Huge Update: 2016 Plans! (Patreon)

For starters, I've been working fervently on the SNES Medley and have the rhythm guitar/bass section about half done. It's taking me a lot longer than usual since it's so long xD but usually I can work pretty quick when the rhythm section is out of the way.

So tonight, we're going to talk about some exciting plans I have for GaMetal in 2016. We had such a great year in 2015 but I want to have an even better one next year. Here's some of the ways we're gonna try to do that:

Improved Background

We ended up hitting this milestone a lot earlier than I expected (definitely not complaining!) and I plan to get this going at the beginning of the year. I'm moving out in a couple of weeks so once I get settled I'll be better able to start working on it. It'll feature some sort of display (like a bookshelf or table or something) with gaming memorabilia from games GaMetal has covered before. Also, I'm considering bringing back gameplay footage in some form. If you've stuck around me for a while, you'll know before 2013 I used only gameplay footage, and when I returned in 2013 I dropped it completely for the instrument playing stuff. 

I had a few reasons for this: for one, I realized live playing captures peoples interest more. Secondly, back around the time I returned, there was a lot of legal stuff going on around Youtube that had people really concerned about the legality of gameplay videos. It looked like, for a minute, monetization was not going to be allowed for them, and copyright strikes may have been possible. So I decided to just stay away from it for the time. Obviously now that dust has settled and it's pretty clear gameplay videos are in the clear.

I don't plan on doing the 'full gameplay video green screened in the background' thing, as I'd rather do something different, and I doubt I'll be having the amount of room to properly light a green screen xD. I'm still toying around with some ideas.

Collaborations

A lot of people have asked why I haven't really done any collaborations

(aside from Edo bean), and well, it's because I wanted to prove myself first xD. I feel like we've built a pretty solid foundation for ourselves now and I've reached out to a few people. Nothing concrete yet, but I'll definitely be pushing for collabs a lot more in 2016.

Sound revamp?

You may have realized I change my sound up every now and then. I usually end up doing it once or twice a year. I've been doing a little experimenting with a new sound, and will be changing it up sometime soon. It shouldnt be too major, I currently love the sound going on now, but there's always room for improvement. Plus a lot of my problem areas at this point come from my equipment rather than mixing stuff. xD

It probably won't happen immediately, but sometime early in 2016.

Patreon Rewards/Tiers

You all are the most important to me (I love all my fans but Patreon right now is my best shot at doing this full time :D) and I'm constantly thinking of new ways to reward you all.   We have a couple of huge pledges (Alex and Andrew, thank you!) and I'm trying to think of a good reward for

new higher tiers, around the 15 to 20 dollar area. Maybe even a 30 dollar tier. I just want to make sure it's really cool. I'm also still working on ideas for a

7 dollar tier.

Also, I'm making a new reward available for Tier 3+: you will now receive a download of the .WAV file of new songs when they are released. These are the fully uncompressed sound files that have zero loss in quality, so you can't get any higher quality than that. Tier 2+ will still receive the 320kbps MP3, the highest quality MP3, as usual.

Now, the news I'm most excited about...

GaMetal Albums are coming in 2016

You know how my 'Part-Time' milestone goal said I'll be devoting some more time to working on GaMetal? Well here's where part of that time will be going!

Earlier this year, I received an invite from Larry Oji over at OverClocked Records

(the OCRemix people) to join their roster. Well, I uh, don't actually have any albums! Just loose songs. Haha. Anyways, I've been giving albums a thought for a loooong time, and I plan on doing a bunch in 2016. 

Also, to stay true to my mission statement, and since OCR albums are digital downloads anyways, these albums are going to be pay-what-you-want. So basically, they're free, but if someone wants to donate they can. Oh and, I'll be setting a reward tier up here to get the album download before they're made public. :)

So what kind of albums are we talking here? I have a few planned:

GaMetal V (Super early 2016)

This is actually going to be all the songs from 2015, with all the songs from before Dark Pit remastered. (Like how I remastered You Will Know Our Names). I'm solely doing this to establish a presence in the OverClocked community. (I only have one song there! :/)

Legend of the Seven Stars (Working Title) (Early 2016)

2016 is the 20 year anniversary of Super Mario RPG, one of my favorite games and game soundtracks. Remember the SMRPG megamix I did in 2012? Yeah, I'm gonna re-record that. I now have a great excuse to xD. I'm also going to include a few bonus tracks: Culex (FF2 Boss Theme actually but hey some people don't know that), and maybe a re-recording of Beware the Forest's Mushrooms.

And I'll probably throw Kero Kero sewers in there somewhere since I left it out the first time. xD

GaMetal Begins (Late 2016)

Yes, I'm ripping off Batman, because I like Batman. xD If you've been around since GaMetal first got started in 2009, this is the album for you. This is going to be a remake album of all the 2009 GaMetal songs along with a few of 2015 re-records: Tetris A, Grabbag (2015), Final Fantasy Battle Medley (2015), Bionic Commando (2015 remaster), Gourmet Race (new re-recorded version), and Pokemon RBY Trainer Battle. Also, I'm going to split up Bowser Medley and NES Medley #1, meaning new full versions of Bowser 64, Ultimate Koopa, Bubble Bobble Main Theme, Startropics (Cave Theme/Overworld), Together We Ride, and Stage 1 (Journey to Silius).

I've actually been working on this one here and there throughout the year and have arrangements done for most of these songs. :)

That's nice and all, but what about an album with nothing but new material? 

Power to the Patrons: Volume 1 (???? 2016)

The Patreon request list is getting fairly large, and as much as I like to give, I wish I could just do all of them in a month and fulfill everyones request. Well I can't quite do that, but I thought of something that would help! The Power to the Patrons album will feature 10 randomly chosen songs from the Patreon Request List. I've set this up as a milestone reward at $500 (I've bumped New Camera down to 450), so once we hit that we'll start selecting songs and I'll begin working on the album. With the way the Patreon has been growing, I'm hopeful this could happen sometime around the middle of the year.

And this is Volume 1, so it won't be the first Patreon album we put together. :)

In Conclusion

Each year since 2013, GaMetal has statistically grown about

4x stronger. With the current Youtube subscriber count nearing 20,000, if we continue on course, we could hit over 75k+ at the end of 2016. I'm personally shooting for 100k. But none of this would be possible without you all! I still can't thank you enough for all your support. You're the best! I hope you're as excited about 2016 as I am!