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NOTES: This is the winning track from MAGfest X’s DoD. I’ve wanted to do this song in this style for a while, and finally got to it for that competition. This style is basically a shoutout to the band Dirty Loops (hence the name), that takes really terrible pop songs and makes them amazing. I’ve always wanted to do a full band remix, where each musician exclusively plays their own instrument, and this song started out that way but didn’t end up that way. Shnabubula was going to play all keys, but his recording schedule was pretty thick and then his MIDI/Recording computer died. In the end, he did the keys in the intro up until the main melody, and the piano solo. Sam also helped me come up with chord progressions and other stuff in a few sections in the song. Originally I was going to have Chris Feener do all the guitars, but he wasn’t able to record them, so I got housethegrate to do the solos at 1:56, 3:00, and 5:19. Travis Moberg does all the drums throughout the song.

NOTES: Your ears aren’t deceiving you. Yes, this is a Crystal Flash cover and yes I transplanted Metroid Metal arrangements into the song. Since August 2011 was Recover Month, I had only one choice: Cover the one song that got me into remixing. This originally started off as just a straight Crystal Flash cover, but as I was working through the arrangement, I felt an urge to add a riff from one of the Metroid Metal arrangements in a certain section. It was originally supposed to be that one reference, but I decided to add more Metroid Metal arrangements to make this arrangement less of a straight cover. Metroid Metal was also one of the first remixing projects I ever listened to. I felt it only appropriate to do tribute to two of the best musicians I know, two of the best people on the planet, and two of the largest influences on my music.

NOTES: …Alright…so DoD August 2009′s theme was “Recover Month” where you arranged another remixer’s DoD song. I was already doing Grant Henry’s Flesh Crystal for my main entry, but I talked to fellow remixer and widely perceived rival of mine Dr. Manhattan (real name Hugo Vinicius) and said that he and I should do a pair of alts where we cover one of the other’s songs and turn them into really silly genres. But neither us would tell the other what we were doing. So I took Hugo’s “The Freak Winged Boy” which is originally a totally metal Ys 3 arrangement. But I took the main melody, changed the key to the relative major, found some jazz chords that fit around the melody…and profitted. And as a first, this is the first DoD song I ever made that DOESN’T feature live bass. I played acoustic bass on my keyboard because bass guitar would’ve been wildly inappropriate.

Click here for Dr. Manhattan’s original song. You’ll probably need some context.

NOTES: This was my first DoD entry since my last MAGfest entry. My laptop died and I had to get it repaired before I could do anything…and then the first repair didn’t actually work so I had to send it back…anyways I was itching to make music so the first thing I did was this song. It’s a song I had been thinking about for a while, first suggested by my friend Nick Marinelli. It’s the boss theme from Ys I & II. Since it’s called “The Termination” I decided to do some puns with The Terminator, including adding some clips of Arnold and covering the main theme right at the end.

NOTES: I was actually intending on doing this song for last September’s DoD, and “I Need Scissors! 61″ would be the MAGfest song, but I decided against that, because this song would probably go over better with a MAGfest audience. The idea stemmed from a suggestion Nate “FoxxDragon” Horsfall gave to me to remix the 4th Race theme from a slightly obscure SNES game called Uniracers. When I listened to the song it had that fast shuffle feel made famous by Van Halen in “Hot For Teacher.” Then I was reminded of the songs from Sonic Adventure and Twisted Metal which I was already very familiar with, so I decided to mold those three songs together with “Hot For Teacher.” Hell, they’re all in the same keys and roughly the same tempo! Why the hell NOT!?

As for the sound clips, the first set of soundclips are real sound effects from Twisted Metal, the second set is real dialogue clips that Sonic says when you’re playing as Tails in the level the source song is from…and damn he is an annoying bastard. The last sound clips are an inside joke for fans of Frost* and Dream Theater.

NOTES: Alright, this DoD song is weird, I know. This was actually for DoD’s virt Month, for November 2010. We decided to do this month in celebration of his recent success and as a “thank you” for him hosting DoD for several years, since I host DoD now. I had been working really hard on PuD’s DuDs and released the album on November 23rd, leaving ONE day for me to make this song. Thanksgiving was the next day and I was leaving to go visit family for the weekend a few hours away. The style is a bit unusual for one of my songs, but I loved virt’s writing on that soundtrack, and wanted to do it justice. Plus, virt had just released the OST, so I chose it because I thought it was an appropriate tribute. And at least I still have plenty of live bass and guitar!