ReMixer Spotlight: djpretzel

David W. Lloyd, alias djpretzel… hmmm… what can I say about him? He’s the founder of OverClocked ReMix, which means he’s busy almost all the time. He oversees all submissions to the site. He helped compose the music for Kaleidoscope, on XBox Live Arcade. 71 of the remixes on the site are his. He… I’m sorry, this is hard for me. The fangirl in me is trying to run rampant. I mean, I interviewed djpretzel! Ahem…. shoving that down for a second here… Somehow djp managed to find time from his busy schedule to let me interview him. This is the result of that interview. (EEEEEEEE!)

[EXPAND Click here to view my exclusive interview with the man, myth, and legend of OverClocked ReMix, djpretzel!]

Mirby: What started your interest in video game music?

djpretzel: Well, I was already interested in both video games AND music, so it wasn’t an epiphany or revelation, just a natural extension of combining two different loves into a single interest. I remember playing “Smurfs” on Colecovision or “Spy Hunter” on C64 and getting those themes stuck in my head, humming them for the rest of the day. Part of it may simply have been how BAD I was at certain games, and how many times I thus had to hear the same music over and over. When I got a Sega Master System, that was the first game console that was MINE instead of the family’s (I have two older sisters), and that was really the system where themes like OutRun and Space Harrier and Shinobi got me hooked on VGM.

M: Classic tunes.

djp: Absolutely – they were all actually arcade themes, just conversions, except for Alex Kidd and Phantasy Star.

M: What started your interest in remixing?

djp: Now, as a far as remixing/arranging goes, I come from a musical family. Interestingly enough, neither of my parents are particularly musical or play instruments, but my sisters and I were all in high school band, marching band, etc., and we listened to a lot of different music on family trips.

M: I know another David like that…

djp: My sister Emily got a Yamaha PSR home keyboard – I forget the model, but it was actually really cool because it was one of the few that actually let you program your own sounds in a limited version of FM synthesis. She never used that feature, but later on I got into it. She wrote some original stuff, mostly cheesy synth pop since that was all the rage at the time, and I tried to as well. I got more and more into synthesis and electronic music because of this FM programming feature on this PSR – I was fascinated, crappy as it was, that I could actually design my own sounds. Back then eBay didn’t even exist, I think, but I started looking in the classifieds for people selling used music gear, synths in particular. I bought a Casio CZ-101 from some dude in Maryland – my parents had to drive me to pick it up – and that made sound design a lot more fun since there were more options.

M: Sweet!

djp: It didn’t have a sequencer, and I didn’t have a computer, so I needed a way to actually record compositions as MIDI (all my original stuff at this point in time). So I checked the classifieds again and found someone selling an Alesis MMT-8. This is a hardware sequencer – a type of device that doesn’t even really exist anymore, completely replaced by computers or onboard sequencers. It does nothing other than record MIDI, and play it back.

M: I figured as much.

djp: As I later learned, it also had the bad habit of erasing ALL of its storage if the power spiked.

M: That’s not good… hehe…

djp: Anyways, I mention this because the dude I bought the MMT-8 from, we sat down and talked a bit, and he mentioned he was moving and that’s why he was selling it. Then he asked me if I’d be interested in taking his collection of Keyboard magazine off his hands – for free.

M: I smell something a little shady about this…

djp: I played it off casually and said sure, why not, but I was actually really psyched, and for the next couple years I read through all those issues – he had stuff from 1986 through 1993, including old interviews w/ Jan Hammer and Keith Emerson and all sorts of gear reviews. Nah it was completely legit, the guy changed my life by giving me those old magazines, because it got me addicted to synths and music technology in general.

M: Well, I suppose it might be thanks to him we have OCR now, right? Or at least a little bit…

djp: I read those things front to cover, which really gave me an appreciation of where music tech started, and how far it had come. Of course, it’s come twice as far in the time since then, but having that history & appreciation means you don’t take things for granted.

M: Of course not.

djp: Software like Kontakt 4 or Cubase 5 would have been $4000 easily, if you could even come close to matching those features, way back then.

