ReMix:Lemmings "Extinction Party" 4:34

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!