Month: July 2018

Secret of Mana – Whispers from a Verdant Grove [Mini-Tribute Album]

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It’s been a while since our last Mini-Album, but it’s time to release a new one!
And for that we decided to make a tribute to the iconic OST of Secret of Mana, that was remade (for the best and worst).
And so “Whispers from a Verdant Grove” was born!

You can download our album for free by clicking on this picture =>
SoM
Or directly with this link: http://www.mediafire.com/file/u9279j7ujdtbdz4/Pixel+Mixers+-+Whispers+from+a+Verdant+Grove+%5BSecret+of+Mana%5D.zip

This Mini-Album features 14 songs from the soundtrack composed by Hiroki Hikuta for SquareSoft in 1993.
25 musicians worked on those rearrangements, the length of the album is a bit more than 49 minutes.

This is, I think, one of our most cohesive album since “Huntress“ (our Metroid 2D Games Album), music style speaking, with a lot of acoustic instruments, like woodwinds or acoustic guitars, for the majority of the songs. And then a kind of old-school prog/fusion-ish feeling for the others.
Even if the few songs with a different style there is always a little something that feels like the songs go well together!

If you want a taste of our album before downloading, here is a trailer:

You can vote for your favourite tracks with this poll: https://www.strawpoll.me/16171790

And a huge THANK YOU to every one of you who downloaded this album 😀

– Project Director: Hashel https://www.youtube.com/c/Hashel
– Artwork: Mind Waker https://www.artstation.com/mind_waker
– Album Mastering: Dacian Grada https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVDkhWI0arWWOzjKgVd3S2Q

Cool Links:

– Pixel Mixers FB https://www.facebook.com/PixelMixers/
– Pixel Mixers Twitter https://twitter.com/Pixel_Mixers
– Pixel Mixers Discord https://discord.gg/2YmK66G
Don’t hesitate to check our 18 previous free VGM Tribute Albums: https://pixel-mixers.com/2018/04/08/pixel-mixers-albums-list/

I hope you’ll like “Whispers from a Verdant Grove”

Stay tuned for our next projects:
– Castlevania Series Album (pre 1995 era)
– Shovel Knight Mini-Album

 

Pixel Mixers in 21 days of Video Game Music (Part 1)

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July 1st to 21st took place the #21daysofVGM challenge launched by Video Game Music Academy. The challenge consists in writing a short piece of music every day for 21 days in a row, in order to make composition part of the daily routine of a musician.

Some brave Pixel Mixers embarked upon this exciting adventure, so we decided to interview them. But first, why not pushing the “play” button here below to listen to a selection of the entries while reading about our members’ experience.

We asked our members what motivated them to take on the challenge, what they feel were the major benefits and difficulties.

The first to answer these questions was Dacian Grada, the highly prolific synth-metal cover artist on YouTube. “I’m not really used to composing original music, so this was the perfect opportunity to hone my skills.” he said, “The real benefit for me was the sense of accomplishment from doing a new original composition every day, often really different from the previous one, making me realize I can in fact do some original stuff if I put my mind into it. Coming up with original melodies was (and still is) the biggest challenge, i still need to learn how to properly do one, but I feel I’ve definitely improved with this!”. 

Listen to Dacian’s entries.

Mind Waker was already featured on this website, and didn’t disappoint in this challenge delivering as usual tracks of great variety. “I just made it for the challenge, but I’m happy to have some ideas to work on later – there were few tunes I definitely want to polish to full songs. The hardest part later  on was just to come up with something interesting” he continues, “sometimes you just need to go with the uninspiring idea and work on it until it sounds interesting. The important part is just to finish and work on something and not to wait for the inspiration”.

Listen to Mind Waker’s entries

Relatively new in the Pixel Mixers community, Moonbike surely didn’t waste his chance to prove himself a skilled and eclectic composer.“I love participating in game jams, and I love composing original video game songs. It’s hard to finish these pieces sometimes, especially under tight deadlines, so I thought this challenge would be a great way to practice completing songs in a timely manner and build the habit of composing every day. This challenge also pushed me to grow as a composer and expand my repertoire of techniques – which is invaluable – and introduced me to many other talented composers! […] The hardest part was finding the time to work on a new piece every day. It was a time sink, and often took hours out of my day when I had other things to do. Sharing my completed tracks with other participants definitely motivated me to keep going.”. 

