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*NO* Super Mario RPG 'Bukki's Booster Seat'


Chimpazilla
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NoTuX  (Formerly Blue Magic)

Damon Campbell

Website:  https://soundcloud.com/notux-1

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Submission Information

Game Arranged:  Super Mario RPG

Song:  Welcome to Booster’s Tower by Yoko Shimomura

YouTube Link:  https://youtu.be/MthR2dXqWHI

Hello everyone.  It’s been a while. After some big changes in my life, I kinda quit working on music for a while, but I started to feel like a part of me went missing and I realized that music is sort of my therapy to help me deal with my everyday stresses and on-going battle with depression.  Though, I’m not great at it yet, I kind of need it.  With that in mind, I decided that I want to take music more seriously and improve.  I have been thinking about changing my name for years, but never really got around to it.  Since I now have new inspirations, and a new state of mind, why not go with a new name?  Under this name, I will be diving back into some of my old projects and creating something I can really be proud of.  This being the first of many.

This is sort of a chill hip-hop remix of the Booster’s Tower theme.  This was my very first VGM remix that was done YEARS and YEARS ago using Midisoft Studio 4 (one of my all time favorite programs) back before I even discovered OCR.  I believe it was back in 97 or 98.  Of course, it didn’t sound nearly as nice and the ideas didn’t flow very well, but the instruments and arrangement was pretty similar, and I wanted to keep it that way while fleshing out those ideas I had way back then.

Hearing McVaffe’s Bukki’s Tango and Dev’s La Saia’s Resting Place really persuaded me to try my hand at VGM remixing in the first place, but I felt that I could never compete with what McVaffe did with this song, so I held off on remixing it until I got my skills up.  I took a crack at this remix a few years ago.  It was decent, but I felt that it just wasn’t up to my standards.  I knew I could do better, but I just wasn’t really able to get it together.  I kinda threw what I had on SoundCloud and abandoned it until this past Christmas.

So, here it is, ladies and gents.  New and improved: 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I really like this arrangement - very soulful, and the 'hip-hop' part is tempered with a great classical guitar. It works amazingly well together... and then it's over. It's not just that the song is short, though - nothing wrong with a short song - but it doesn't sound complete. The track builds up to something great (having an introductory section that lasts ~42 or 56 seconds, pending on what you interpret as "introductory"), and it pays off great with that hip-hop + guitar portion, but that's more than a third, or even almost half of the song invested into a build-up. The structure is quite unbalanced, leaving the listener a bit confused. A good rule of thumb to apply to song structure is about 25% maximum for an introduction, or 20% maximum introduction & ending, otherwise the song will feel incomplete. The ending also doesn't do it any favors - it just sort of ends. This exacerbates the incomplete feel that this song gives off.

The production is quite good. The instruments are alright, too, though the violin could use a little better humanization, considering it's used as a solo & duet instrument. The vibrato is static - either personalizing the vibrato using the volume envelope or utilizing whatever tools that particular VSTi allows for adjusting that would help a great deal. The attacks on the violin also swell for each note, which kills any sense of phrasing that a real violinist would have. Utilize that swelling attack only in the beginning of a phrase and decrease it for the rest of the notes in the phrase; this will make it sound considerably more human.

The drum pattern is very fitting, but it does sound like it's on autopilot for the portion that it's in. Use some fills, and don't be afraid to change it up, even just a little bit.

I actually love this arrangement, but it doesn't feel finished. With an introduction like that, you need to give it some more meat. It's tough to give any helpful advice on that front, as that's something that could be taken in many directions, pending on where you decide to take it. While you do that, though, humanize the violin as I suggested, and make the drums more interesting. I do hope you send this back to us when you're done, as this sounds great.

NO

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The intro with the piano and violin is very lovely.  I love the very gentle "drop it" vocal, it's more of a suggestion than a command but that fits this soundscape.  I agree with Gario that the arrangement doesn't feel complete since nearly half the track is intro.  Following what is here, at 2:02, I'd love to hear a violin solo or something unique, some kind of breakdown perhaps, followed by a reprise of the source theme and then a proper outro.  This arrangement is just a taste of what should really be a longer track, it feels more like a halfway developed wip than a complete song.  I also agree that this particular violin sample doesn't really work due to the unnatural sustained vibrato, but the writing is quite nice.  The drums get a bit static after awhile, a changeup would be great, maybe during the reprise portion.  Let's hear this again!

NO (resubmit)

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  • Chimpazilla changed the title to 2015/12/28 - (2N) Super Mario RPG 'Bukki's Booster Seat'
  • Liontamer changed the title to *NO* Super Mario RPG 'Bukki's Booster Seat'
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