54 replies to this topic

[Paragon]

#1 SuperGuitarBros - Sonic the Hedgehog - Acoustonic - good -0.26
#2 Harjawaldar - Heroes of Might and Magic 2 - Un Lamento nella Notte - good -0.5
#3 Hat - Super Mario World - Over World - above average +0.37
#4 thesamareaye - Kingdom Hearts - Dear to My Heart - above average -0.07
#5 Rexy - Conker's Bad Fur Day - Broken Wind Rag - above average -0.09
#6 Ergosonic - Sonic the Hedgehog 3 - Rawater - above average -0.13
#7 Pumpkin King - Sonic the Hedgehog 1, 2, 3, Sonic & Knuckles - Piano Medley - above average -0.26
#8 jaxx - Final Fantasy 7 Crisis Core - Carried to The End - above average -0.32
#9 Daniel Alm - Super Mario 64 - The Landlubberly Guitarist - average +0.43
#10 Juja - Xenogears - Torn Apart - average +0.4
Voters: 7

The removed Donkey Kong Country song.

October is a Free Month!

Songs are due on Saturday, Oct. 27th at 9 PM Eastern US time.

I'll have the site updated (including the banner and everything) soon, but I'll post the topic now.

[Rexy]

Potential first post... because it's 3am and I have a lot to get off my chest.

Definitely a fun turnout. I can understand it generally being more laid back for an event given the theme, but the tunes were a pleasure to hear throughout. Yep, I originally was planning to send in the Conker track for the July free month but like Brandon did this month, I misread the deadline. I know there's people that would think that the text is kind of obvious, but I think it should be a little clearer just to make sure it doesn't get mixed up with the listening party date?

Gotta admit, I felt generally okay with the rank. Not quite too sure about the average score though (must've been the lowest one I got, and I've done something more upbeat than I normally would too), but it's probably not worth spilling any of the Panther King's milk over. (damnit with those references...)

The top three for this month ended up being my top three overall, albeit in a slightly different order. And I got to hand it to the Super Guitar Bros for that awesome Sonic medley; flows together, felt so nostalgic, and the performance was very well done between the pair of them. I've seen Aktulua's progress since the VGMix days, and I'm glad he managed to come so far with his recent endeavors with Sascratch; hoping to see more of you two together!

So, free month. Not sure if I'd take part in this one due to being busy with other things, but I'll keep looking out and seeing how it goes. Good luck!

[Brandon Strader]

I was gonna make an acoustic version of Another Winter from Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.

Didn't get the deadline right. Instead I'll be making it for my mom's birthday over the next week or so.

Awesome results, great songs!!!

[Pumpkin King]

Man... As I finally found good time to sit, listen, and write reviews, I find out that the voting period was over! I was wondering why there were problems as I was trying to listen to a song from the link, that wasn't working because they were all being edited. Oh well, sorry for not voting. Honestly, I probably would have voted almost everything with perfect scores. They were that good. I totally enjoyed listening to them. I'll post my reviews right here.


Conker's Bad Fur Day - Broken Wind Rag: I absolutely love it. What great fluid piano playing. I wonder how long it took you to get this down… I don’t think I could do this piece. At least it would take me quite some time to be able to play it. I'd probably need professional training since to me it seems it would be hard to self teach myself this (I'm self taught).

Final Fantasy 7 Crisis Core - Carried to The End: Another very good piece. I don’t know the source tune, but I’m sure this was a great tribute to it. It sounded fantastic and had good performances. Only thing that could make it better would be a vocal performance. It’d be perfect.

Heroes of Might and Magic 2 - Un Lamento nella Notte: This is exactly what makes me want to learn how to play guitar. Maybe one day I’ll take lessons. I don’t think reverb would hurt. Just a little. More for the lead melodies. Not a big deal. It probably would sound better without it. Anyways, this sounded great.

Kingdom Hearts - Dear to My Heart: As I listen to it. Beautiful. Thank you for this. Another amazing piano piece.

Super Mario 64 - The Landlubberly Guitarist: Man, this is another piece that sounds great. I don’t think that reverb is necessary. Either make it more minimal or play around with the settings on the reverb a bit. This is what makes me think that if reverb were added to the Un Lamento nella Notte cover then it wouldn’t be as good. Anyways, who cares. Great performance.