Listen to Moonbike’s entries.

As the name suggests, Piano Game Knight is a pure pianist, mostly known for his Chrono Cross piano covers. He told us of his experience in the challenge too: “I mainly wanted to level up my piano improv skills by composing ideas from my head to the piano based on the prompts/challenges given to myself. Also to get out of my comfort zone by challenging myself to create something daily and sticking to that schedule to the end even if I’m busy with life and work. The biggest benefit for me, in the end, was having 21 ideas that we could build upon in the future for ourselves and maybe make an album! Also it was nice to see different people’s approaches to the challenge”.

Listen to Piano Game Knight’s entries.

Despite different motivations and obstacles, all these musicians agree on one thing: composing everyday is challenging, but a great learning experience, especially in a context like the #21daysofVGM, where plenty of people make this together and provide feedback and encouragement each other.

P.S. If you listened carefully to the playlist in the beginning, you have heard tracks from artists not in this list. Did we interview them? Stay tuned to find out!

Aliased Road by Alek Fleischer [EP]

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aliased_road_coverbanner.jpgThose who follow Pixel Mixers are surely familiar with Alek Fleischer‘s glitchy, granulous, intricately textured synth sounds and ambiences. Well, he just released his EP “Aliased Road”, where he surely delivers the electronic goodness you’d expect from him.

I live in Washington and I’m 18 years old, but I was born in Oregon and have been making electronic music in some capacity since I was only nine. (It understandably didn’t sound that good at the time). I think a lot of Pixel Mixers started with covers right off the bat and are only recently branching out into originals, but I went through the opposite process. Generally I see original music as my main musical focus and VGM covers as a side gig (albeit a very rewarding one!), so I’m excited to share it here.

I’ve done a couple tiny game soundtracks (including for my own solo development). These include “Quality Television”, an absurd puzzle game I made about hypnotizing guards with a TV, and “OVERFOWL”, an action-focused jam game by a collaborator about overflowing your stats. Early on, I spent a lot of time making bizarre little demos. You can find some of these in an earlier album, “Vertical Slice”. It only covers a fraction of that; you’ll likely see more of it in future releases. But over time, I’ve become a lot more focused and consistently happy with my production. These abandoned tracks become less and less common the more recent in the project file list you look.

Aliased_Road_Cover

That progression culminates in “Aliased Road”, which is entirely comprised of tracks made this year for specifically this purpose. It’s a glitchy synthwave EP. Even though it’s a short album, I tried to take the listener on a journey. It opens with a banger, but that first track unexpectedly ends with breaking down into glitchy breakbeats. The album gets wilder as it goes, and was a lot of fun to experiment with! That first track’s followed by pseudo-ambient pieces with modular percussion, melodies made from glitch sounds, and intense tracks reminiscent of French EDM. But however weird it gets, it never loses sight of its synthwave roots. I hope you enjoy it!

~Alek Fleischer~

You can listen to “Aliased Road” on Spotify or purchase it on Bandcamp or iTunes.

Alek’s Social Media:

Gravity by Danilo Ciaffi [EP]

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DaniloDanilo Ciaffi, a regular Pixel Mixers‘ member, known for the quality of his arrangements and mixes, but also for his composer skills, has released his 1st EP “Gravity“!

I am 25 years old and, after many years around Europe, I settled to live in my home-town, Rome.
I just graduated in pure mathematics while being a part-time freelance composer, and I’m now trying to make these two passions of mine coexist in the world of sound technologies.

I started making music at the age of 15, when I picked up a cheap guitar with the intent of writing down some songs ideas I had in mind.
Through the years I played and composed in pretty much any genre, until at the age of 20 I started getting into narrative music and soundtracks. I am currently scoring a video game and working on my own concept album.