M: Which is a whole lot more these days…

djp: So yeah, I think this guy who gave me hundreds of issues of Keyboard magazine for free, he played some role in the eventual creation of OCR.

M: Somewhere in your subconscious he lurked…

djp: Anyhow, eventually I got a Roland U20, which let me do compositions that started sounding more like actual music, and also an Alesis Datadisk – this device, also now obsolete, was designed specifically to recording incoming MIDI to floppy disks, and then also playing it back. This is all before I had done a single game remix, but I was certainly playing games at the time… this was still the 16-bit era, so I would have been playing Revenge of Shinobi and Phantasy II & III, most likely.

M: Good era.

djp: Anyhow, when each of my sisters turned 16, they got cars. Not superfly fancy cars, but a set of wheels nonetheless, which to a teenager is supposedly the ultimate freedom. I’m not knocking cars by a longshot, but when my turn came around, I decided to delay getting a car so I could get a sampler/workstation instead. That’s when I got my Ensoniq ASR-10.

M: Sounds fancy.

djp: Thing had programmable effects, loaded the OS off floppy, and an LED readout that looked like a Speak & Spell, but man did I love it. And it was really a pretty decent bit of kit – I’d done my research well. I upgraded it to a *whopping* 16MB of memory and attached a 2X SCSI CD-ROM drive and I was on my way!

M: If you don’t mind me asking, did you do early remixes on that thing?

djp: Around the same time I was also getting really involved in the emulation scene – retrogames.com, mame.net, that whole community was a lot more cohesive back then. Nowadays there’s not as much of a scene, since the nostalgia factor has sorta given way to outright piracy masquerading as homebrew, and other issues. I’m getting there.

M: My bad.

djp: Anyways I was a news poster at retrogames.com and was doing my own little emulation-themed comic strip called “OverClocked”, which poked fun at the emulation scene. Believe it or not, there was a lot to poke fun at, although it was also just an excuse for me to get better at Photoshop and 3D Studio MAX (I can’t draw – comic strip was all 3D).

M: Don’t feel bad; I can’t really draw either.

djp: Around that time retrogames.com was covering news about the occassional Commodore 64 remix, and indeed there was at that time something of a scene for those doing primarily electronica arrangements of C64 music. I loved that idea, but I wanted it to be all games, from all systems, in all styles of music.

M: A noble plan.

djp: So I sat down and started doing VGM arrangements on my ASR-10, in my parents basement. I did Phantasy Star III and Shinobi, in two different styles, and decided to start a side project to my comic strip, and call it “OverClocked ReMix” where I would post my own game mixes as well as others’.

M: Including a really strange Bubble Bobble one.

djp: Indeed.

M: And from there, the site grew and expanded into what we know today, right?

djp: That’s the long version of that story, but essentially a series of events combined to get me interested in electronic music and emulation/retrogaming, and those two interests coalesced when I started this side project. Which, yeah, eventually grew much bigger and became my primary focus.

M: And it’s a great community, if I do say so myself.

djp: Thanks.

M: Hey, it’s the truth. After all, OCR gave birth to VGMix, and from there, Dwelling of Duels… Or something like that, right?

djp: Hmm, I have no idea how DoD came to be, but OCR certainly predates both of them.

M: Well I figured since DoD is hosted on VGMix… And I thought I read that VGMix was born out of some discontent members from OCR…

djp: It wasn’t always hosted there, AFAIK, but like I said, OCR was certainly first.

M: I know this. 2000, and it’s been a great 10 years since…

djp: There are a couple versions of that story, but that’s certainly one way to put it. It’s been a busy 10 years, that’s for sure, and we’ve been online & growing for all ten of them.

M: 2000+ remixes, 17 albums, hundreds of members… And an inspiration to many, myself included.

djp: Glad to hear it.

M: Are there any tracks you’ve done that you’re more proud of or like more than the others?

djp: Sure, I think Sonic ‘Love Hurts’ is a mix that’s stood the test of time, and Zelda 64 ‘Pachelbel’s Ganon’ as well… those were both made on my Yamaha Motif, which is what I replaced the ASR-10 with.

