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Super groovy source, as expected from a Sonic OST! Not much for me to add that hasn't already been noted by Proph and Wake, unfortunately. As a bassist, I can get behind a bass-guitar-forward mix all day - as long as what the bass is doing is meant to be the focus. As it stands, the bass is in direct competition with both the Omnisphere bells and piano (:00 - :12, :12 - :38). I definitely agree that volume-wise it could be lowered several dB and still have the presence in the mix it deserves without standing on the toes of the melodic phrases. There's nothing inherently wrong with the bass using passing tones to transition chord roots, though you'll want to be careful that the harmony you're crafting between all the layers (bass, strings, piano, pad, and all the reverb and delay) is copacetic. Wake and Proph noted the dissonance/crunchiness @ :38 - :51 where the delay FX on the piano clash with the piano itself as well as the pad/string layers. You may need to automate or duck the delay during those clashing sections or remove that effect in that section. :51 - :55 is such a highlight section, and I also would love more of that feel in this piece. :55 - 1:20 would be a cool spot to continue the tonality of that gnarly distortion guitar since you're recapping the A section here. In general, when reintroducing sections from the piece, it's a good idea to vary parts of that section to keep things from feeling stale or redundant. For me to sign off on this one when it comes back, I'd need to hear: the bass guitar reduced in volume to give space to the piano, bells the clashing/unwanted dissonant notes fixed @ :38 - :51 more variety to the sections after :55 There's a lot of opportunity here to make this one feel more like AshleyXR, and you've got a good foundation established here to build on. Feel free to bring it on back to us after spending some more time with it! NO (resubmit)

Begins similarly to the source, with a loud electric bass doing the low notes. Right away there's something off in the sound, I'm not sure if the bass sample is slightly out of tune but it's just not fitting correctly with the rest of the instruments. I'm fairly confident it's playing "correct" notes though... except for 0:12 where it plays a very unfitting C. At 0:13 a percussion enters but the bass is so loud that it gets buried quick. I'm still hearing the bass as being off here, but now I'm more confident it's actually playing at least some wrong notes. At 0:25 we move to the next section and my impressions are more or less the same. We change to a new section at 0:39 and now things are definitely not fitting together, the pads, bass and keys seem to be playing different songs entirely (0:44 for example is very dissonant). Fun breakdown at 0:52, would've been a neat way to introduce and keep a guitar for the rest of the arrangement. There's a repeat of the first part and then on the second one there's some sort of piano solo over the backing that I commented not fitting well together. The 0:52 breakdown repeats and then we get a repeat of the main melody over a spicy chord for the end. On arrangement, this is a fairly conservative take on the original. You got creative with the backing around 1:25 but other than that it seems very similar to the source, on spirit. Like I mentioned above, there's various spots with potentially wrong notes that should get a second look, especially the entire 0:39 section. On production, this is kinda getting ruined by the bass. It's so loud that it drowns out everything else and makes it hard to judge whether the rest of the mix works or not. From what I can tell, the piano tone seems overly bright but I'd need to recheck the mix on a more balanced version. Overall, this needs more work to get posted. As prophetik recommended, going to the Discord's workshop to get suggestions would be great. I'd focus on nailing the arrangement first, taking care of potentially wrong notes and finding out how to make the source "yours" by adding more original ideas/variations. NO

Ah, fair enough. I understand the history of that now, and as a fellow writer, yeah...shit can take awhile to plot out and edit, especially if it's that long. I'll see how it goes, then. I might make it simple and like some weird opposite to what you do yearly. Call it a...'Halloween Haiku'. Or something equally catchy and short form. :P

Like we wouldn't have them... :-D https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kbxL0oM6xsneNMq5fwCkAqKWgI93IIz5/view?usp=sharing

Then I'll get started on my eerie pixel idea and see where it goes. As for poems, Twas actually has nothing to do with AOCC. The Twas series was started by me back in 2002 as something goofy to post for Christmas in the old UnMod forum that year. It became a yearly thing after that, focusing on various UnMod and OCR happenings until around the seventh year, when it became about original stories that had nothing to do with the forums. Each one's been written entirely by me, and as one can imagine, they take some time to flesh out and write nowadays (20-plus pages of stanzas do be like that). Doing a second one each year just isn't something I have the time for, so if someone else wants to write up a poem specifically for the Halloween project, they can do it. I gotta save up my ideas for the rhyming novellas I write once a year 😄