Inspiration can come from literally anything: a picture, a sound I like, a story I want to tell or I just wake up with a motif in mind.
In any case I tend to start with very small seeds and grow them until they become a full piece (or more). The most part of the process comes in fact after the sparkle, at the time to expand on your little fragment of music, to choose the sound you want and to work on making your idea into a finished track.

“Gravity” was born when some friends asked me to write the music for a side-scrolling game set in a space station.
The game got cancelled eventually, but I got really interested in the kind of sonority I was exploring and kept working on it. I took inspiration from the sound of 80’s synths, but I also wanted my tracks to feel modern and “digital”, which was a very instructive and fun challenge.

~Danilo Ciaffi~

Gravity

You can listen to Gravity on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/4ZZG2uJ6KrK12dVugKB9uN#_=_
Or buy it on Bandcamp:
https://danilociaffi.bandcamp.com/album/gravity

Danilo’s Social Medias:
– Facebook
– Twitter
– Youtube

Pixel Mixers FAQ

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Pixel Mixers in general:

– What gear or equipment do I need to make covers for Pixel Mixers?

All you need is something that allows you to record yourself with a decent sound quality, could be guitar interface, midi controller, mics… Or you can directly write midi into your DAW. Speaking of DAWs it’s what you need to “mix” your songs, the most used within PM community is Reaper for its free demo (or affordable full version) and user-friendly interface

– Does Pixel Mixers accept donations?

For now we haven’t set any donation system. The only costs for PM are the annual €99 for the wordpress premium account. For now the best you can do to help is to share our albums or website around you and make Pixel Mixers known.

– What makes this community different from others such as OCRemix, Materia Collective, etc..?

First of all, we make free albums, like OCR but unlike Materia Collective or GamelarkRemixes. Which also means we do not license our albums.
We are still new and we do not have the reputation of OCR or Materia Collective that benefits from a great number of active and “famous” members.
We also try to stay “beginner friendly” and help new members to learn to improve their mix and arrangements.
Finally we do organize monthly VGM contests where the people who might “not be ready for albums yet” can practice and improve and benefit from feedback from the other contestants.

Pixel Mixers Discord Server:

– What are the benefits of joining the Pixel Mixers Discord server?

The Discord server is the heart of PM’s community life. We use Discord to talk together, organize albums, discuss contests and covers, look for collab partners, and determine future projects with polls. So if you want to be at the core of what Pixel Mixers is, if you want your opinion to be heard, meet other people sharing the same passion and keep track of all the projects, that’s the place to be!

– What’s the best way to stay informed about Pixel Mixers albums and projects?

Join the Discord server and keep an eye to the #announcements room for all official news! We also have other places worth checking like this website, the Facebook, the Twitter, the Youtube Channel and the VGCover Subreddit.

– How do roles work, what are their purpose?

There are 2 kind of roles, the ones you can’t assign to yourself such as:

– Pixel Mixers: you’ll get this role after engaging a bit with the community (usually between 80 and 100 messages). This role will give you a custom colour based on your “instrument role” (see bellow) and access to post in the #shareyourcovers room on Discord.

– Quality Control Team: This team checks the quality of songs destined to be on PM albums and provides feedback and tips for improvement.
Only mods and admins can give this role. QCT members are volunteers who greatly help the community, anyone can volunteers as long as you have experience in mixing.

– Mods: they are the Pixel Mixers staff, they moderate the Discord and have some roles in the community life, like organizing contests, mastering the albums, making articles for the website, setting the Discord or the bot, finding ideas to improve the community life and PM in general, promote the albums, promote Pixel Mixers…

The second kind of roles are self-assignable roles that will represent the instruments you play or your skills. To do that go in the #beep-boop” room on Discord and write .iam X. You can replace the “X” by those roles:
– Strings
– Brass
– Drums
– Vocals
– Keys
– Woodwinds
– Other
– Bass
– Guitar

The higher up the role is in the sidebar, the rarer it is within the community. For example, we have fewer strings players and more guitar players.
Your custom colour will be based on the rarest of your assigned roles.

There are 2 other self assignable roles:
– Artist: If you draw, paint, or make visual art. Visual artists are essential for our album artwork!
– Composers: if you compose original music, vgm inspired or not.

