quintin3265

I'm always looking for suggestions to make my site better, and I was wondering if anyone here was willing to offer some ideas for improvement.... [REMOVED]

This remix is so vastly improved over the original version that it's almost not the same piece. The first thing that struck me in this latest version is that the guitars are very clear, with none of the distortion that was present in the first versions. The guitar solo at 5 minutes is incredible. The piano also separates very well into each ear in the stereo recording, which is something you rarely hear in remixes. A few things you should not change: The guitar solo at 5 minutes; it sounds great The piano and its stereo mix The arrangement is good almost in its entirety Some things I think could still be improved upon: The drums at 5 minutes, which I previously criticized, have improved, but there is still one drum that still doesn't have enough oomph to it. It doesn't do the guitar justice. It's the one with the syncopated rhythm, and while that drum appears to be present in the rest of the mix, it doesn't sound right at that point. I'm wondering what it would sound like if you simply removed that drum for the duration of the solo. The Dancing Mad part of the remix is too loud, and the dynamic range is too low. Look at the waveform for yourself. At times, it grates on the ears. Metal is supposed to be loud, but perhaps there is some way to slightly reduce the range to bring out the different instruments in the mix. Great work! Feel free to take or ignore my advice however you see fit.

Yeah, I think that at one point there were two different conversations going on: the idea that overclocked remix should design a box like that to be posted on other sites, and the separate idea that other sites should be able to be embedded in overclocked remix's forums. I was talking about the latter, while you were probably referring to the former. While it's a good idea to allow Overclocked's remixes to be posted in its own forums, I'm not sure many people would have much use for such a feature. There are already official threads for those ReMixes asking people "what do you think?" An "outgoing" embed feature might be good for the same use as the "incoming" boxes I posted: to include remixes on external forums, which increases the traffic to both Overclocked and to the external site. My original point, which I think djpretzel missed by posting his deleted post about promotion and competition, is that this is not a zero-sum game. If you design an outgoing embed box, or add the code I specified above to allow incoming embed boxes, people aren't going to think "I'll go here instead of there." Instead, they will think "now I know of two (or three or four) sites that each have different remixes and I can listen to more of the video game music I love," and traffic flows in all directions.

I'm all for adding every site. The more choices, the better. I do have a problem with the second part of that post, though. I'm not going to repost that deleted line because you obviously thought better of it, but for those who did read it, I will comment to say that Wikipedia has a policy of "assume good faith" because they want to build as big a community as possible. Even if what you said was 100% true, which it is not, would that be a horrendous thing? None of the remixers whose songs I have reviewed has criticized me for listening to their works and providing my honest opinion to make their music better. And none of the people on this thread has said anything negative about this suggestion either. Your words state: Overclocked ReMix is an organization dedicated to the appreciation and promotion of video game music as an art form. If you think the suggested embed box is worse than Soundcloud's or YouTube's for improving video game music as an art form, then you should say why and I would have no problem moving on or making improvements. But that's not what you said.

This remix has the potential to be a seminal work. The latest version is amazing, vastly improved compared to the previous take. Everything is crystal clear in this mix, and the guitar solo, contrary to what you might think, is not horrid. There are some things you could do to get the remix up to the absolute top level. First, the guitar solo you mentioned isn't bad in that it was played poorly; instead, I think that the production of it is at issue. It sounds like you were playing guitar in a hallway far away from the mic. If you added post-production on that track, then it should be easy enough to fix by eliminating some reverb. If you decide to replay it, then I think you need to find a place with fewer echoes. Even though that guitar solo is not in the "dancing mad" portion of the remix, listen to the Black Mages' version of Dancing Mad and pay attention to the guitar solo beginning at 10 or 11 minutes. The guitar is clear and rings out above everything else, rather than sounding like it is in a large hallway or auditorium. The drums have received significant improvements. The volume on all the instruments seems right now, but at 5:05, you need different instrumentation on percussion. The melody is right, but the single drum is too weak. I think the mix would be better served if a sharper and slightly louder drumbeat were used there. All in all, I look forward to listening to the next version. Please consider posting this remix to gameremixes.com for three reasons: first, because it is good; second, because I'd like to listen to the 24-bit source on my stereo system; and third, because we could track versions. It would have been easier to rate the improvements had the previous version been easily available.