M: Are there any remixers that you’d like to collaborate with in the future?

djp: I definitely wanna do something w/ Sixto, and I’ve already got an arrangement in mind that would be perfect for katethegreat19 to sing on.

M: Well I’ll let him know, since I’m his unofficial secretary now…

djp: Heh, he already knows – shooting for a style similar to 80s rock band The Cars.

M: Sadly enough, I know who they are, and I can’t wait.

djp: Hey, great band. Actually Trent Reznor mentioned in a Keyboard interview a long time ago that they were an influence for him, the way they blended synths & guitars.

M: Hey, those free magazines just came in handy!

djp: Yup.

M: Anywho…. Any tracks you’d like to remix in the future?

djp: Yeah, I’ve got several WIPs at various stages.

M: I assume you have a backlog of other tracks too?

djp: First out of the gate is probably gonna be a ReMix from the PSP game Crush. Really awesome puzzler.

M: Sweet!

djp: Besides the stuff I already have WIPs for, I also have some project obligations for Dragon Warrior, Mega Man X, and FF9, so I’m keeping busy.

M: You’re always busy.

djp: Very true.

M: Do you have a favorite track from a game?

djp: Not really… I mean, I get asked that a lot, and music is really apples and oranges, I find it hard to rank overall soundtracks, much less individual songs.

M: In that case, are there any particular tracks that stand out in your mind moreso than others?

djp: “Small Two of Pieces” from Xenogears is what I sometimes say, just so I’m not copping out.

M: I don’t qualify that as copping out; I qualify that as not having a favorite because you may or may not like it all equally, or are smart enought to not play favorites. Do you have a favorite video-game composer?

djp: I don’t think in terms of games as much as I do individual songs… if trying to come up with my favorite game composer, I’d go by the number of songs I absolutely love and that I think work perfectly in the context as well. At the moment, using those criteria, I’d probably say Koji Kondo, but it could be [Nobuo] Uematsu, [Yasunori] Mitsuda, or [Yuzo] Koshiro depending on the mood I’m in.

M: That actually describes how I feel at times regarding this… Final question. What do you enjoy most about remixing?

djp: I’m very melody-centric, so I choose my source material and my overall approach with a focus on that. I think the best part of ReMixing is finding that one note, or passage, when if you change an interval or add a counter-harmony or modify the rhythm, it just makes sense and feels natural. Sometimes, when arranging music, you can end up fighting against a source or struggling with it to take it where you go, which is not the worst thing in the world, but it’s much more enjoyable when things click and fall into place and you can get the ideas in your head turned into music that mirrors them.

M: I have the ideas; I just can never transfer them properly…

djp: Yeah I think that happens to even the best arrangers/composers… Until we get neural brain hookups that can seamlessly translate thought into sound, we’re stuck with making music the hard way. But the hard way is often pretty fun, as it turns out.

M: I know; I’ve made one track myself. It sucks, but the fact I actually went through and made it… That is enough to keep me satisfied

djp: Groovy. Got what you needed? I gotta run.

M: Yeah. Thanks for your time!

djp: No problem.[/EXPAND]

You could find his page on OCR here: Artist: djpretzel (David W. Lloyd), or you could just go to OverClocked ReMix and check out the wonderful community he has founded. This was tough for me to do; tuning out the fangirl EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE is difficult, but I managed to do it for the most part. Stay tuned next time for a review of Rocked ‘n Loaded. I should get it sometime next week, so patience is key, people! Until then, game on!

I recently realized I stole that from Joe Santulli, former writer of Collector’s Closet in Tips & Tricks… if you see this, Joe, I hope you don’t mind!

Russian Website Sells OverClocked ReMix Albums for Profit, djpretzel Urges Cease & Desist


Earlier this week, the OverClocked ReMix community revealed that a Russian website identified as Legalsounds.com has been selling various albums from OCR artists, which has been shown to be a clear infringement of OverClocked ReMix’s Terms of Service.

