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Just to follow up on this, I'll also be mailing the mixer to see his reaction to the MIDI similarity, and offer him the chance to co-credit the MIDI author if it's true. I would then have to contact the MIDI author, Monster Iestyn, to get their approval as well. djp agreed with both Gario and I that -- while the arrangement is close to the original and is more borderline, there was enough going on that removing it on arrangement grounds compared to the original song itself isn't the issue. This is strictly about the closeness to the MIDI version on VGMusic.

Hey guys, it's been a long time, but here's an atmospheric Final Fantasy mashup of FF4's Prelude and FF6's Terra with dubstep and light glitch elements! This has been submitted to OCR on March 18, 2018. [EDIT: To show the timeline, this just got approved August 31, 2018 for a direct-post, so about 5 months in this case.] This was inspired by Stephen Anderson (stephen-anderson on soundcloud); it primarily uses bell and pad textures from Spectrasonics' Omnisphere 2; a Chapman Stick from Trilian; 4Front's TruePianos; and various FM sounds from my Zebra2 soundbank "FM Variations". Glitching was via Illformed's Glitch 2, and some of the remaining stuff was from LA Scoring Strings, Rhapsody Orchestral Percussion, and Serum. The solo violin was Embertone's Friedlander, highly recommend it!

Reverb is also tends to be a thing you need to clean up with EQ, just like the instruments themselves. I'm not to familiar with how LMMS works or how you implemented the reverb on the tracks, but if there's a way for you to tweak the frequencies of the reverb (removing some low end, etc) the you should look into that too. Overall, you've definitely improved the EQ for the instruments from what I remember last time though. Keep it up

2ND EVAL PER REQUEST: I really enjoy the overall improvements made in Version 2 of this tune from a production standpoint. The piece has solid mixing and sound overall, with nice support on the low end. I think the lead guitars can come out a lot more around 1:50-2:15. It gets lost in the background for me, particularly because, as Taucer pointed out, the arrangement is relatively conservative. Bringing the guitars more to the front might make the variation pop a bit more. Otherwise, I found my attention drifting away, even though we had some pretty great lead guitar stuff going on. It's likely ready for a submission.

Don't know him in person, but I know his music is great enough to actually have performances of it in Japan (I think he was the first non-Japanese composer who had that honor, iirc). I personally think it's a well deserved honor. Great VGM composer, for sure.

Lol at Meteo turning this from "David Wise appreciation thread" to "lets hate on David Wise as a person thread".

There's a lot to like in here! The organs and choir sound really good together. I also thought the step noises worked well to give linkage to the games. (I might try something similar for my next piece!) One very minor comment would be to make sure that the instrument that comes in with the melody at 0:43 (not sure if it is a string instrument?) has time to 'breathe', i.e. giving it a slight break between phrases. Also, you might want to try making the transition to the 8-bit instrument at 0:58 a little smoother. I guess the easiest way to do this would be to let the organ/strings from the previous section slow down and then stop playing. The 8-bit part could then enter a second or two after the final notes have stopped. (I think the transition at 1:52 works much better because there's a little space between the two segments.) (I'm also very inexperienced, so take what I say with a grain of salt!)

One thing that I recommend, if you're not doing already, is importing a well mixed song that's roughly similar to what you want yours to sound like and using it as a bit of a reference when mixing. It'll help you gauge certain things about your mix, especially as a beginner. It'll also help with the issue you mention about the mix sounding vastly different on different speakers. You can use the reference track to let you know roughly how your song should sound when going between different devices.