5th) psycosulu – Secret of Mana – Leave Time for Love (Electronic Cover/Beadsprite Timelapse)
Thanks for voting for your favourite covers in April and hopefully we’ll see plenty of new people in next month’s top 5. Be sure to check out all of the artists on the list and to browse the subreddit for new artists
We are really happy to finally release our 2nd album of 2019, and it has a special story!
In the beginning of 2019 we had the idea to release a real but small album on April Fools Day. The idea we had was to use the fun OST from the Super Adventure Box, an old-school inspired adventure/platforming mini-game in Guild Wars 2 that was originally released in the game as an April Fools Day joke back in 2013.
The players enjoyed that mini-game created by Josh Foreman so much that it came back to be turned into an annual festival within GW2.
The OST of the “SAB” was composed by new GW2’s composers Maclaine Diemer and Lena Raine. Some songs like “Sunny Glade” or “Main Theme” were still inspired by Jeremy Soule‘s compositions from the main game.
The funny chip-tune OST inspired our musicians and we went from a smaller 5-7 songs project to an album covering the complete OST from the Super Adventure Box, which made us change the release date to make sure we had all the songs covered. We sincerely hope you guys, GW2 fans or not, will enjoy this album =)
You can download our album for free by clicking on this picture =>
This album features the 24 tracks from the Super Adventure Box OST, originally composed by Maclaine Diemer, Lena Raine, Jeremy Soule, Joseph Clark & Keenan Sieg, re-arranged by 25 Pixel Mixers musicians.
The album is a little over 1 hour and 8 minutes of music and feature a great range of music styles, featuring: EDM, metal, classical, solo piano, country, fusion… and more.
And guess what? You can listen to the full album directly on Youtube!
Many times in our Discord happens that someone is looking for a virtual instrument, and doesn’t want to break the bank. Therefore we thought of collecting all this useful resources into a series of articles everyone can always access to, starting by the most requested one: strings. Of course these are not going to be the list of all the existing virtual instruments on the internet, but it is a good place to start looking.
We are going to divide the instruments on our list into two categories: one is the category of absolutely free instruments, the other is for instruments that are free if you already own Native Instrument’s Kontakt.
Virtual Playing Orchestra is a free collection of orchestral instruments made putting together all the best free orchestral samples. The library is in .sfz format, so it runs on Sforzando (also free) and offers all sort of articulations and dynamics controls (not on all the patches, but on all those for which matter).
Spitfire LABS offer two different string patches, all for free:
Strings: a 14-member ensemble with three articulations (Short, Ensemble and Long). This is not a huge bombastic trailer library, but rather the dry, close micing provides an intimate and warm character;
Frozen Strings: “six strings players, recorded dry on a cold day in January 2015”, and as such these sustained strings are cold and perfect for soundscapes.
Both this instruments run through the LABS player (free), and come with built-in reverb and expression controls.
VSCO 2 Community Edition (CE) is an open-source, open-ended subset of the main VSCO 2 library. These samples have been widely used and you can find them in multiple formats, such as VSTi/AUi, NKI, sfz, RMI and more.
SCC Expressive Strings a great string ensemble library including Legato, Staccato, Legato/Tremolo crossfade and Pizzicato articulations controlled by keyswitches, as well as expression controls. Not much I can say about it could be clearer than S. Christian Collins’s video:
If you are looking for a warm and beautifully expressive cello, your best bet is going to be PocketBlakus. It features a sustain patch and a spiccato one (with 7 Round Robins nonetheless!). Plenty can be said about this instrument, but I’ll let a song speak for it:
Impact Soundworks doesn’t really need our advertisement, but it would be criminal to exclude the Stroh Violin from this list. The Stroh violin is a self-amplified violin that folks at ISW have sampled in three articulations (pizzicato, spiccato, legato). This won’t be the instrument to play a warm, mellow solo in a full orchestra (lying, it probably will), but its dry and lively character can be amazing in a small ensemble, in a folk setting or even in experimental/electronic music.
Sketching Chamber Orchestra is a collection of Kontakt instruments built by some big names in the Kontakt Scripting community using the samples from VSCO2. If you own Kontakt and nothing else, this will get you started, and bring you very far.
Last on this list, Palette – Primary Colors is the free version of the bigger Palette Orchestral Series. It features strings, woodwinds, and brass ensembles with a limited set of articulations, 3 dynamic layers and up to 7 round robins for a total of 1.3GB of samples. Even though this does not offer individual sections, this is a gorgeous tool, and a free one. So run grab it!
That’s it for strings now, see you soon with more cool freebies!
Here are the top 5 covers which received the most upvotes on the VGCover/subreddit during March 2019
1st) Super Guitar Bros – Zelda Dungeon Medley (Acoustic/Classical Guitar)
2nd) Earth Kid – Chrono Cross – “Under Cerulean Skies” Fields of Time (Folk Cover)
3rd) StyrofoamShotgun feat. Psamathes – Cuphead – Die House (Metal Cover)
Die House also features on our latest indie game tribute album The Great Tales of the Little Ones Vol. 2
5th) Torby Brand- Celeste – Exhale (Piano Cover)
The second entry in this month’s top 5 from our indie game album
Thanks for voting for your favourite covers in March and hopefully we’ll see plenty of new people in next month’s top 5. Be sure to check out all of the artists on the list and to browse the subreddit for new artists
Hello guys, I’m really excited to present you our very first album of 2019!
And what an album… The 2nd volume of our series dedicated to Indie Games music.
