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*NO* Zelda 2 'Do You Need a Light?'


Gario
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  • Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
  • Do You Need A Light?
  • Battle BGM
  • I seem to have a thing for shorter remixes these days, probably because I've been focusing more on chip music this decade. This track kinda concludes my 10 year spanning Zelda Forest theme trilogy too, and yeah, I know this isn't a strict forest theme, but hey, it does play in forests so... Anyhoo, I always wanted to make a remix of this, and finally here it is. 
    Cheers!
     

 

Edited by Liontamer
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  • Liontamer changed the title to 2017/03/21 - Zelda 2 'Do You Need a Light?'

Mmm, this is a cool idea. The blending of the Zelda 1 dungeon texture and Zelda 2 battle music works great. Definitely caught me off guard in a good way, there. The production is pretty solid, to boot, so great job.

The arrangement seems to be some type of variations form of sorts, which while a bit predictable does the job alright. The section from 0:20 - 0:54 is a really stale way to introduce the theme, though. The source plays faintly (with a rather vanilla choir/vocal sample) behind the arpeggio with no drums (save for 0:31, which sound strange for reasons I'll detail below), which makes for a pretty uninteresting portion of the track. If the track were longer thirty seconds wouldn't be a big deal, but for something this short you need to handle your temporal real estate carefully and make sure everything has a purpose. This section just sounds like padding with an arpeggio, which doesn't do good things for the track overall.

The drums that pop in at 0:31 sound like they're coming in to break up the arpeggio a bit, which would've been great, but then they drop out after playing for half a measure. In all honesty it sounds like a mistake as they are, like an incomplete part you intended to come back to. It's a shame, since that actually would've helped breath life into that part.

I like this, but having a quarter of a track sound like it's there just to add length doesn't gel with me. Expanding the drums that come in at 0:31 would help push this over for me, or just doing something more than riding that arpeggio for thirty four seconds would flip my vote. Good work, though, and I hope you send this back with some improvements to that section.

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I can't argue with anything Gario said, but I'll also add that the instrumentation felt lacking to me, and not just the vox synth that he mentioned.  All the synths--lead, pads, arps, percussion, bass--are extremely bland.  To be honest, this sounds like OC ReMix circa 2000 in terms of instrumentation.  I know that primitive, quasi-chip synths are your thing, but if you asked me to blindly listen to all your remixes and order them by age, I would have pegged this one as the oldest and not the newest.  Your other remixes largely show much more sophisticated sound design.

Also, the percussion loops are pretty complex, but I'm not hearing a lot of variation.  It sounds like it's basically the same loop in all but that long introductory section.

Anyway, yeah, first thing to do is flesh out the main body of this, possibly also shortening that intro.  But then I also think the synths, especially the leads, could use some love.

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This track comes out swinging in the best possible way, but I agree with the two gentlemen that having that long fairly empty section is a dealbreaker.  The rest of the track is dynamite.  I love how you incorporated that Zelda dungeon theme.  I suggest making that long section more interesting with additional elements or writing, and also consider adding at least one more section to the track, perhaps a very short breakdown or transition, and one more unique section after that, then the outro.  The arrangement just isn't there yet, although the production is quite good.  Also, your render cuts off early.

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  • Liontamer changed the title to *NO* Zelda 2 'Do You Need a Light?'

Not sure why the faux-vox at :20 was so quiet, but it meant that the melody was extremely pushed back for a bit of time. Definitely agreed with others on the dated aesthetic. The textures felt thin, and the instrumentation lacked sophistication and fullness.

When the track picked up at :54, that was the height of the dynamic curve here, and the track just hovered there until the end. At only 2:09-long, everything needs to the fully clicking and needs to sound fully developed. The ending at 2:01 was abrupt and there was no real transition or flow to it, plus the track cut off before fading to 0.

Just wanted to sanity check this, since I was surprised at the votes just seeing it was by Jonas, but I agreed with the others. The energy felt static, the arrangement was underdeveloped, the sounds weren't sophisticated. MindWanderer's observation that it could have been a piece from the super-earliest days of OCR was on the money.

This just needs more everything; right now, it's a concept, but far from developed.

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