Administrator David W. Lloyd, also known as djpretzel, disclosed that this is the not the first time that LegalSounds has attempted to sell the same albums and has urged a cease & desist:

Please proceed; clearly they didn’t get the message the first time. This pisses me off just as much, if not more, but what really aggravates me is that any time I spend dealing with it is time better served working on the site & releasing more music… which they’ll then turn around and try to profit from.

I think perhaps we should propose a three strikes rule to them – this is the second time our free content has surfaced on their site, for sale. If it happens again, or if they fail to remove it this time, some sort of petition may be in order. I don’t want to inadvertently publicize their “service,” though…

Further investigation marks Legalsounds.com’s involvement in selling these albums as an ambiguous legal status in its own country, adding to OverClocked ReMix’s dilemma. The ambiguous laws underlined by “License ЛС-3Ðœ-05-09 of the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society” enable the Russian website to sell these albums, as Legalsounds.com pays license fees for all the materials subject to the Law of the Russian Federation “On Copyright and Related Rights”.

By creating a C&D e-mail template to Legalsounds.com, moderator Stevo “Level 99” Bortz has encouraged action for artists who have been unfairly taken advantage of through the illegal distribution of these albums. With a few simple clicks of your mouse, you can contact Legalsounds.com and let them know that they are infringing upon and violating the endless amount of time and effort that these artists have utilized to create the music we have all come to love.

OverClocked ReMix Releases New Policy for Private Album Projects

 

OverClocked ReMix overlord djpretzel has recently released a new policy to announce the source material and directors of private album projects in order to tackle problems with other potential projects of the same game:

We’ve recently decided (duh) that it’s not fair to the community to have these private projects be COMPLETELY private – at the very least, we’re going to announce the names of games being worked on, so would-be directors can decide for themselves whether to start their own projects from the same games. Again, to be clear, these are private albums being run by directors who prefer to do things that way, which IS an option that we respect & allow, so we’re not going to release any additional information about these projects OTHER than the game name, and we ask that everyone respect the wishes of the director(s) who choose to run their projects this way. By the same token, though, we decided that keeping the actual names of the games private was problematic & not transparent.

Currently, the two private projects  that have been approved by OverClocked ReMix are Final Fantasy VI and Banjo Kazooie. To keep up-to-date on the list of current OCR projects that will be released , you can view the thread here. If you happen to be interested in the starting an official project for OCR and/or project approval,  guidelines are also available here.

2010: The Year in ReView

As 2010 draws to a close and 2011 looms on the horizon growing ever closer, now is an appropriate time to look back and reminisce about what made this past year so great. Describing all the myriad events that happened in the world and the universe would take far too long (suffice it to say that there was a particularly notable total lunar eclipse on December 20, being the first such eclipse to fall on a solstice since 1638) so the world of video game music remixing is what we’re going to inspect in this article. Whether it’s OverClocked Remix, ThaSauce, or something not directly associated with the sites or the community, it shall be mentioned. Let the comprehensive guide of 2010’s notable events begin!

First off, January. The year was kicked off with OCR01967, a remix from the game Romancing SaGa 3 entitled “Romancing the Bossa” by OCR veteran Bladiator, AKA Karl Harmdierks. It was the first of many tracks in what was OCR’s tenth birthday. A few days later, ReMix: ThaSauce came out with their first entry of the year, RTS0204, a remix from the infamous game Bad Dudes entitled “My Way Or (Night Version)” by formerly just64helpin and now known as JH Sounds. Also came the first round of the Grand Robot Master Remix Battle, a competition that lasted all the way until June. It produced a lot of great mixes, and tested even the most veteran of remixers. The year was off to a great start.

January faded and February came. With it came the release of Get Acoustic on the fourth, an acoustic jam of The Megas’ 2008 release Get Equipped. The emotional feeling for the disc went from one of energy as with GE to one of somberness. The final track, Lamentations of a War Machine, also had a faster tempo than the GE version. On the 14th came Kaleidoscope, also known as OCRO-0001, the site’s first original soundtrack. A collaboration between Judge Another Soundscape, AKA Mattias Häggström Gerdt and site founder David W. Lloyd, AKA djpretzel, the soundtrack became a huge success. Of course, many tracks were released in this month as well, but none as monumental as those that would be posted in the coming month.

