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*NO* Sonic Advance 3 'Twinkle Shiverfrost'


Gario
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  • 2 weeks later...

This opened up with some SNES-style synths, so I was optimistic I'd be able to get behind some 16-bit chiptunes here.  Unfortunately, there's a lot here that's holding the mix back.

First, it's quite repetitive, with the same motifs played with the same synths many times over.  As near as I can tell, the entire second half is a copy-paste of the first half (minus the intro and ending), and each of those halves consists mostly of the same melody repeated twice with an intro and a bridge, meaning that the main melody is copy-pasted four times.  The percussion is even more repetitive, maintaining the exact same pattern for the vast majority of the piece.  The energy level is also largely unvarying and fatigue-inducing.

Second, the parts don't line up well together.  Melody, pads, bass, etc. are all doing their own thing.  There's no harmony, there's no call-and-return, there's basically nothing to indicate that any of the parts were written with the other parts in mind other than that the major sections change at the same points.  To be fair, the source isn't great in this regard either, but that raises another point:

The arrangement is very conservative.  The bulk of the part writing is lifted directly from the source.  I'm picking out only very small portions that are sufficiently transformative for our standards.

Balance also needs some improvement.  In many places the melody is too quiet, in other places it's the bass that can barely be heard.

The ending is lacking, too.  There's just a quick riff at the end of a loop.

So, sorry, but I think this still has a long way to go.  I'd take it over to the workshop forum to get some more detailed advice before submitting again.

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  • 3 weeks later...

The production quality here needs a step up, the percussion is very exposed and dry, not to mention very repetitive, specially the hats sequence which sounds overly artificial.  The pads seem to sit in the background just to muddy the mix in the mid/low-mids.  The overall sound palette sounds too basic and vanilla.

However, I believe you can make a great mix with not-so-great sounds, but the biggest failing here is that there was little regard for harmonization.  There's a lot of clashing of all the parts and it sounds very dissonant. Parts like 0:57, sounds like all the parts are playing without a care of what the others are doing. You need to bring the bass, pads and arpeggios to complement each other, to harmonize.  Also in this section, the right-panned cymbals are sequenced too fast together where they just end p sounding almost like noise.

There's a lot of work to do here, but don't get discouraged, listen to music critically and find how the different parts work together to form a unified whole, a chord, a harmony.  Find how this differs from your own and try to bring it closer to that, reading up/watching videos on music theory basics/harmonization also helps a ton.  For now though, we can't pass this.

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  • Sir_NutS changed the title to 2017/11/11 - (2N) Sonic Advance 3 'Twinkle Shiverfrost'

There's not much else to mention that hasn't already been said. The track is definitely repetitive, especially in regards to the percussion. Overall is suggest shortening the arrangement and adding some more original sections to break up the repetition of the source. Along with that there are a lot of clashing parts, both harmonically and in the part writing. Sir Nuts mentioned listing to some tracks critically to see what works for them and I think that is a fantastic idea. See what parts others use to support the melodies and how all the parts work together. 

There's a lot of work here to be done, but keep at it and keep improving!

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