In response to your question, I wanted to clarify that the suggestion wasn't meant for posting overclocked remixes at all (the opposite of your idea), although embedding overclocked remixes can also be implemented by me as well should you decide to get the initial code working. After reading your post, I'm wondering if we're talking about the same thing. Perhaps I should clarify and you can tell me whether we are or not. There are two reasons for suggesting this idea: first, I noticed that many WIPs never get any replies, which could be reduced if people can listen to them inline in the forums. Second, I'm having difficulty contacting our existing forum admins and people have asked me to set up a forum where they can talk about songs they've posted at game remixes and I don't want to fragment the community with yet more unnecessary forums. It's better to tell them to "go to overclocked's WIP forum." I thought the boxes are most useful in the "work in progress," "competitions," and "albums" forums, where people are constantly posting links to many different sites. Most people (such as me) will never get good enough to get songs to even be looked at by the judges panel, and you can't "upload" songs to overclocked remixes on demand. If such contributors can put a GR box with a "play" button in the post, maybe twice as many listeners will decide "I'll just click on that" and later download the song than would have if they had had to go to a second website. As another example, an album creator might have difficulty determining exactly which tracks are in his album and what state they are in at any given time, because he has to keep a manual list of links that he needs to go offsite to listen to and update his list every time a new version of a work-in-progress emerges. These boxes eliminate the versioning and tracking issues and make it easy for that album creator to kick people from his project for underperformance or laziness. The same goes with compos: contestants could track their songs and get feedback before submission, while organizers can track which songs are being submitted. If the song box is added and catches on, then I have the advantage of being able to make improvements and address complaints, which can't be done at YouTube. As a side note, there is actually another way this could be done: with the <object> tag, so that you have something like <object data="http://url/{param}" width="" height="" type="text/html"></object> . I don't think that changes anything in terms of implementation, but it might be interesting to know.

I think that every year, the Penn State Homecoming Parade has at least two floats with someone dressed up as Mario. I have videos of it in my YouTube uploads, but it would take a long time to figure out where in the 10 hours of clips they actually appear. About ten years ago, I used a theme from the Xbox game "Fable" in a gameshow I was hired to write software for. One of the contestants actually recognized the tune and was able to identify it during the show, which was impressive.

I agree with crypto_magnum that you could change up the song to get rid of the parts that show sample weakness. I actually gave the same advice to a different remixer a few days ago. But when you have a song like this one, where sample quality is the only thing holding it back, it seems like a shame to throw away that work. One thing I wouldn't do is go out and throw down hundreds of dollars on expensive samples or mastering software. The gains you'll get are likely marginal, because sampling cannot yet approach the quality of live instruments. One thing I found, with open-source software for example, is that the commercial products usually rank much higher in the Google search results than the free stuff, regardless of the quality of either. That's probably because the companies pay someone to do search engine optimization, while free developers just concentrate on their products. There have been times when I've been about to pay for something and then have some across something better that's free. Before you give up on this mix or decide to change the composition, why not spend a few hours completely scouring the Internet to make sure there isn't anything better out there? Use several different search engines, use forums, and look down to the fourth or fifth page of results. At the worst, you may find advice from other remixers on how they got around the specific sampling issues you're having.

When I started this song, my first thought was that it came from Lufia II, as the guitars were just like that. That's a compliment, because it's a good game. I agree with just about every other poster that the drums need some work. Even if you made the trivial change of raising their volume, I think this mix would be improved significantly. While I didn't look at frequency curve, I have a feeling that it would be biased towards the high end of the spectrum. Also, at times, it sounded grating, almost as if there was clipping. The waveform doesn't show clipping, but I wonder if increasing the dynamic range a little bit might improve upon things. It is a metal mix, but surely everything doesn't have to be at -3db. I don't know if I would listen to an album of songs like this, because they are just too loud.

