there are several time signature changes throughout this song, which made it complex (but, to be honest, I think it helps the song flow, so it ended being an added bonus).

The main reason for delay of submission was that I had Audiomint use the wrong mic when recording the first time. With the correct mic, you can much more easily hear the words (plus some side-chaining and transient shaper work). The words are very simple. I recommend looking at the image because it's hilarious, that's Audiomint's handwriting - previous page was her playing with lyrics, but we agreed to keep it very simple and not verbose. (That's Korean for the "meow" sound, for those who are curious.)

• I keep the source "RW" rhythm moving in various parts (bassline, synth work in "CoT" uses "RW" parts).
• I wanted to use guitar as a kickback to Powerglove's "Red Wings over Baron", which I've liked for a while.
• The 7/8 part is a very abstract version of the 7/8 part of "Red Wings", but I think it fits well.
• Both Aeroprism and I use Reason, so it made collaboration a lot easier than usual.
• We looked at possibly doing a synthwave version as we still have 9 minutes of unused content.

[...] Anyways, thanks to the collaborators, our team, our competitors, and to DarkeSword for holding the competition. We had a blast with this song and it only took a few days to write. I find it interesting how some of the better songs happen when it's condensed focus time (or "Compressed Time", LOL) rather than spending months on a song. I do think to get to the point where it takes a few days, you have to go through some of the longer time in learning, but, once you have a process, it's pretty fast and reliable."

As Xaleph said, in order to trust the process, it's important to establish one in the first place. Having mentioned Emunator before, it's only proper to allow Xaleph's vanquished GSM round 2 foe to bend the knee and acknowledge the compo whoopin' he suffered from this track:

"Honestly, I hate you guys. I don't think I will ever recover - physically, emotionally, financially, spiritually - from the smackdown this track put on me in the first GSM competition. I put out what I consider to be one of the best pieces of music I've ever made, and you just stomped all over it with your stupid synthwave bleeps and psytrance bloops. It's perfectly viable to reject a track on the grounds that it hurts my ears, so why not on the basis of it hurting my feelings?

NO

...

... fine.

It's good. Really good. I find that the team atmosphere of GSM lends itself to tracks that can sometimes feel like a mashup of everybody's ideas, "executive boardroom style", and I can't say that this doesn't feel that way to an extent, but you exercised such a great level of creative control over the parts that you have that it absolutely works in this track's favor. It feels like an adventure, and psytrance is the perfect musical foundation for this kind of approach. It's a genre that relishes in its buildups, breakdowns, and unexpected hard stops and left turns, and man you've got a lot of them here. It helps that every section of the track is engaging and brings something new to the table, but you transition so expertly between them that the time just flies by [Editor's Note: I wrote this out unironically and forgot the name of the remix title. Any puns are entirely coincidental.] This absolutely does not feel like 6 and a half minutes long.

A well earned victory my friends!"

As we said at the start, time indeed flies when you're having fun. It's true whether you're vanquishing opponents in your favorite RPG series or listening to this expertly assembled & gradually evolving combination of classic FF themes. :-) Another grain of truth: both Xaleph/Aeroprism and Emunator's versions are primed to perk your ears up and keep you engaged for the long haul!