The-Coop

So... yeah. I meant to do this yesterday evening, but after falling ill and enjoying all the aches and hacking that comes with it, the idea slipped my mind.

Just wanted to wish every one of my followers, along with those who just randomly stop by, a Merry Christmas, a Happy Hanukkah, a Joyful Kwanzaa, and of course, a Happy New Year. I also wanted to say a big "thanks" to everyone who's liked, favorited and watched my channel over the last year. I know things slowed down thanks to the holidays, work and such, but rest assured, I do have plenty of stuff to upload once I have the time (the folder with all of the signatures I've made for people over the years is unsettlingly large). In fact, I have an image I intend to upload later this evening.

Again, thanks for the interest in my stuff, for the comments, for the strange little llama badges, and I hope you all have a great end to 2014, and wonderful start to 2015.

- TC

So after mulling it over for a good while, and finding all sorts of excuses to not do it, I finally sat down and decided to begin going back over the remixes I've made over the last 13 years. HISTORY TIME!

Well before I began posting remixes anywhere, I was basically making them on a half-sized keyboard that was bought for me by my parents one Christmas. I learned songs from Master of Monsters, Ghouls 'N Ghosts, Altered Beast, Necromaner, Thunder Force III, Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, and a number of other games, transforming the songs into what amounted to piano solo pieces. I got decent at it, but at the time, I never thought about recording anything I'd learned. I say "decent" because I've never had the dexterity in my fingers to really be good at the piano, but I still played and enjoyed myself. This went on until about mid-2001 when I bought a copy of Music Creator 2002, and it wasn't long afterward that I began doing remixes in that program that not only focused on piano-based interpretations of VGM songs, but expanded on them. After all, now I could add multiple instruments, and really go to town on what I'd already been doing.

I started out posting stuff on VGMix around early 2002 if I recall. The remixes weren't all that complicated, and were mostly comprised of me just adding better sounding samples to game songs. They weren't midi rips or anything, I just recreated the songs in Music Creator, added a few new bits here and there, and that was about it. I guess they were more like arrangements than remixes, really. But, it didn't take long before I started making what could be considered "real" remixes. Changing a song's genre, key, tempo, mood... all that good stuff. As this was going on, I discovered OverClocked Remix. Where VGMix was "Post what you want once a week" in its setup, OverClocked Remix had a judging panel that decided if a remix was of good enough quality to get on the site. And near the end of 2002, I actually got a remix on the site. In fact, I got a few of them onto OverClocked Remix from 2002 to 2004, which made me pretty happy.

Now, I'll be the first to admit, a lot of my remixes back then weren't all that spectacular. WAAAAAAAAY too much reverb, much too quiet, and at times, pretty damn empty sounding. But, some of them turned out better than others, and a few folks liked them. As such, I kept making remixes for all kinds of older games, covering games like Lunar: The Silver Star and Moon Patrol, as well as returning to the likes of Thunder Force III and Master Of Monsters. By the end of 2004, I'd done my fair share of remixes, but found myself at an impasse. OverClocked Remix had raised their quality standards to a level that to be blunt, I couldn't reach anymore, and people didn't seem very interested in my stuff on VGMix. I didn't think that I sucked, but I did feel like I was doing all of this for an audience that was quickly getting smaller and smaller. And so, between OCR being out of reach, VGMix garnering me little in the way of listeners, and no other real venue to post my stuff to, I lowered my output a lot and just did a remix once in a great while.

Years went by, and I got better at mixing, mastering, and so forth. I'm no pro by any means, but I'm noticeably better than I was. And while my compositional skills are about at the same level they were years ago, I think I've improved a bit there as well. I'd tinkered with the concept of doing updated mixes of my stuff during that time, and also put out a few remixes over the last couple of years that I really liked... even if I didn't do as much justice aurally to them mixing-wise as I would have liked. But finally, this year I figured it was time to revisit some of what I've done, and begin touching up some of my remixes with the intention of getting them more up to snuff with where I am today in terms of skill. To try and undo the mistakes I made with their sound quality, and get the remixes that I thought turned out pretty good to be more listenable.

Thus far, I've given older remixes a remastering so they were clearer, louder, and what have you. Others, like my newer Mega Man 9 remix, got reworked compositionally due to it feeling like I'd half-assed it. I can promise you that some remixes will remain buried forever (God... the one I did for Hellfire was pretty bad *lol*), but I've got a good number of both old and newer on my to-do list that I want to tweak and improve to varying degrees. I don't want to rewrite them or anything, but just make these remixes sound better and fuller... maybe use some better samples here and there, mix them better, add a new instrument or two, stuff like that. I intend to give them all more lovin' than I originally did, and hopefully breathe some new life into them.

So yeah, that's what I've been keeping myself busy with. Long-winded way to go about saying it, but there you go. I should also mention that my remixes tend to be late '80s/early '90s Electronica, piano, and orchestral in nature. And lastly, for those interested, here's a link so you can visit my YouTube channel and see what I've put up thus far...

www.youtube.com/user/TheCoopOC…

Yes, it's been over two years, and I finally sat down and wrote a new entry for this thing. I'm on a roll!

I know I haven't been all that active lately around these parts, but some of that was because of work, and some of it because I was trying to track down as much of my work as I could. It took forever (or close to it), but I finally gathered up at least most of the old and oldish animated gifs and such that I've done over the years. And now, I can finally start uploading it. It'll go in spurts, but "new" stuff is coming to this account. Most of it will be signatures that I made for people years ago, but other stuff that's a bit tough to really categorize as something other than "other" will be there too. I'm still deciding if I want to add a section for the various photo edits I've done. Quite a few of them center around what basically became very localized memes on OverClocked Remix, though I do have some other ones too. We'll see.

I also wanted to take a second and thank everyone who's commented on my stuff, and who added me to their watch list. I greatly appreciate the interest shown in my little animations, so don't let my sporadic uploads and limited responds lead you to believe otherwise. And to those who've sent me a llama badge, thank you as well. I have no idea what in God's name they're for, but thanks nonetheless.

So yeah, that's what's up. Hopefully it won't take until the next blood moon that falls on my birthday for me to write something new in this space.

- TC

Well, here we go. I've never really been one to keep a journal, so this is a first for me. That said...

I know I kind of disappeared for a bit, and only just now got around to responding to the comments that have been left for me over the last few weeks. Things got a bit hectic, and uploading my gifs and such for this place got put on a back burner for a bit. However, I just wanted to give a general "thanks" to everyone who left comments and compliments for what I've uploaded thus far, and a nod to those who subscribed to my little corner of DA. I promise that more stuff is coming, both animated and non-animated, so stay tuned.

And with that, I'll bring this first (and brief) journal entry to a close. Thanks again folks, and I'll try to keep my uploads coming at a steadier pace in the future.