Pixel Mixers Albums organization:

– How can I be on a Pixel Mixers album?

For that you have to keep an eye on what’s happening in the PM community life, either on Discord, VGCover Reddit or our social media. There will be announcements of the next projects to come and other announcements when those projects start.
From then, just follow the guideline in the project announcement to join in.

– What is the difference between a mini-album and album?

Mini-Albums have a track limitation, the number of songs on those albums must be between 7 (minimum) and 15 (maximum). The goal of the mini-albums are to focus on lesser known games/series or shorter OSTs. You can only make one song for those.

Normal-Albums do not have any track limitation (except the actual number of songs in the OST, as we do not want duplicates) and you can make 1, 2 or even 3 songs for those.

There is a 3rd kind of album: the Full-OST-Albums. There are rare because we cover every song from the OST. These are more difficult to organize for our smaller community,

– Can I make games/themes suggestions for the next Pixel Mixers albums?

Yes! Usually when we start the making of an album, we will elect the theme of the project that will come after. First, we take a day or so to let people make themes/games/series suggestions, we collect them and put them into a large poll.
This poll will be shared inside and outside the community for the Normal-Albums, but only inside for the Mini-Albums. After few days, we’ll keep the top 5 of the huge poll and make a final poll that we’ll only share within the Discord. After few days, the suggestion with the most votes wins!

– How many songs can I submit for a Pixel Mixers album?

For the “Normal-Albums“, once the “V1” of the mix of your 1st song is sent to QCT you can claim an other song, as long as this song was not claimed by someone else. The maximum is 3 songs per main arranger. However you can be a “guest” on other people’s songs as much as you want!
For the “Mini-Albums” you can only do one song, but you still can be a “guest” on as many other songs as you want.

– Can I sell the covers I specifically did for a Pixel Mixers album?

Yes, you can sell that cover on a personal album or as a single track as long as, when you share it, you highlight the fact that the song was made for a PM Album and that it’s available for free + link to the PM album itself.
It must be clear and visible, so don’t hide it at the bottom of your video description!

– Can I use a song I made for a Pixel Mixers album in another community album?

No, this is strictly forbidden and can cause a temporary ban from any PM project for a significant amount of time.
However, using songs you did for PM in your own “compilation” album is totally fine, as long as it’s not labelled by another community.

 Pixel Mixers Albums hosting:

– Why not use Bandcamp for Pixel Mixers Albums?

As you know, Pixel Mixers does free VGM Tribute Albums, we do not sell. The problem with Bandcamp is that the number of free downloads is really limited, even more so with a free account. We would likely reach that limit in less than one day after the release of a new album. And so, people would be forced to pay to download our Albums and we do not want that.

– Why does Pixel Mixers use Mediafire for hosting its albums?

Because, so far, Mediafire is the only website that have those following qualities:
completely free to use, unlimited free downloads, viewable download stats, ability to edit a file while keeping the same link, no file size restriction and storage restriction of 51GB (which is more than enough for our needs).

– Aren’t Mediafire links dangerous for my computer?

No, as long as the file is safe there is no danger at all. And we can guarantee you that we take great care of our album files and that since we started in early 2016 there was not a single complaint about our albums being corrupted or having viruses.

Electric Dreams by Mind Waker [EP]

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6516
You guys probably already know Mind Waker, a core member of the Pixel Mixers Community. He made artworks for bunch of our albums and he is one of the most respected and active musician in Pixel Mixers.
Well, he just released his new Original EP called “Electric Dreams“!

I’m a Finnish dude who is soon turning in to his 30‘s and likes Sci-fi stuff and fantasy. I like working on arts and moving images, so as a day job I freelance in Visual Effects and at nights I work on music and digital painting.

My project is called “Mind Waker” which started as a Progressive Metal band but slowly turned out to be my solo project for which I’m currently writing 3 albums worth of material and stories. Because coming up with whole worlds and story archs takes a damn long time I make covers and other type of music to keep me inspired.

