Music Remastered

I don't mind remixes to the extent of some submissions presented by scubateve I just know people's interpretation and remixes can totally obliterate the original song and sounds entirely differ. I don't want this game sounding like it came out of the Sonic 2 OC remix album -_-. How about we at least aim for the songs sounding "like" the originals?

 

Remix
Arrangement

Know the difference. It could save your life!

 

That album was terrible, but the one they did for S3&K was fucking awesome.

 

Updating the song to meet modern standards makes it a remix. Sorry to break it to you, but that's the truth; the term you're looking for is rearrangement, where the song is rearranged to be something different. You may have been led astray by OCR's definition of "remix" (arrogantly dubbed a "ReMix"; yes, there is a difference, apparently), but you can be damn sure that every single song submitted to this project so far is a remix. Period.

That said, you still require individual compositional and aesthetic interpretation to properly adapt something from a Genesis to be something that uses modern synthesizers and means of producing music. It's all about interpretation. In fact, your avatar—and the subsequent legitimate frames produced for the character—is very much an interpretation of the original art; in fact, that's why it's done so well! Gambit's emblems are interpretations as well, and that is why they look so clean, refreshing, and aesthetically appealing—not because they trace the original art the best.

I think it's ridiculous that you keep preaching this "stay true to the original!!!!" bullshit when it's been shown very clearly that the interpreted pieces have shined above and beyond the rest as the very best pieces of work to be submitted to this project. You're fucking poisoning it, and I'm sick of it. There's nothing with trying to stay true to the original, but you're promoting bland, listless submissions over ones with some serious creative effort put into them. THIS IS DETRIMENTAL.

But... you know what, I don't even know why I fucking bother, because every time I feel like speaking out about this kind of crap, you, Master Emerald and Vincent come in here with some long foreign incomprehensible wall of text about how majority rules and that people will absolutely love what you're doing, Canned Karma will come in and say something that appeals to the middle ground and is largely neutral, and everybody the fuck else will start running their mouths like anything they fucking say matters. It's a goddamned cycle.

Whatever. Fuck it. Keep making shit worse.

 

Here's another apt metaphor.

You're not outright tracing the sprites. That would look really bad.

You don't want "traced" music.

 

No need to get into war guys.

Let's review together the Music guidelines Topic:

DOWNLOAD
And that answers on the desired "main-style", we want as main tracks.*

*As you already know we aim for extra music packs, so if you think your personal interpretation is high quality enough, just post it for review!

 

I have to say that that use of "remastered" is quite misleading.

 

And I thought xenophobia was something theorical...

 

I guess it's a good thing I wasn't referring to that post then, isn't it?

 

Thanks so much guys for bringing pointless drama back to this thread. I don't give a damn what you want to label the submissions so far as; 'remaster' or 'remix' isn't something I'm concerned with so long as the end product is quality.

Last I checked Tweaker, trying to be neutral was considered a good way to get to the bottom of conflicts. When you go off on people like that, you're guilty of continuing the very cycle you loathe so much.

If anyone is still interested in actually getting the reason behind this thread back on track, I want a list of which remasters/remixes/whatever the hell you want to call it you guys feel works the best for each of the zones. And why. There's been a lot of submissions made over the past year, and I don't want people complaining that they had no input in the decision making for the final score.

 

Sheesh. So much for respecting other people's opinions.

Some of us prefer and will keep preferring the old classic style, and some will always prefer a mix of old and new fresh stuff. Perhaps we should just make both available when possible?


For example, there were those emblems that were made lately for the level select and the mode select screen. One set of them was very faithful and looked perfect in the eyes of some, and one set differed from the original in more aspects and was liked the most by other people. Both were the best in their respective cathegories, but one of those sets had to be discarded because it happens that most of the staff are more fond of the "new" content.

Same thing happens with music. Some would just want the original compositions sounding much better, while some will rather have some additional content to it. There's been examples of both of these, but in the end the best sounding "faithful" rendition might be discarded in favor of another piece that adds its own stuff, just like it's happening with some of the graphics.



I propose that, when there's good enough stuff from both sides, we keep the best one of the "faithful" submissions and the best of the "fresh" submissions. Then, there could always be an option to toggle between "classic" and "arrange" modes, just to activate one graphic/music or the other when there's two possibilities.

I believe this would be the same that was being planned to do with the remixed music, but in an overall scale.

 

Multiple options certainly seems like the ideal choice—after all, it's something I opted to do with Megamix and it appears to work well in that regard—but I feel that with something like Sonic 2 HD that it matters a lot more to have a very clear, concrete direction of where we want things to go, which means that consistency and clarity of one ideal style is more important than anything else.

You certainly didn't see multiple stylistic options in the original Sonic 2—why should we be any different? It just feels like such a cop-out for uncertainty.

 

Well, the certain thing is that nowadays there's two clashing points of view on remaking a game.

Sonic Jam made it possible to toggle between normal and original modes, for those who found the games too difficult. So it would be nothing new to have this kind of option, something that will get even more people to fully enjoy the whole project, both in and post-development.

