23 replies to this topic

[Katajun]

 

#1 Prince uf Darkness, Wild_Cat, Connor Engstrom, The Tiberian Sons - Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse - Rhyme of the Ancient mARRRRRiner (Team Pixels) - good +0.48
#2 Ivan Hakštok - Tekken Tag Tournament 2 - Takes Two To Tag (Team Polygons) - good +0.24
#3 newip - Quake 2 - Rage (Team Polygons) - good -0.26
#4 LONELYROLLINGSTARS (ft. Snappleman) - Katamari Damacy - Katamari of Love (Team Polygons) - good -0.35
#5 clansmaneddie - Horizon: Zero Dawn - Our Ancient Sunrise (Team Polygons) - above average +0.3
#6 Powellman - Tekken 2 - Oppa Ganryu Style (Team Polygons) - above average +0.29
#7 Claude D. - Prisoners Of War - Prisoners Of Disco: Getaway from 2010s (Team Pixels) - above average +0.17
#8 Epic Game Music - Final Fantasy 6 - 255 Battles with the Cursed Shield (Team Polygons) - above average -0.09
#9 pingosimon - Jackal - Jackal Stage 2 (Team Pixels) - above average -0.17
#10 zykO - Castlevania 3: Dracula's Curse - The Demonic Chronic (Team Pixels) - above average -0.26
#11 Katamari - Ape Escape, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon - Animal Friends (Team Polygons) - above average -0.37
#12 mithius, Brandon Strader - Giftpia - Giftpia (Team Polygons) - average +0.48
#13 Cyril the Wolf - Deltarune - Jester Revolution (Team Pixels) - average +0.4
#14 Funbuns - Fate/Stay Night - Shirou of Justice (Team Pixels) - average +0.27
#15 Czyszy - Rikki & Vikki - Foxes and Boxes (Team Pixels) - average +0.22
#16 LethalMelody - Mighty Final Fight - Bay Area (Team Pixels) - average +0.12
#17 jmr - Mario Paint - Inchindown Oil Paint (I have Seen the yellow paint) (Team Pixels) - average -0.14
#18 tibone - Outrun - passing breeze (wip) (Team Pixels) - average -0.29
Voters: 25

 

Congrats to Prince uf Darkness, Wild_Cat, Connor Engstrom, The Tiberian Sons, Ivan Hakštok, and newip for winning Pixels Vs. Polygons month! While Team Pixels had more main entries in total, Team Polygons had a higher average placing in the rankings! Who really won this month? You, the listener, of course!

 

This month is a theme we all know and love for some Post-MAG fun: Brevity! Any track from any game is allowed, but your entry must be shorter than 60 seconds in length! Slap something together quick or work your butt off to make that 60 seconds really sparkle, it's up to you. Special thanks to Daemon9623 for creating this month's banner artwork in person at our last listening party.

 

Thanks to Impact Soundworks, the winner will be getting a prize - one of the following ISW libraries: Shreddage Drums, Shreddage Bass 2, Shreddage, Shreddage 2 or Super Audio Cart!

 

Also: Did you know that we now have a Discord server? As well as a whole new Music Player? Keep up with the times!

[Czyszy]

Fun minimalistic banner. Cool to see Claude D and Ivan Hakstok again. The PuD entry is indeed ball-crushingly good. I sincerely thought it was gonna get an "incredible" average score.

[Katajun]

Fun minimalistic banner. Cool to see Claude D and Ivan Hakstok again. The PuD entry is indeed ball-crushingly good. I sincerely thought it was gonna get an "incredible" average score.

Daemon made the banner during one of your alts! https://youtu.be/8eGtB71uUCE?t=7246

[Ivan Hakštok]

First things first, some apologies: I'd like to apologize to the DoD team for vanishing suddenly during August and leaving them hanging for Legacy Month. Some IRL stuff got to me and I needed to take a break from everything.

 

Second, congrats to the Tiberian Sons on the win. Hopefully we can have a rematch next year.

 

 

Now, time to share some info about my track!

 

I have to say I'm more than happy with getting the 2nd place, since I expected my rating to be way lower, not 0.24 behind 1st place. But what put the biggest smile on my face was seeing the dance party that started during the song. Thanks for that.

 

Initially I was thinking about skipping this month because I've been struggling to do anything productive lately, but one thing I really wanted to do was at least to try to defend last year's MAGFest DoD title. I also knew I wanted to cover something from the Tekken series, since playing T7 served me nicely as a replacement hobby instead of making music during the last few months. I started working on 3-4 WIPs of various Tekken tunes, but nothing was working. Then I accidentally stumbled upon a TTT2 gameplay video (I think it was a Yoshimitsu combo compilation), with the Fantastic Theater music playing in the background, and I immediately got some inspiration to do a more guitar-oriented version of it. 

 

I set up my project file and did some transcribing/writing in the middle of December, but I was away from home for most of the month, so I had to do like 90% of recording/sequencing/mixing between December 30th and January 2nd. The acoustic guitar intro was a last minute addition because I wanted to get the track to 4 minutes without just copying another section. The "baila, let me see you dance, baby" vocal clip is from the song Baila Morena by the italian artist Zucchero, and of course there was that Stayin' Alive reference which I had to put in because it just fit so perfectly.