My creative process is all over the place, but I guess the main thing I find to get “juiced up” is just to find a sound I like and build from there. What most inspires me to work on huge album concepts is the work of Arjen Lucassen whose story archs can span multiple albums. Inspiration sources for the smaller things like covers and singles I take inspiration from bands I like to listen from day to day, like Snarky Puppy, Vulfpeck, she, Bernhoft, meganeko, Major Parkinson and many more artists and bands…

The Electric Dreams EP was pretty much inspired by Deadmau5 and a handful of chiptune artists I mentioned earlier. Listening to Deadmau5 made me realize that I wanted to get back to composing electronic music which I actually did quite a lot when I first got my hands on my first DAW “Reason” back in 2006 or somewhere around that time.

~Mind Waker~

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You can listen to Electric Dreams on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/4gn0AWFBLF0SB994rKPef8
And you can also get it on iTunes:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/electric-dreams-single/1319066422

Mind Waker’s Social Medias:
– Facebook
– Twitter
– Youtube

June’s Top 5 Up-Voted Covers

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Here are the top 5 most upvoted covers on our VGCover /subreddit during June 2018.
We’re still trying to push for new artists to appear on these lists so please try to remember to upvote the covers that you’ve enjoyed on the subreddit.

 

  • 1st) Eldon Reeves – Trailer Theme from Fire Emblem Three Houses

 

  • 2nd) Gunderslam/Tremendouz – Ryoshima Coast from Okami

 

  • 3rd) Ro Panuganti – Main Theme from Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

 

  • 4th) Danilo Ciaffi(feat. Pixel Mixers Members) – Ballad of the Windfish from Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening


Danilo’s cover is also from our Legend of Zelda Tribute Album: Hylian Downfall

  • 5th) PeyCa Ft. Kiaran, ChrisMan, and xMEIYIN- Schala’s Theme from Chrono Trigger

Thank you for voting this month and please remember top upvote newer covers on the subreddit so we can hopefully see you in the top 5 for July!

XenoGears – Shattered Memories [Tribute Album]

| pixelmixers

My dear friends, it’s time to release our newest project: “Shattered Memories” a tribute album to XenoGears music!
We made this tribute album to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the game, release in February 1998. We gathered more than 60 musicians and re-arranged 36 tracks from the OST!
You can download our album for free by clicking on this picture =>

007

Or directly with this link: http://www.mediafire.com/file/ukgcaijuhbms49f/Pixel+Mixers+-+Shattered+Memories+%5BXenoGears%5D.zip

The soundtrack was composed by Yasunori Mitsuda, the famous composer of Chrono Trigger & Chrono Cross. If XenoGears still has some of his musical signature, the global mood is more serious and dark than CT&CC, due to the main themes of game, being really mature.
The Length of this album is almost 2 hours and 20 minutes, we covered most of the tracks from the OST (36) and tried to give a new “life” to those VGM gems!
Once again we tried to bring as much as variety as possible, with: prog rock, metal, classical, jazz, folk, Celtic rock, fusion, EDM and more!
If you want a taste of our album before downloading, here is a trailer:

And a huge THANK YOU to every one of you who downloaded this album 😀

– Project Director: Hashel https://www.youtube.com/c/Hashel
– Artwork Main Design: Michael Walker https://twitter.com/Solgabane?s=09
– Artwork: Mind Waker https://www.artstation.com/mind_waker
– Album Mastering: Ro Panuganti https://www.youtube.com/user/Swiggles1987

If you want to follow our future projects (Secret of Mana, Castlevania, Shovel Knight, Donkey Kong Country, Indie Games Vol. 2…) or even join them as a musician here are some nice places for you:
– Pixel Mixers Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/VGCovers/
– Pixel Mixers FB https://www.facebook.com/PixelMixers/
– Pixel Mixers Twitter https://twitter.com/Pixel_Mixers
– Pixel Mixers Discord https://discord.gg/2YmK66G

Now some polls to elect your favourite songs per disk 😉
– Disc 1: Alpha => https://www.strawpoll.me/15999680
– Disc 2: Omega => https://www.strawpoll.me/15999705

Hope you guys will enjoy our XenoGears album 😀
Don’t hesitate to check all of our other albums: https://pixel-mixers.com/2018/04/08/pixel-mixers-albums-list/