 

As long as the intentions of the original artists are captured, then everything is good. I am tempted to say we need people to submit the whole soundtrack for the style to remain consistent, but this isn't necessary. Lots of games have more than one composer (though they likely used the same hardware/software - not possible here). Anyway, art is very ego centric, so as an artist, you have to sometimes please yourself to please others rather than the other way round... you can still go for a style or an intention but if you constrain your own personality then it's going to sound stale. I've come to this realization from lots of things elsewhere, but also the fact my attempts at faithful renditions here weren't well received, and I felt very pressured to stay true to the original but now I realize music can't be constrained, it has to flow freely.

Conclusion: there's 3 ways we can do this - we now have a patchwork of tunes that came from different music set-ups and composers of varying prowess.

1: to make them all better and assimilate them, we should collaborate more! At the moment this is musician vs the world whereas we should probably all pull together in order to produce the tracks rather than one person makes their version and that's the end. Yes we're criticising but maybe if a track had more than one person's input e.g. one person who is good with synths can do that, another who can make really good drums can do that etc. I think this is a good idea. Alternatively, we can pass material around for people to modify. This way, we'll have all the nuances of the different hardware and software, samples, styles etc. over the whole soundtrack.

2: Agree on an aesthetic or artist's style that we want to work towards whilst still using your own creativity. Yes I know we have an example with the Chemical Plant, but does everyone agree this is perfect? Does everyone intend to work towards this style? I noticed pitch bends are missing and replaced with stepped notes, therefore not perfect IMHO though overall, the style works. It's easy to work towards the same thing with the level pieces, as everyone is using virtually the same method and software, but with music it's hard to do that.

3: We accept the music is going to stay as a patchwork of different people's work, and in the same way that remakes of commercial games don't please everyone, we're going to have to put it to vote as was planned from the beginning, and displease a few people. OK?

Maybe we should start a poll thread for all the submissions so far, and commence voting, then the outcome will decide the style we should be aiming for. I.e. the one that pleases the most people. Trouble is, maybe corrupt admins will have multiple votes but oh well... same as real democracy anyway.

 

What's the rush. We haven't got a deadline to meet and there is plenty of time for more remasters to come from people. Someone in a couple of days just might come across this forum and think, "I could do a remaster" and it will be the one confirmed. When the right ones come they will come. I don't think we should be so critical when the game is at it's infancy. It's taken a year for the Sonic sprite sheet to be done and then there's Tails, Knuckles and Super Sonic to be done so it might be a good few years before completion. Until then there is plenty of time.

 

To throw my opinion into the mix, there needs to be more hierarchy to the music submissions.

It's a bit too "open source" right now and it makes things messy. What I believe would be best would go like this:

Musicians audition their best works to project members.
Based on style, competency, and potential, a group of the best musicians are chosen.
Someone who is a sound engineer is put in charge of the musicians.
The sound engineer keeps track of who is doing what and makes suggestions to ensure the tracks all fit with each other.
"Hired" musicians work as a pool and collaborate whenever desired.
As the tracks are finalised, the sound engineer does volume normalisation and final mastering.

Now you have music that fits together both sonically and stylistically.

 

Huh? Admins get just as many votes as any other member—one. There's no option to reset a vote outside of manually editing the SQL, and that's hardly worth all the effort involved.

 

Because at the moment, people are wasting time doing the wrong style or aesthetic or instruments - if we had a large number of opinions it would be clearer as to what to aim for, as at the moment people are aiming at their idea of what it should be, basically we're in the dark right now and we have only a tiny amount of feedback and research going on. There is no deadline, you're right, but it will never get finished if decisions aren't made to begin with!

 

In order to make something like that work it would be very hard to keep open submissions from the public since everything would have to be controlled by staff or something. There have been some pretty amazing takes on some songs from people that have just made an account here, posted their song, and then are never seen again. Of course, I'm fine with any take on the songs as long as I can tell what it originally sounded like. So really, that's basically all I'd base a submission on if I were to do one.



As for songs I'd love to see in the game so far, here's a list of some. I'm not listing any songs done by ScubaSteve since he's on the staff and everyone has probably heard his submissions.

Casino Night Zone
Cinossu's take on that is fucking incredible, though I would love to hear it performed by that band if they're still doing it.

Oil Ocean Zone
Mesmonium's version nails the atmosphere perfectly. This is a case where someone came in, dropped a couple posts and then has never been seen again.

Metropolis Zone
Ransom Rath did this, I believe that's actually a band, or something. Anyways, this is heavy, and it's industrial. It's beautiful.

Death Egg Zone
I love Blast Processing's ambient version. It's a bit situational, I don't know how well it'd work for a full-blown stage if we make one, but I think it's great regardless.


Also, nobody better start thinking that all the songs for the game are done after reading this post. If you want to get technical, yes, we have songs for every spot in the game, but I just don't feel as happy with some of them as I could be.