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hey mate, it's me again I followed your advice and both sorted/mixed the synths and added more variety to the drums. Hope it's better - I like it a lot more over the original version.

Well hello there! Welcome to OCR! Seems like you want to send this in as a submission, right? Awesome, I'll give you an idea of how it'll fare on the panel if you submit it as is. Nice combination of instruments you've got going there - this works pretty darn well as a synthwave track. The overall soundscape is delicious, and the way that the track builds off of itself does a great job to progress the track. Your synths are well crafted, and when the drums come in they compliment the overall soundscape very well. In the beginning the production works well enough, but as the track progresses and more instruments are introduced the soundscape tends to get pretty muddy, due to how wet the synths are. The moments of clarity in this give me goosebumps, like at 0:45 (the introduction of that bass synth) and 2:12 (that drum over the bass), but 2:46 onward the instruments all bleed into one another and create a messy soundscape. The Sanctuary portion's main synth is also overly wet and would otherwise be problematic, but that section doesn't have nearly as many synths going at once to cause issue. Release heavy synths, delay and reverb are solid tools in the Synthwave genre, but there's too much of it in this track so tone it down to clean it up. Related to the issue above, when things get overly crowded the track takes a hit as far as having limiting artifacts. When everything is going down in the second have it sounds like there's a constant "buzzing". While I can't 100% confirm this to be a limiting issue, clipping or anything without uploading it to Audacity, it's very likely when this gets busy it also hits your limiter. Be careful with that. The drums in this, while great for the genre, suffer from being pretty static. Change it up from time to time, add a pattern, switch the beat a little in subtle ways, etc.. The fills are a good start, but the pattern drones on after 2:12, so you'd very likely be called out on it on the panel. If you were to send this to the inbox as is, I would likely pass it on to the panel, but it would very likely be rejected on production grounds, overly crowded soundscape and that static drumset. I'd suggest making your synths a bit more dry, and giving some more variety and life to those drums. Pay attention to your production levels, too, though they'd likely be almost automatically fixed once the soundscape is less crowded. ... On an unofficial note, I really like the arrangement, here. Personally, I feel there was a lot of potential to expand on the Sanctuary track after 2:12, but that's just my opinion. Most of your issues in this track come into play after you start the Castle theme, though, so it wouldn't be a bad idea to have a more rich and focused Sanctuary arrangement. This doesn't affect your track in any way as far as the panel goes, but I thought I'd add that suggestion in there a bit off the record. Best of luck, and thanks for sharing your track, here - it's a pretty cool track.

(this quote was from PRC345) I've signed up for the Discord group today, didn't get around to it earlier. I'm going to post small announcement over there in the #comps page, linking to this thread and/or ThaSauce.

Sometimes, it's harder to stay true to the source and still evoke such a quality reaction for a remix. Meaningful and pure, and everything (down to the length!) seems perfectly in concert - well done!

Regarding how much stuff there is to do on the map: https://zeldamaps.com/ Yeah, there's a LOT OF FUCKING SHIT TO BE DONE. This game has zero wasted space. Every tree, every rock, every bush has a purpose. Complaints about audio aside, the game is a masterpiece, the benchmark against which future open world games will be compared (most of them unfavorably, I suspect)