TonyDickinson.net

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!

NOTES: God, so many wasted hours on those VR missions! And I never 100%’d any of the characters. Anyway, the VR Variety Mission theme song always stuck out to me for some reason, it was funky, jazzy, quirky, and just plain cool. I always wanted to do something with it, but I was never quite sure what to do. The song has no prominent melody, but really, very little MGS music does, but it makes perfect sense with how the music is used in-game. I almost like to think of the game play being the melody with backing music. None of the melodies you hear are in the original, I wrote them all. When I made this, I was listening to a lot of Marco Sfogli and Alex Argento, and those two guys are batshit crazy musicians and composers, and they both make a sweet jazz/metal fusion style on their solo albums, so I took some heavy influence and used that to create this track.

NOTES: So SnappleMan challenged me in DoD for June 2010, right? Well, I needed an epic, extraordinarily ambitious arrangement to ensure a victory. I’ve been wanting to arrange Dancing Mad for quite a long time, because pretty much all of the arrangements I’ve heard don’t deviate away from the source enough. Not that it’s a bad thing, but I always felt that there was so much that could be done with the church organ solo sections.

The other thing is that I’ve always wanted to do a One-Winged Angel arrangement. I did one a while back and I posted it here, but time has passed and I realized it blows and really had nothing special about it (straight Advent Children version cover? C’MAAAWWWNNN!!!!). The other problem was that by itself, I had NO original ideas on how to arrange the song. Between the Advent Children and OCR’s Voices of the Lifestream “Black-Winged Metamorphosis” versions, I couldn’t do anything with it. But as I was arranging this I had the idea to slip some One-Winged Angel sections in here, and it worked great! If I remember right, One-Winged Angel was actually a leftover from FF6 anyway. The styles meshed very well, so that’s great. I’m a little disappointed that I couldn’t slip in more of One-Winged Angel into the remix, but that’s alright. Anything that’s missing is in the first parts of the song, and Dancing Mad has a ridiculously epic opening statement as it is. Plus, the cheesy anvil’d, bass drop’d half time breakdown is just too sweet as the first OWA statement.

Also in the song are several references to certain prog bands that you may or may know. If you know who they are, then that’s an easter egg you can laugh at and enjoy. If you don’t recognize them all, then stop being a damn noob and get edumacated on your prog rock!

By the way, this song does have lyrics, and I know they’re hardly decipherable. The way Symphonic Choirs was made makes it very difficult to cut through the thick horrible mass of noise in this song.

SnappleMan, Going Down (x2)

Don’t let your pubic fat
Get in the way

You’re fucked (x4)

SnappleMan is fat and greek
He masturbates with feta cheese
He thinks he can win DoD
But he will never beat me

He’s crazy
Fat and lazy
Pussied out
Last time around

SnappleMan, Going Down (x2)

He does not know what he got into
Thinking his only threat was that Jew
I think that the time has come to pass
To open up this can of whoop-ass
He thinks he can win this fight using wank
Unaware how much he’s gonna get spanked

You’re fucked, you are fucked (x3)
You’re fucked, fucked fucked fucked fucked!

SnappleMan is fat and greek, masturbates with feta cheese (x8)
(He is crazy, fat and lazy) (x4)

NOTES: Yes, this is a straight cover of SnappleMan’s “Dead Batteries” remix from the OCR Project Chaos album. Early in June 2010, SnappleMan challenged me to a DoD duel. Since he backed out the previous February (SnappleMann/Paragon is an Asshole (part 1)) he decided he had unfinished business to attend.

Well, so did I.

That’s how Prancing Dad and this song came about. This song however, is the result of me killing time a couple days before the deadline. I made this straight cover to add to the mockery, hence the name. Plus, I’ve been wanting to do live bass on that song for a while now, but I figured why not do it myself?