Next up was March, the first month of spring, a month that signals a deliverance from the winter frosts and a rebirth of beauty with the blooming of the trees and flora. On the ides of March, or the 15th, Serious Monkey Business, a Donkey Kong Country 2 remix album, was released.  With it came a few important milestones. The credits remix, entitled “Re-Skewed”, was posted as OCR02000, the two-thousandth mix to be posted on the site. It was also by David Wise, Grant Kirkhope and Robin Beanland, three veteran Rare composers, and Wise was the composer for the soundtrack. To have him remix a track was an honor for the site, and for it to be one of his own tracks was a great way to show that the composers support the community all the way. Another one of the tracks to be posted was entitled “Dance of the Zinger” and was by Jake Kaufman, also known as virt. Several years previous virt and djpretzel had a falling out that caused virt to create his own site known as VGMix. He returned with OCR02005, a glorious dance remix of Flight of the Zinger and returned with style. This wouldn’t be the only remix of his posted this year.

April brought with it the release of “What If This CD…Had Lyrics?” on the 26th. YouTube sensation brentalfloss was well-known for his series of “With Lyrics” videos, each being a remix of some classic gaming tune, but with lyrics. This was his first full album, and it was a great one. Featuring songs from his YouTube archives and others exclusive to the album, it was a perfect melding of old and new and incited nostalgia fits among gamers of all ages. The very next day brought with the the pixietricks/zircon collab (wife and husband team Jillian and Andy Aversa, respectively) “Time to Oil Up,” a remix of Hakan’s Theme from Super Street Fighter IV, which was released on the same day. The only reason this is notable is because it’s the first, and currently only, time that a remix was released on the same day as the game that the source track belongs to.

May had the usual song releases, and on the seventh a Mega Man fan film was released using two Megas songs in its credits roll. It also brought a monumental event in OCR’s history. Just as 2010 brought with it an old anniversary (OCR turned ten), a new one had found its genesis on May 30th. Site founder Lloyd got married to his long-time love Anna Ziskind, thus inspiring congratulatory wishes from all forum visitors, and also a few jokes and the new husband’s expense. This didn’t affect the site in any way, thankfully, as Lloyd kept his schedule just as it was before marriage. The only difference was that he was noticeably happier.

June came, and Essence of Lime was released on the 18th. Originally a solo effort by Ben Hoffman, alias Hylian Lemon, others quickly latched on to the idea of an Oracle of Ages remix album and joined forces with Hoffman. The album was a rousing success, despite the fact that several websites mislabeled it as an Ocarina of Time remix album. It even reached into the world of the game Minecraft, with a small blurb reading “Goddamn Ess. of Lime is badass to listen to.” Plans were quickly made for a companion album, then untitled (now known as Lime of the Season). This one would be an Oracle of Seasons remix album, for Ages can’t be remixed without Seasons. Unfortunately with the joy of the release came sadness as well. VGMix, the brainchild of Kaufman, had died. Dwelling of Duels, a well known monthly competition hosted on VGMix had vanished with its host. Luckily, a lot of people worked to give DoD a proper site, and can now be found at dwellingofduels.net.

>July came and with it, heat. The 4th, known as Independence Day here in America, had a rare quadruple mixpost under the guise of Four for the Fourth. All Sonic remixes, they were lapped up quickly. halc, alias Drew Wheeler, tried his best to remix Labyrinth Zone from the original Sonic and succeeded, and Chemical Plant Zone from Sonic 2 was received warmly and remixed well by PrototypeRaptor, also known as Jonathan Paulsen.  Joshua Morse took on the iconic Ice Cap Zone from Sonic 3 and blew it out of the park, and Level 99, alias Stevo Bortz, took on the Doomsday Zone theme from Sonic and Knuckles. On July 29th came OCRO-0002, the site’s second original soundtrack release. This one was for Trenches, a comical World War I-era tug-of-war style iOS game with some elaboration to make it quite unique. The music was done by OCR forum regular Abadoss, AKA Kenneth Keynes, and his brother Troy. It went extremely well for the two, and was downloaded en masse.