 

I actually recorded a video outlining my project file/equipment/plugins yesterday but it was full of bad english, awkward pauses and my mouse not working properly, so I deleted it. Maybe I'll try recording it again soon.

[finbeard]

yo Hakstok i loved your song & it was great hearing something from you for the first time in a while! especially a musical something!!! i've missed you, dude! we still gotta Tekken The Musical together some time!

 

i also loved that Quake track a lot. The Tiberian Sons track was naturally what you'd expect from artists of their caliber and i'm frankly amazed it didn't crack the "Incredible" ranking in the average. maybe the length was a bit much for some folks? i dug it. huge Symphony X vibes, especially The Odyssey in the combination of orch + rock and the mild nautical theme. lotta fun there.

also special mention i gotta give to clansman's sick 2a03+vocals combo on that horizon zero dawn track (i'm glad someone blurred the pixels/polygons line!), and zyko spitting sick gangster flow. was this secretly Vocals Month? i was shocked by how many vocal songs there were!

 

here's some background on the LONELYROLLINGSTARS entry! it actually morphed out of being a vocals/drums only finbeard solo entry because i can't resist rolling everyone up together~~~

i translated/localized the original lyrics of Katamari of Love/Katamari Love, the ending theme for the first Katamari game. it was originally sung (very well) by Shigeru Matsuzaki, who's a big deal famous singer in Japan, kind of like a Japanese Michael Bolton.

 

Katamari of Love was composed by Yoshihito Yano, the same guy who composed LONELY ROLLING STAR & a lot of the other best things across the Katamari series, and who we had out at MAGFest about... 4 or 5 years ago now? wow, has it been that long? super cool guy, and he writes some amazing (and amazingly cheesy) lyrics. i wanted to do this song as a tribute to him, for writing a lot of music that really resonates with me & for being such a cool positive guy/cool friend to the band when he found out about us.

so i translated the lyrics– it's basically an adapted translation, cuz i didn't translate every line directly/literally (which is why a lot of anime sounds weird & stilted!) and focused on the big picture. the whole middle chat bit, though, is almost exactly what the original says– eat a balanced diet, get more sleep, get a tan! (Shigeru Matsuzaki is well known for his heavy tan, and even references it in some of his other Katamari songs! he's on every soundtrack in the series, if i'm not mistaken!) one big thing is i wanted to keep the syllable count the same as the original Japanese so the melody wouldn't be disrupted, and there were a bunch of places i chose to change sentences a little bit so i could end on the same long held vowels as Matsuzaki, since they sounded nice. i've never translated a song in this way before, and i've been working real hard on my Japanese lately, so i hope it hit that mark of being appropriately cheesy, appropriately true enough to the original, and also sounding natural/believable in English!

LRS were super cool in coming onboard while i had a rough demo coming together & largely just writing their own parts around what i had choir-wise, and i had Snappleman come in for a guest spot to do a cool guitar solo where i extended the outro section. i had a ton of fun making it and i was glad to see people seemed to enjoy it during the listening party! you've just gotta BELIEVE! believe in the heart that believes in you!

 

thanks to everyone who entered for a really memorable listening party & a bunch of really enjoyable tracks! i don't think there was a single track i didn't like this month, that's wild and sets my big gay heart aflutter~

also, if you wanted to hear the vocals + drums only demo version of the song, here's a link!!
 

[angry_polar_bear]

Gotta admit, the Katamari song was the first one I went for when the entries went up

[jmr]

So hey, about my entry.

Back in November I saw this YouTube video about this oil tank in Scotland which holds the world record for the longest echo:


...and this subsequent video with the impulse responses recorded on the site:

and I thought "I HAVE to use this in a song somehow!" (Actually, my first thought was to create a parody "8 bit stereo" youtube channel with NSFs all ran through this reverb, but I showed some restraint on that.)

Around the same time, Ryan Soloby tweeted this and reminded me of this glorious Mario Paint ambient music track:
 

Have you seen the yellow paint?

 

And that set everything in motion - a song that I could practically do a straight cover of that'd still work when slathered with excessive reverb.

I recorded the electric guitars DI and dry, but also with a mic near the strings - the clean parts in the beginning is a blend of the two. The first half of the song has three guitar tracks of all single notes, with pretty much every single dry/wet knob in the guitar rig signal chain gradually turning up through the entire song. My original takes were about 6+ minutes long, but I knew that would be perceived as a painfully long entry so I cut it down to a more sensible two loops plus the convolution reverb tail. The 4:20 run-time was kind of a happy accident as a result of that.

The original SNES song uses the same single waveform sample for both the low bass drones and the high pitch twinkly sounds, so I figured I'd do the same thing - I sampled a few notes from the guitar parts I had already recorded, processed them to make it vaguely synth sounding, and sequenced the parts as close as I could get them. So, like the the original, the core of the entire song is made with just a single instrument.