Super Mario World - Over World: Man I love this tune. And it’s quite a good arrangement for it. Great instrumentation. My only complaint… I don’t think the vocals were necessary, haha.

Sonic the Hedgehog - Acoustonic: Man that was good. Other than the awesome performance of course, I thought the transitions were good and creative. Props to you, sir. What a good tribute to some of the best video game music ever composed (in my opinion).

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 - Rawater: Hell yeah! This right away makes me want to play the game. This might be mixed better I think. I don’t know. It sounds great regardless. Seriously, I got chills towards the end.

Xenogears - Torn Apart: Cool piece. I like how you implemented the repeating guitar melody. I do think it would sound better if you put a delay on it. But whatever… nice, but short piece.

[Pumpkin King]

Also, I want to share what I originally wanted to submit for the month. I did a piano cover for Sky Chase Zone from Sonic 2. It wasn't recorded from an actual piano, so that's why I submitted the Sonic piano medley. About that, I don't have great mics for recording music. All I have is a Zoom H2 recorder and a crappy out of tune piano in a bad space. Haha.

Anyways, for anyone that wants to hear more Sonic:

[raubhimself]

Cripes, I didn't realize this was acoustic month. Right up my alley. So far only listened to Acoustonic and I'm loving it.

[edit] holy crap hat!

[thesamareaye]

Awesome stuff this month guys. Like I previously stated, I think that months like these should happen more often.

About my entry: I got the idea to mix "Dearly Beloved" and "Hollow Bastion" together a few months ago. I meant to record and submit it in an earlier month, but lazy old me never got around to it lol. When I saw this month's theme I knew I had to enter; it's right up my alley. It also helps that I now have some new music software that has better sounds than my keyboard. I spent probably about a week working on the arrangement and spent the day of the deadline recording it. I am fairly pleased with the result. I agree with what Bahamut said, the left hand is bland in several parts. I don't really have the knowledge/skill at the moment to really be able to do a whole lot with my left hand when it comes to technique. However, I did intend for my entry to be very laid back and not do a whole lot dynamically. I understand that 8 minutes is a long time for someone to listen to a quiet, emotional piano piece, but I am happy with the emotion that is expressed through my recording. As some others have said, you kind of need to be in a certain mood to listen to it, and that is exactly how I intended it to be. "Dear to My Heart" pretty much sums up my playing style when it comes to piano.

[Pumpkin King]

Awesome stuff this month guys. Like I previously stated, I think that months like these should happen more often.

About my entry: I got the idea to mix "Dearly Beloved" and "Hollow Bastion" together a few months ago. I meant to record and submit it in an earlier month, but lazy old me never got around to it lol. When I saw this month's theme I knew I had to enter; it's right up my alley. It also helps that I now have some new music software that has better sounds than my keyboard. I spent probably about a week working on the arrangement and spent the day of the deadline recording it. I am fairly pleased with the result. I agree with what Bahamut said, the left hand is bland in several parts. I don't really have the knowledge/skill at the moment to really be able to do a whole lot with my left hand when it comes to technique. However, I did intend for my entry to be very laid back and not do a whole lot dynamically. I understand that 8 minutes is a long time for someone to listen to a quiet, emotional piano piece, but I am happy with the emotion that is expressed through my recording. As some others have said, you kind of need to be in a certain mood to listen to it, and that is exactly how I intended it to be. "Dear to My Heart" pretty much sums up my playing style when it comes to piano.

Let me just say, I loved your piece. I'm surprised that you're making excuses for your left hand. I thought it was great, along with the right hand. And I don't think you need to be in a mood to listen to it. Right away it hit me and put me in a nice state of mind. Only thing is maybe it could be shorter. But I personally liked it as long as it was because I love piano stuff.

Both your piece and Rexy's piece were amazing.

[Brandon Strader]

I think people who entered Unplugged Month should submit their songs to OC ReMix. Details on how to do it here.

[thesamareaye]

Awesome stuff this month guys. Like I previously stated, I think that months like these should happen more often.

