ReMix:Lemmings "Extinction Party" 4:34

By DarkEco

Arranging the music of one song...

"Miners and Climbers Disco"

Primary Game: Lemmings (Sunsoft , 1992, GEN), music by Hirohiko Takayama

Posted 2017-05-18, evaluated by the judges panel


Lemmings!! It's been a good while! DarkEco (Jonathan Vernon) makes his OCR debut with this energized EDM/rock hybrid jam:

"From the Mega Drive/Genesis game Lemmings, I bring you my rearrangement of the track "Miners and Climbers Disco." This is my first ever submission to OCR that I actually made almost a year ago but didn't feel confident enough to submit. After eventually posting it publicly, it was receiving generally positive feedback from the kind folks on the OCR Facebook group, which made me consider that I was being too hard on myself. The track itself was what I'd call a "crisis of genre." On one end, I'm heavily inspired by rock music like Joe Satriani, Pink Floyd, early Dream Theater, and Porcupine Tree. On the other end, I'm a lover of electronic music like Infected Mushroom, zircon, and Orbital. On top of all that, I love VGM and get comments from friends that everything I write (which isn't that much) sounds like it should be in a game. So I'm stuck loving genres that are at opposite ends of the music spectrum, and fusing these into a sound that I want to be my own involved a lot of tricky decisions that I'm still plagued by, mainly being the drum sound above everything else. Should it be electronic or acoustic drums? Will it sound too inconsistent to my overall genre if I switch between the two? I'm sure I'm not the only one who's been in this situation. I settled on having a punchy electronic kick with acoustic snare and overheads, but I still don't feel happy with it overall.

The main thing I decided before I started writing any game remixes was that I wanted my remixes to keep the spirit of the track but enhance it in ways that weren't possible when it was made. I'm sure somebody could make a killer smooth jazz rearrangement of this track, but to me that would sound too far from home. It needed to sound fun and upbeat, and fun was really my main goal. I made heavy use of Image-Line's Gross Beat to spice things up. All the gating and tape stop effects on the guitar are coming from that. The entire solo near the end has been put through Gross Beat to make it more snappy and to the beat. I'm not the tightest of players, so it helped fix my timing too. As a guitarist, I felt like I wanted to try new things that I never hear on a guitar. The standard rock sound bores me more then ever these days, so what if I pretended the guitar was any other electronic sound? It's something I am exploring even more now after writing this track. This was very Infected Mushroom-inspired. If you listen to their album The Legend of the Black Shawarma, it makes frequent use of gated, stuttering guitars. The breakdown at 2:03 was quite Pink Floyd and Sonic CD (US)-inspired. You can probably hear the obvious zircon inspiration during the section that starts at 1:19. I'm a huge fan of his delayed sine sounds and really wanted to give it a try myself. His music is actually the reason I pursued any kind of music production myself, so I'd like to thank him for that as it was a potentially life-changing choice for me. After grabbing my own copy of FL Studio, it started snowballing. This mix was created using FL Studio but I've now moved on to using PreSonus Studio One and I'm very happy with the switch. Truth is I'm a lazy writer if given the chance and the pattern system of FL encouraged too much copy/pasting. The workflow for audio recording didn't vibe with me either.

From here, I'm hoping to continue contributing to OCR and already have a couple more mixes that are about 50% finished. "Extinction Party" will probably be quite different to anything I produce in the future as I'm heading down a more electronic rock route than a dance-oriented one. As for how long it will take to finish these, I can't say as I'm currently working on a degree in Sound Design at university, but I'm very excited with the progress on them so far!"

Well, first off, welcome to the party :) And yeah, always good when positive feedback inspires someone to finally submit something - this is fun, genre-bending stuff with some very unique sounds going on. Also cool to see a fellow Studio One user; great workflow, in my opinion. Gario writes:

"Oh hey, I remember this from the FB page - I came in and gave some feedback on it (something like a few paragraphs of feedback, lol). I said it there, and I'll say it again here: this takes a real 'kitchen sink' approach to the track, throwing everything you got at it. There's some rock guitar in there, gated synths, guitar and synth leads, atypical special effects... If you like music, you'll find something to like here."