I'm impressed by this remix. I don't know why nobody has commented on it yet. I'm not familiar with "Nisus," but what immediately struck me was that you varied up the tune in Dancing Mad. That song has been done so many times that it's difficult to find a remix that doesn't sound similar to some other mix. Unfortunately, production is always the killer around here, because it's usually not possible to pay an orchestra tens of thousands of dollars to play a remix. Nevertheless, I think that this mix could perhaps be improved by simply substituting some samples. For example, I don't think that the drums hit hard enough, or perhaps they aren't loud enough. You definitely get the metal feel from the guitars, but a metal band would have drums that are louder and sharper than these. When I edit movies, one of the ideas I try to follow is to maximize your strengths. I don't have cameras that handle the dark well, so when I do weddings, I edit the videos to avoid dark scenes. I could have tried to fix up the lighting in post-production, but it would take a lot of time and would be difficult to get right. Since a choir is difficult to find, try to minimize the use of the choir, or replace it with other instruments in some or all places. I wouldn't worry so much about trying to find better samples (which may not exist) and instead see what can be done with the stuff you have. One bad sample (or bad scene) can make a song (or video) seem amateur. People usually don't notice if you simply don't include something.

This is an exceptional remix - in fact, it's the best remix of this song that I've heard. I agree with One Winged Angle's comment that there is some Jim Brickman in this music - I think he says that because you actually duplicated some of the notes from one of Brickman's songs. Unfortunately, I can't think which one off the top of my head, nor does it matter. Have you ever considered taking this piano track and putting an orchestra or a hip-hop beat behind it? The piano is a masterpiece, but I still think that many solo piano songs could be improved if other instruments were added as harmony. If you have time, perhaps you should take an hour and just experiment with putting some canned beats or sampled violins or even something unusual like guitars behind it just to see if you could improve this mix further.

I thought that some people here might be interested in an easy way to post remixes and track changes to them. I created a new feature that would allow anyone to embed a remix in this forum, should the admins choose to make a simple 30-second change. You can see a sample of how it works at http://www.shoemakervillage.org/grdemo.html. When some BBcode is inserted, a song box like those displayed in the linked page appears. Clicking inside the boxes plays the songs, displays the user's profile picture, and provides a link to download the lossless or 24-bit version (if the user has uploaded one). Statistics, like song views, are tracked as usual. These boxes are always updated to the latest version of the song, so if the user creates a new version, it automatically updates to the latest version. Older versions are still available by clicking on the "download" link, of course. I tested this in Firefox 16, Chrome 23, Internet Explorer 10, and the Android browser. It does not require Flash, so it works on iPhones as well. The code to add a song listening box would go something like: [gameremix-song]3223[/gameremix-song], where the parameter in the middle is the "song number," which is displayed on the user's profile page. The manual on where in the control panel the custom code feature is is located here: https://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/bbcode_add. All you have to do is type "gameremix-song" in the "Tag" field, and in the "replacement" field, put: <iframe src="http://gameremixes.com/song/embed/number/{param}" width="445" height="155" seamless="seamless" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"> </iframe> Feel free to offer comments. If people use this feature, I can also make a [gameremix-album] or [gameremix-compo] tag. If no admins see this, I'll try posting in a different forum.

If someone is able to do this, they deserve to be looked at as a master composer. One trend I have noticed is that few people here are remixing current games. For example, my 6000-song music collection does not contain any Final Fantasy XIII-2 remixes. The game has been out for a year, so you can't say that it's too soon for people to have played it. My theory is that people don't remix newer songs because game music has advanced so much over the years that an excessive cost would be involved in remixing them. Liberi Fatali would be nearly impossible to do well because one would need a full choir. If the choir wasn't in the remix, then people would see it as a "novice" work. Remixes have to improve upon the original in order to be successful, which is why there are no remixes of "Heart of Chaos" in Final Fantasy XIII-2, for example. I was able to locate one remix of Liberi Fatali, though: http://gameremixes.com/remixes/2264-v1-jayjerkin-Liberi_Falti_or_somethin_like_that_lol. The author obviously made a good effort, and I don't like to criticize musicians for trying, but I think that this artist had little chance of success from the start. The source material was just too high a bar for someone without many musicians and a recording studio. On a side note, this doesn't bode well for the video game remix community, as many current songs have already surpassed this "unattainable" level. I think your idea would have to be modified to not focus on the "chorus" from Liberi Fatali, as you said, but instead use some other part of the song. The drums or violins might be a better choice, but I don't know if they would capture the essence of such a seminal work.