August was a bit of a moody month. On August 15th, a preview of an Armored Core tribute album entitled The Answer was released. It was quite well received. On the 19th, remixing veteran Geoffrey Taucer, alias Jeremy Waters, left the community to pursue his dream job. He promised to check in from time to time, a promise he has kept, but a sad day nonetheless. And then, on August 28th came the unthinkable. The well-known double act between  Duane Zuwala and Brandon Lackey known as The Adventures of Duane and BrandO was dead. The two had split up, showing some distance between the two. Lackey would continue his own solo act entitled The Amazing BrandO, and Zuwala would remain as Duane’s Action-Adventure World. It was tragic, but time moves on…

September came and if anyone wanted to be woken up when it ended, their slumber was stopped a bit early. The well-known One Hour Compo had it’s hundredth installment on the second. On the 15th came the first of five Final Fantasy V remix albums. Directed by DarkeSword, alias Shariq Ansari, this one was entitled Wind. It featured 9 tracks from remixing vets such as Sixto Sounds, AeroZ, and DarkeSword himself. This series would be the first album Ansari had directed since Rise of the Star in 2005. It was released to stellar acclaim, and left fans salivating for the next installment, Water, in early 2011.

October brought more autumnal weather, and with it a few milestones as well. The game Shantae: Risky’s Revenge was released on DSiWare on the 4th, with a soundtrack scored by none other than virt. A remix from the game came two weeks later by Kaufman himself, entitled “Baal Bhaagna.” It was a Bollywood-inspired take on the source used. The 26th of the month brought the start of competition for the Grand Maverick Remix Battle, hosted by Ansari just like the GRMRB was at the start of the year. And much like that, this one lasted until the end of the year. On Halloween came the final track to be posted from Morse’s album Castlevania: Sonata of the Damned, Demonic Conception. The album was released on Halloween 2009, and with the post came the first OCR album to be released in its entirety through individual mixes. Christopher Getman, better known as Mazedude, also had his 50th mixpost on the same day, joining the ranks of Ari Asulin, alias Protricity, and djpretzel himself.

In came November, and with it came yet another remix of Wily Stage 1 from Mega Man 2. This one was by AkumajoBelmont, real name Robbie Sabo, and was unlike any other remix of the source before. It was a huge success. JH’s first album release with fellow remixer B-Type’s record company Giggling Robot Records happened on the 11th. It was entitled Genuine EP, and contained four tracks. The long-awaited Teen Agent album release occurred on the 22nd. Directed by the infamous Brandon Strader, the album was based on a semi-obscure PC game from a composer who also was semi-obscure. However, he gave it the old thumbs-up, and so did fans. Lastly, on the 28th long-time remixer chthonic decided to use his real name, Benjamin Briggs, for all his remixes. No longer would he have people either confusing him with some metal band or stumbling over how to pronounce his name.

December came, and with it a promise of the best the year had to offer. Although it was the last month of the year, the 13th showed it could contain many firsts with the release of Threshold of a Dream. The Link’s Awakening remix album was the site’s first Zelda album, and 20 album overall. It also was the site’s longest running album, having started originally way back in 2002, and featured many first-time remixers. The requisite flood from the album also brought about the site’s 2,000th hosted track. At the time of this writing, there are currently 2011 tracks hosted on the site, even though the most recent track is OCR02153. Oddly fitting, in my personal opinion. The 23rd also saw the release of Return All Robots! and its soundtrack, OCRO-0003. This was a new type of original soundtrack for the site, as the first disc was the actual soundtrack and the second was all remixes.

And now the end of the year is here. OCR posted 186 tracks so far, and RTS posted 58. Not records by far, but still a respectable amount. The birthday party for OCR went resoundingly well, and wasn’t forgotten once. ThaSauce got a new format so it would be easier to write and post articles on the site. Many stellar albums, an astounding amount of tracks, and a promise of more to come is what 2010 leaves us with. Let’s hope 2011 delivers on the hopes its predecessor has planted! Until next time, and next year, game on!!