MindWanderer concurs:

"I'd say it gets overly busy in more than a few places, occasionally triggering some slight overcompression, but otherwise this is pretty fantastic stuff. Lots of cool, creative, entertaining stuff going on here - it never comes across as random, but still manages to keep tossing out the surprises. For a dance-ish sort of track, I didn't think the harmonies were overused at all. I'm looking forward to seeing more from you, too!"

Judges have really been on-point lately; those two votes cover pretty much everything I'd say. I especially liked the lead work, and it's definitely impressive that Jonathan was able to incorporate this many ideas & sounds while maintaining general coherence. Great to see new faces, and cool to see more Lemmings - in the earlier days, it was ReMixed far more often, so this is kinda nostalgic for me in its own right. Definitely looking forward to more from DarkEco!

djpretzel

Discussion

Latest 10 comments/reviews; view the complete thread or post your own.
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WesternZypher
on 2020-05-20 14:22:05

How apropos of our current zeitgeist.

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Gario
on 2017-05-22 12:27:37
On 5/20/2017 at 7:34 PM, DarkEco said:

OH MY GOD THIS ACTUALLY GOT THROUGH?!

YAAAAS QUEEN!

Congrats, by the way ;)

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GuJiaXian
on 2017-05-22 09:38:52

I've had this in my playlist for some time. Congrats on having it officially accepted!

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Wiesty
on 2017-05-21 11:01:47

Yay my first mod review made it on! Congrats dude, great track!!

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Jabadoterry
on 2017-05-21 09:53:38

oh man! friggin awesome, I never thought that this could be remixed, but OH MAN! heck yeah! really catchy, you can still hear the original tune in there, so it hasn't swayed too far, outstanding job, lemmings was always a fond memory of mine.

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DarkEco
on 2017-05-20 22:34:57

OH MY GOD THIS ACTUALLY GOT THROUGH?!

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timaeus222
on 2017-05-18 19:08:42

This reminds me of Yu-Gi-Oh: Duel Generations music; uplifting, with a healthy dose of pump-you-up... except... times two. I like the "interactive" panning on the guitar lead early on (though I think it sits a bit weirdly narrow in the mix). The glitching on the lead guitar also didn't slide under my coolness radar. :) Maybe the kick drum was missing some presence in the upper registers, but overall I think the acoustic non-kick drums and electronic drums meshed pretty well.

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The Nikanoru
on 2017-05-18 17:23:46

Very happy to see this on OCR! I listened to it for the first time almost a year ago on the workshop and I've still got this track on my mix.

Great track, also hoping to hear more from @DarkEco! :)

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Black_Doom
on 2017-05-18 17:01:07

Haha, I remember listening to this track in the workshop a couple of months ago! Very fun track with a very strong groove :) The combination of the guitar and somewhat retro-ish eletronica is pretty neat. Another instant eargasm! Great debut man, hope you'll submit more!

avatar
Liontamer
on 2017-05-18 15:23:53

What did you think? Post your opinion of this ReMix.

Sources Arranged (1 Song)


Primary Game:
Lemmings (Sunsoft , 1992, GEN)
Music by Hirohiko Takayama
Songs:
"Miners and Climbers Disco"

Tags (7)


Genre:
EDM,Rock
Mood:
Energetic
Instrumentation:
Electric Guitar,Synth
Additional:
Effects > Glitching
Time > 4/4 Time Signature

File Information


Name:
Lemmings_Extinction_Party_OC_ReMix.mp3
Size:
6,673,835 bytes
MD5:
5d5a20020f8b3160c69d93201a729efa
Bitrate:
192Kbps
Duration:
4:34

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