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Grandmaster Duel Arrangement - Pokemon Trading Card Game


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Plain and simple: tell me everything I need to make this OCRemix worthy, and I will do it and submit.

I've been holding off attempting to submit stuff on here for 3 years, and I feel like I now have great potential to get my stuff on me.

 

https://soundcloud.com/epic-rpg-remixes/grandmaster-duel-arrangement-pokemon-trading-card-game

 

Inb4 change the guitar lead

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Well... consider your inb4 confirmed. When I listen to this, I hear lots of quantization in the guitar lead, tubular bells, drums, etc. that makes this feel "stiff" and robotic. The instrument choice is also a bit odd. Fake guitar lead, with a funk keys/guitar sample? Is this rock or is this funk (I thought it was prog rock?)? The organ fit in fine though, IMO. That guitar lead however, needs to be replaced with something more expressive, like a synth lead with heavy vibrato, or even a real guitar recording. It would still give a prog rock vibe, but at least it would be more evocative.

 

The most important concern though, is the repetition. Literally, the entire second half of this is a copy and paste of the first half; why repeat it if all of the content has already been heard verbatim? What I would suggest is cutting it down to 2:52, and if you want to write something more, differentiate it from what came before. Avoid simply writing something short and repeating it a second time note-for-note, instrument-for-instrument (if you do that, it's a loop, which is OK as OST VGM).

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Well... consider your inb4 confirmed. When I listen to this, I hear lots of quantization in the guitar lead, tubular bells, drums, etc. that makes this feel "stiff" and robotic. The instrument choice is also a bit odd. Fake guitar lead, with a funk keys/guitar sample? Is this rock or is this funk (I thought it was prog rock?)? The organ fit in fine though, IMO. That guitar lead however, needs to be replaced with something more expressive, like a synth lead with heavy vibrato, or even a real guitar recording. It would still give a prog rock vibe, but at least it would be more evocative.

 

The most important concern though, is the repetition. Literally, the entire second half of this is a copy and paste of the first half; why repeat it if all of the content has already been heard verbatim? What I would suggest is cutting it down to 2:52, and if you want to write something more, differentiate it from what came before. Avoid simply writing something short and repeating it a second time note-for-note, instrument-for-instrument (if you do that, it's a loop, which is OK as OST VGM).

 

Yeah, the piece loops entirely. I originally made as a fanmade remastering for my YouTube channel. That would be changed if I submitted. I'd do the intro section again then do some hits and let the tracks reverb out, sort of like this (to use a VGM sample): https://youtu.be/b4Q9vm_QUsM?t=2m

 

Also, involving the synth with vibrato, I like that idea! Maybe I could throw in an amp plug-in on it, too.

I don't know what genre this would be, either. I'm not concerned that, though.

What about the second half of the loop where the straight synth plays and the beat kicks up? Do you think that part is solid? I was considering changing the percussion instrumentation to more electronic there, but I scrapped the idea since the acoustic kit still sounded nice.

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Well, I'm finding that the execution overall is pretty consistent, actually, so I think 1:41 - 2:52 is about as solid as 0:00 - 1:41. I would personally add vibrato onto that supersaw at 1:41 - 2:52 though so that it's more expressive/sophisticated, and/or make the tone less detuned (the suggestion to lower the detuning is more from a personal standpoint). One way you could do this is assign an LFO (low-frequency oscillator) to the pitch knob inside your synth and increase the LFO depth to 1 half step or so.

 

I actually like the acoustic kit; you seem to be going for a big, rock-ish sound, based on your sound selection, and so far I think it works. You said you're not sure what the genre is, but now that I've given you my perspective on it, hopefully that'll give you some ideas on making the overall sound more cohesive. For example, I found the tubular bell and funk keys samples to be out of place with the genre it feels like to me, although I get that you might have picked the tubular bells because you had strings (and they're both in an orchestra).

 

What I think you could also consider is checking whether your sequencing is humanized enough. Are your notes all quantized (100% perfect rhythm)? If so, I think you can make them less perfect so that the ReMix sounds more like a real-life performance, because human beings don't have 100% perfect rhythm (even a few milliseconds of offset can help, especially on chords).

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