About my entry: I got the idea to mix "Dearly Beloved" and "Hollow Bastion" together a few months ago. I meant to record and submit it in an earlier month, but lazy old me never got around to it lol. When I saw this month's theme I knew I had to enter; it's right up my alley. It also helps that I now have some new music software that has better sounds than my keyboard. I spent probably about a week working on the arrangement and spent the day of the deadline recording it. I am fairly pleased with the result. I agree with what Bahamut said, the left hand is bland in several parts. I don't really have the knowledge/skill at the moment to really be able to do a whole lot with my left hand when it comes to technique. However, I did intend for my entry to be very laid back and not do a whole lot dynamically. I understand that 8 minutes is a long time for someone to listen to a quiet, emotional piano piece, but I am happy with the emotion that is expressed through my recording. As some others have said, you kind of need to be in a certain mood to listen to it, and that is exactly how I intended it to be. "Dear to My Heart" pretty much sums up my playing style when it comes to piano.

Let me just say, I loved your piece. I'm surprised that you're making excuses for your left hand. I thought it was great, along with the right hand. And I don't think you need to be in a mood to listen to it. Right away it hit me and put me in a nice state of mind. Only thing is maybe it could be shorter. But I personally liked it as long as it was because I love piano stuff.

Both your piece and Rexy's piece were amazing.

Thanks man. Yeah, I didn't intend for my recording to go that long. The biggest reason why it is so long is because most of it is slow, but I don't think I would change it. And you sir are a beastly pianist. And you have a Korg Triton Extreme like me, lol! I noticed you have it standing to the side in your video . What kind of keyboard are you playing?

[VikingGuitar]

Banner FTW.

[jaxx]

I deserved the place I got, wasn't really satisfied with the piece. Performance wasn't the best and the guitar was distorting at times, was going to change this and resubmit but didn't have time. Not up to my personal standard of quality... Kind of regret releasing it, mainly because the original soundtrack deserves so much better.

[Juja]

Eep! Last place two months in a row. What's the record for consecutively taking last place?

Heh, it's okay, though. I fully expected to get last for a few reasons.

First of all, I put this one together really fast (at least it was fast for me). It was about 3 hours before the deadline that I decided I would even enter, and I did end up submitting with only 4 minutes to spare. I was just going through my music folders until I found a song that was simple enough to learn quickly, and I decided that Torn Apart from Xenogears would be an easy one.

I just played along with the actual song instead of actually arranging anything, which I think is probably pretty frowned upon for DoD. I think it was Bahamut that said something about how my song didn't sound personalized, and that's pretty much why. I just learned it quickly and then did a straight cover. I thought it was just going to be an alt, until I got around to practicing the song and realized that it was over 2 minutes.

My bad recording quality is another thing. I recorded all the tracks with my nylon string acoustic and a computer mic from Wal-Mart similar to this (if not this exact model) -

http://bargainez.com...00-computer-mic

I tried noise gating each track to get rid of some of the mic noise, but I don't know if that was a good idea or not from looking at the listening party log. I would've asked Auriplane for some advice on mixing since she's like a mixing encyclopedia, but she wasn't online at the time.

Well, I'll try to put more effort into whatever track I enter next time.

[auriplane]

I would've asked Auriplane for some advice on mixing since she's like a mixing encyclopedia

Haha! Yeah, right.

Actually, they were replacing the floors in here for most of the last week, so I was staying with my brother. I think the contractors are finally done with everything, though, so I probably won't use that as an excuse not to enter DoD again.

Free month!!

EDIT: Love the Heroes 2 track :-D

[Rexy]

@Pumpkin King: Wow, thank you for the comments! In regards to how long it took me to get down that take, that had pretty much been on and off over the course of this month after failing to make the July free month. This take was established on the Monday night prior to the deadline. Even then, while I may have first taken piano lessons as a child, it was around my teens that I grew a knack for ragtime, hence wanting to do those kind of arrangements on occasion.
And I have no idea you were self-taught either; with your performance consistency as of late, I would've thought you gained some great tuition somewhere, but hot damn... I'm glad we're onto something with you

@Juja: You did THAT in 3 hours?! Gotta have to say, it takes balls to do something right in the last minute, and you've got my respect for that. In regards to scoring last 2 months running, again your entry didn't receive my lowest score; in fact I actually loved you for covering that particular source.
I don't think there is some kind of shameful prize for last place consistency, but either way, I'm sure you'll fare better in future months. I believe in you!