No need to stretch a vote out here -- I'm on the side of "gotta be more substantial." This could probably work if the genre execution was better, but as it is, you've got a lifeless drum kit paired with a too-simple piano and some tasty bass that could stand to be a little more featured. For lo-fi hip hop (or boom-bap, for the old heads in the room), you need to execute your drums, bass, and the tone of your instruments very precisely. With the sharp, reverb'd shaker, the extra-crispy-and-dry snare, and the lack of anything resembling dynamics, this misses the mark. Gotta add some more realism and probably don't let it sound so very quantized...a J Dilla-style beat would have a lot more "humanity" to it in small imperfections in timing. Shaker with all the reverb contrasts poorly with the rest of the drum kit, and all of it sounds too "crispy," aka there's too much high end there. Saturation and low-pass filters are your friend here. Also, playing with more than just a few drum samples throughout will help. Get us some variety in sounds...remember that a lot of old hip hop music sampled MULTIPLE drum loops that would appear at different times in the song, creating more timbres to work with. You're on the right track with those vinyl-sampled tom fills -- if you can get that kind of texture on more of your drums, you'll be on the right track. For mixing, the piano as-is can work, but genre-wise it's probably better to add some low-pass filtering to it to soften it up. Making the performance more dynamic would also help, since right now everything sounds quantized to grid and to velocity.  Bass was decent but not featured prominently enough for the genre.    This one should come back with more dynamics, better drum processing and wider variety of sounds, and an overall tone that feels less crispy and more dusty (less high end frequencies in key areas). You'll be helped by embellishing the arrangement as well...don't just make it the same throughout but add some variation to the themes, maybe do some call and response with the piano and another instrument.    NO (resubmit)

Happy Mother's Day (I hope everyone had a good one). Despite having some plans on incorporating "Bloody Tears" (I consider it a VGM classic with a great melody)  into one of my own remixes, I decided to listen to this track after Larry posted about it. I feel the Rap portion covers Alucard's story well and is a nice gift for the occasion. While I've never been a fan of Trap music personally (especially when done by amateurs), I found the arrangement strong and distinct for a source that's been remixed plenty (not saying that's a bad thing, especially in this case). Over all, good job.

Sampled Bryan Fury's ending theme from Tekken 4 aaand this was the end result.    

Reharmonization :)

Thank you! That was one of my favorites as well. I did a bit of a harmonic trick in the middle where I used the same melody with different chords, and it felt like a new key. Still don't know what to call that technique today. :-)