Leaderboard

Normally, I'd break it down and comment on production and arrangement separately, but I think with a mix like this, the line between the two can be pretty blurry, so I'll look at them both together. First off, I don't think the intro works particularly well. Right now, you have the full punch of the arrangement coming right out of the gate, with percussion, bass, melody, and a phasing/filtering effect on the the whole thing, and it's a bit jarring; after the intro, you then town it down and bring in individual elements, but.... the best way I can describe the feel of this is that it feels like I'm reading a book that tells me the entire plot in the first few pages, and then introduces me to the characters and setting afterward. You can occasionally pull something like that off in the right context, but it's hard to do and I don't think it really works in the context of this arrangement. I'd try to make the intro less busy. I'm not wild about the percussion samples; they sound a bit dry and don't sit all that well in the mix. This may be fixable with EQ and effects, without actually changing the samples; if you haven't already, I highly recommend you check out Zircon's percussion tips. Percussion also needs more variation in general. The mid (particularly upper-mids) feel a bit busy; I'd try to EQ out a bit more space for your leads. The arrangement is fairly conservative; aside from instrumentation, very little is changed form the original. I think this alone would prevent it from getting past the judges were you to submit it. Now, having said all that, there are a few aspects of this that I really like. At 1:14, you have a cool little mixup in the percussion. This is a cool little flair, and I'd love to see you more of this sort of variation, as well as some changes to the bass and the other instruments to accentuate this little mixup, rather than keeping it almost-hidden the way it is now. When you recycle the exact same mixup a few bars later, this sort of takes away from the novelty of it; as I said above, more variation in the percussion would go a long way. I like what you did starting at 2:08, though the jury's still out on whether I like the distortion I can hear in some parts of this section (particularly at 2:18). I can't tell if you've got clipping somewhere in your signal chain or if the distortion is deliberate; I'd fiddle around with this a bit, but I'm not sure what the ideal solution would be. Also, this mix is, on the whole, just plain fun! Despite all my criticisms, you definitely capture the fun, carefree feel of an afternoon playing Mario Kart. Are you planning on extending the mix past it's current end? The section at 2:08 would, I think, work great as a bridge of sorts, but I like it less as an outro, and I'm not wild about the fadeout; this would be a moot point if you extended the mix past it's current end, obviously. Overall, the mix is fun, but I don't think it's likely to make it past the judges' panel in its current state.

A tricky source to work with, not a whole lot there. And this arrangement is definitely on the repetitive side as a result. But it never quite repeats exactly, with different, creative accompaniment each time, and there's lots of extra padding to break up the repetitions. I definitely think Rebecca could have erred more on the side of originality here, transforming the lead more and doing more with the other parts of the source, but I think it's adequate as it is. Production is up to her usual standards, so I'm good giving this a YES