OCR03558 - *YES* Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess "Frozen Mourning"

[Gario]

Note: Name change was requested by the artist - it is officially 'Frozen Mourning'.

- Gario

This is an arrangement of the theme “Midna’s Lament” or “Midna in Distress" and is an embellishment of a central motif from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, for Nintendo Wii or Gamecube. It’s my favorite theme from a game that mostly used ambience aside from a somewhat strange-sounding MIDI soundtrack; it adds a lot of tension to the part of the game in which it plays. This arrangement more or less tries to embrace that tension.

The original theme as it was in-game can be found at this YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHdm-iKQNLo

 

“Remixer” name: 744 (or sevenfortyfour when written out fully)

Real name: Ben Brownlee

E-mail: 

Current site: sevenfortyfour.bandcamp.com

Forum userid: 34405

 

[Gario]

Very tasteful approach to the source, here, if a bit conservative. The texture is light, but when change comes in it's quite effective. It's clean, crisp and overall a really slick track.

All of that being said, the levels on this are very low on the whole, and it's difficult to raise your levels without clipping at 2:30 due to that single spike in levels there (it's very easy to see in Audacity). There's a certain amount of compression or soft limiting that one could do to fix this, but a cleaner solution would be to make it so that particular bass drum strike wasn't as loud (and do a soft limit over the track afterward). To be honest, though, either solution would work fine.

I could see this being easily post-able if the levels were fixed, but as it stands the whole track is too quiet. Get your levels up!

EDIT (03/28): He took the advice to heart, sent in a fix. I think it's sufficiently loud, now, with still enough dynamic variation. I'm waffling a bit on this, since I think there was some over-correction going down. Might be my fault so I'll work with him a bit - it sounded pretty good the first time around at 2:30, but there's some overcompression now. I'm going to hold my vote back and see if a balance can be struck, though for now the 'NO' holds.

EDIT (03/28): It's a better balance between the two now - loud enough, but not very messy at the point past 2:30. I'll take it.

YES

[MindWanderer]

Yeah, nothing groundbreaking here, but it's transformative enough and the production, at least at this point, is just fine.  Very effective reinterpretation.

YES

[Chimpazilla]

This might be one of my favorite sources of all time, idunno.

Conservative take on the source, yet transformative enough.  I love the icy feel.  Reverb is quite heavy, but it is fitting.  I think the overall dynamics of the track could still be smoothed out some, perhaps even with some volume automation on the rendered wav prior to mastering, that would avoid any compression spikes in the final product and still get the levels more consistent.  This gets the job done though, for me.  Beautiful.

YES

[Liontamer]

Yeah, I'm actually surprised by how this stands apart from the source's sound, because after the first minute or so, I wasn't convinced I'd approve this. But due to the new instrumentation, along with the key change and some layering of certain lines, this went well in the right direction The original orchestration added in from 2:40-3:18 was also a very nice touch and combined seamlessly with the source tune.

Boo on the cut-and-paste of the opening section at 3:18; I'm not mad, mind you, but it just felt like a low-effort loop point. At least at 3:45, there were some new strings, plus the addition of the delicate piano at 3:57 was good (albeit very distant) for the close. I'm more borderline than the other YES's, but through multiple smaller changes, Ben, you have enough interpretation to stand apart from "Midna in Distress." Nice work creating this more delicate version!

YES (borderline)