After “The Great Tale of the Little Ones” in 2016 here is the Vol.2 of what’s going to be an annual thing!
We focused on games released from 2015 to 2018. So in early 2020 for the Vol.3 we’ll focus on games from 2016 to 2019 etc etc.
I already can tell you that we were super excited to work on this project and everybody involved did a really good job, I hope you’ll appreciate it =)
You can download our album for free by clicking on this picture =>
This album features 54 tracks from 36 Indie Games, including: Undertale, Celeste, Hollow Knight, A Hat in Time, Stardew Valley, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, Furi, Ori and the Blind Forest, Overcooked, Pyre, Cuphead, Deltarune and more! 62 musicians did their best to honour those great songs and the result is a 3 discs album, for more than 3 hours of music!
And guess what? You can listen to it directly on Youtube!
“My name is Ben, I go under the name Bullicann online for my music stuff. I’m 23 years old and from California, USA.
My idea as a musician is to try and make something unique with every song that I do. For example, if a certain song has a tendency to be done in a certain style, i make it a point to not try to make it the same as the others. Overall though, im a big fan of metal music, so everything i do tends to be metal in some way, with some influences from classic rock and blues.
School Days originally was written when I was in High School, around 2013. I had the music written since then, and some very poor lyrics to go with it. After graduating, i shelved the project until 2018, when i asked the very talented Psamathes to help me write some new lyrics and also to sing on the tracks. What you see today is the collaboration between the 2 of us working to put together the best of what we can offer as musicians.
For the track “After the Rain”, I wanted to write something similar to the early 2000’s pop-punk ballads. I noodled around for a bit on the guitar until I eventually wrote the lead guitar part that you hear. Fun fact for any music theory nerds, the chorus/main riff progression is actually 4 different major chords.
For the track “Prisoners”, that song had actually gone through about 3 different versions before i finalized the one on the release. Kinda the same with the other track, i started out by messing around with lead lines until i got the one i liked. From there I tried out a few different chord progressions before settling on the classic one you hear. During the collaboration process with Psamathes, we kinda wanted to take this one a little bit heavier with the vocals/lyrics. So this one sort of drifted from a pop-punk sound to a more typical hard rock/heavy metal sound.
To conclude, I just want to say a huge thanks to Psamathes for helping me finally get these songs out. Also big thanks to the rest of the Pixel Mixer community for being so helpful and supportive.”
You can listen to School Days on Spotify or buy it on iTunes.
3rd) Hashel – Donkey Kong Country – Aquatic Ambiance Band Cover Feat. Torby Brand, Mark Autumn, GameroftheWinds, & Ro Panuganti
This track is from our recent Donkey Kong Country Album Treetop Tunes
4th) Danilo Ciaffi -Donkey Kong Country 2 – Stickerbrush Symphony Post-Rock Cover Feat. Mark Autumn Lord Bif & Hashel
Another track from Treetop Tunes! Download it here
5th) Nah Tony – GameCube Startup Metal Arrangement
Thanks for voting for your favourite covers in January and hopefully we’ll see plenty of new people in the tops 5’s for this year!
If you ever looked for piano sheet music or piano covers, chances are you stumbled upon one of Torby Brand’s works. What you may not know, is that Torby was one of the men behind AM2R’s soundtrack, and we have the pleasure of asking him a few questions about it!
“My name is Torbjørn, but I’m better known as “Torby Brand”, and I am a 23 year-old computer engineer from Norway.
I’ve always been engaged by video games and soundtracks, which lead into the start of my YouTube channel in 2016. There I post piano covers from various video games, anime and other media. I’ve only played for 3-4 years, and I don’t consider myself to be particularly skilled on the piano. I instead focus on fun and nostalgic pieces that anyone can play, complete with self arranged, free sheet music.
AM2R was a huge deal for me. I had been following the project for years, and I knew DoctorM64 through the Metroid website that I work on, MetroidHQ. As he was developing some of the later areas in the game, I was lucky enough to be given the chance to contribute. I composed two pieces for the 5th area of the game, the Distribution Center. As this was the only main area in the game, that was completely original, it was fitting to have original music. Additionally, I arranged and performed the piano medley “SR388” that neatly merges my original pieces with melodies from the original Metroid II. I am very grateful to Doc for giving me the opportunity, as it allowed me to part of something so beautiful and grand, as well as jump-starting my YouTube carrier.
For “Ancient Power” I spent a lot of time listening to and contemplating the different underwater themes in the Metroid series. However, a lot of the temple ended up being above water and with fancy new Chozo technology. That’s why I ended up with a much more “lively” melody, more like the synths in the Prime Trilogy. I made my piano version, and worked closely with Doc to recreate the track with his instruments. Similarly, we used the same bassline and parts of the melody for “Flooded Complex”, the calm watery prelude track to Ancient Power.
Right now I’ve been releasing a lot of albums, including works on Minecraft, Deltarune, Steins;Gate and AM2R. These are available on platforms like Spotify and iTunes, and has really brought my piano game to a whole new level. So if you’re interested in any of those, please check it them out!
Not to mention that I just finished my second Pixel Mixers track, which will be on the brand new Donkey Kong album. The Pixel Mixers community has been immensely friendly and helpful, something I hope to repay by contributing on future albums as well!”
![The Great Tale of the Little Ones [Mordra]](https://pixelmixers.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/the-great-tale-of-the-little-ones-mordra.png?w=383&h=383)
Bullicann, a veteran Pixel Mixers‘ member, just released his first EP “School Days”!
Pixel Mixers 