The second half of the song has an extra layer of chords played with the lowest tuning I could achieve without the strings just flopping around on the guitar. Lots of chord shapes that I'll never remember or be able to recreate.

The song was starting to have a Sigur-Ros-esque vibe, so on Christmas Eve in between family gatherings I recorded a bunch of soft, kind of strained falsetto "ooh" and "ahh" vocals to layer in. Most were used as recorded, but some I shuffled around and ran at double speed with reverse echo subtly in the later sections.

The piano parts were recorded at my mother's house - she has this gloriously out-of-tune upright piano in the dining room. I recorded each chord individually so I could adjust the sample rate to re-pitch it. I did it by ear, purposefully leaving a bit of dissonance in places. Again, some double speed and reverse echo effects were used.

Drums were thrown together at the last minute, and probably the only element that I didn't come out as I envisioned them - because I played to the original SPC which doesn't have a consistent tempo at all, I found it hard making anything other than just loud crashes work, so that's what I did. I used the free Big Mono kit and guitar rig distortion to make it sound even more trashier.

So yeah, this was more of a fun sound design experiment than a song. I'm glad that some folks seemed to genuinely appreciate it for what it was (it was 100% not a troll entry). That said I knew what I was submitting wasn't the typical DoD fare, and that it'd be shredded to bits by the votes, so I'm genuinely surprised that it didn't come in last place! 
 

[pingosimon]

and I thought "I HAVE to use this in a song somehow!" (Actually, my first thought was to create a parody "8 bit stereo" youtube channel with NSFs all ran through this reverb, but I showed some restraint on that.)
 

NOOOO why??  Never restrain yourself from a great joke!

[zyko]

about my track(s)...

 

what can i possibly say, anyway; they're both tragically unfinished, unmixed and my computer broke 48 hours before the deadline and before i could do anything to rectify the issue. the only evidence the songs ever existed are two WIPs about TWO WEEKS older than the state of the songs at the time of DEATH. which is pretty much par for me, i guess. still, i'm totally touched by all the feedback i received for either one whether here, on discord or in person at MAG. truly, y'all make my perpetually undercooked hack ass feel really warm and loved and it means the world to me.

 

i only got to listen through these once on the plane home (since i missed the party ugh) and woooooow, so many good entries. i'll edit this once i've consumed some DEMONIC CHRONIC and given these a proper listen. 

[jmr]

and I thought "I HAVE to use this in a song somehow!" (Actually, my first thought was to create a parody "8 bit stereo" youtube channel with NSFs all ran through this reverb, but I showed some restraint on that.)

NOOOO why??  Never restrain yourself from a great joke!

Because it would have taken effort that I'd have rather put into my entry, haha.

[pingosimon]

Effort into music...instead of memes......

 

Your ideas intrigue me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

[Wild_Cat]

First things first, some apologies: I'd like to apologize to the DoD team for vanishing suddenly during August and leaving them hanging for Legacy Month. Some IRL stuff got to me and I needed to take a break from everything.

 

 

 

Ivan! I'm so happy to see you back among us. We missed you. Also, your track was awesome.

[clansmaneddie]

mag dod was fun even if it was a blurr

 

sorry for missing the results and all ugh, but wow 5th place whoa

 

JMR's was real neat especially after learning where that reverb came from, big stuff

 

As for mine, i got really into Horizon Zero Dawn, one of my favorite games/story/ost's in quite a while.  Fell in love with it.  Dod kinda sprang up last minute, had the idea of blending chip and raw acoustic to shadow the games story and be all DEEP.  Charted Aloy's theme a few months ago for my students, so the song was somewhat fresh.  Modplugged the chips Norrin_Radd style, felt good that i actually knew how to use portomentos so leads could sound expressive.  One taked the acoustic takes and left all blemish to keep it all honest and raw.  Vocals felt very emotional, managed to have reverb in my headphones and boy does that make a difference in performance, makes you feel like you're on a mountain which in this case felt fitting.  I just wanted to blend the sound of chips(pixels) into raw acoustic and vocals(polygons) where you have trouble along the way where the transition happened.  At the end the day, they shared the same melody, the same sunrise, one in the same, ohh wow, what symbol

 

i think the arrangement is cool, but i'm real happy with the cover of Aloy's theme in chip form, that was a hoot to materialize. 

[Prince Uf Darkness]

Ivan, good to have you back! 

 

Ok ok... I saved up a remix for this month. I reinforce that there is NO WAY for me to do a DoD track when I'm on the road with TSO.

 

Believe it or not, I started on this arrangement all the back in June 2017 for Kain Month, and then it occurred to me I wouldn't have the time to finish it so I shelved it for a while. I then brought it back up over last summer, got Wild_Cat to bass up the intro and Connor Engstrom to do a couple solos, and pushed it as a Tiberian Sons track. Maybe we'll play it at MAGfest in a couple years... ?

[Ivan Hakštok]

Thanks for the kind words guys, glad to be back!

 

I just realized that this was also the first song I ever recorded on my Sandberg bass which I bought back in April. So, to celebrate that, here's me playing the song on it!

 

 

Some mistakes and audio glitches here and there but I didn't feel like doing more takes.