Leaderboard

These are just going to be first impressions from voting, so take this all with a huge grain of salt! The City Is a Warm, Dead Waste: I love the variety here! It reminds me of Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin in some ways, it doesn't surprise me to see a few Team Whip alumni on this one! Guitars are kickass here, and there's a monster amount of synth variety too. There's a solid amount of cohesion with the sounds chosen here, though I'm somewhat less sold on the arrangement itself - lots of great ideas but I think it'll take me some time to grasp where the arrangement is actually taking me. I think there's some reverb fine-tuning to do here, a lot of the elements feel overly boomy, which takes away some of the bite from elements like the drums. Other than drums/guitar, I actually surprisingly can't pinpoint individual elements contributed by each artist - there's a lot of sounds that feel like they could have come from anyone, which is pretty neat! 🏆Duel of the Shifting Sands: Ooohhh, 8-bit plus! I'm not surprised at all by that, but I'm not used to hearing it with all the extra bits and bobs, and I gotta say... I dig it! A lot. I think there's untapped potential to process the chiptune elements a little more dynamically, but overall, the blend works pretty damn well. 3:02, hell yeah! This is a great way to drive this home. I was on the fence about which track would get my vote, but this section really clinched it for me. Overall, I saw a huge amount of potential and TONS of great ideas thrown out from both entries in this duel, but this track feels like like it has the edge in terms of focus and cohesion. 🏆Seven Fists Under the Sakura Tree: Motherfucker, you guys are not playing around. This hits IMMEDIATELY off the rip. That fill at 1:06, excuuuuse me? I think this has a bit of the same "washiness" that I noted in "Warm, Dead Waste" where there's just a little bit less clarity to the mix than I would like, but I don't think the track suffers too much as a result. Ok, and now we go into something completely different at the end that somehow also works? I was trying to write out my highlights as I went along, and I just couldn't keep up. The sound choices, writing, production... y'all are crazy for this one. This is going directly onto my Smash Bros. playlist. This is going to be hard to beat. Sakura Wa Karenai: Ok, so that's how you're gonna play this. The production on here is IMMACULATE right off the jump, I can hear some strong DJ Mokram influence on the world instruments, then some psytrance beats come in and I immediately know who's at the helm. The production on here feels a little tighter, but I'm waiting for the moments like Team Rage had in their entry that REALLY knocked me off my feet. Oh, there's 2:06 - that's more like what I'm talking about, but it still feels like you're holding back on the energy levels. We've still got time to go though, so we'll see where this goes. 2:42 really jumped out at me in a completely different way, but it was a powerful moment with the entrance of vocals and that beautiful FM piano. The sound design in this section is off the hook. OH BABY SHUFFLE RHYTHMS now we're cooking. Ahhh, this matchup is TOUGH. There's so many brilliant ideas here and there's actually quite a bit of connective tissue to bridge them all together, but will say that the energy management falls just a little short of my hopes. The mix is incredibly clean, from the instrumentation to the mixing/mastering, but it feels like there was room to push the intensity further. I still loved this a ton, and you gave the other track a serious run for their money, but Seven Fists takes the crown in this matchup for me. 🏆Only Trust Your Mix, Techniques Will Never Help You: this title sounds like something I would hear in an incomprehensible Youtube Short production tutorial, I'm curious what the title alludes to! This starts off with some pretty straightforward but catchy, bright rock that reminds me of old Sonic Adventure music, the lead performances are top-notch. I don't feel like this track was as ambitious as the other ones from Team Rage in terms of ideas, but it feels like perhaps the most cohesively-executed of the three, and just because it's more focused, doesn't mean that it's any less impactful. The seagulls are a nice touch too, reminds me even more of Sonic Adventure when we hit that part. Crazy breakdown at the end, this was really good! You Make the Sun Shine (In My Heart): Aww, so cute! This is definitely the hardest matchup so far just by virtue of the fact that each entry were clearly going for different things. The other two matchups, although executed very differently, ended up going for relatively similar energy, but this is the kind of diametrically-opposed matchup I love to see from GSM. The lead vocals are confident and fit the bill really nicely - some slightly awkward moments where the lyrics and the melodic phrasing don't perfectly sync up, but that's to be expected on a short timeline when you have to add your own lyrics to the equation. Across the board, I'm hearing brilliant synth riffs and excellent sound choices. I love the vocal harmonies that I assume colorado weeks contributed? 3:25 onward to the end of the song is when everything really clicked for me <3 The area where this struggles for me is the mixdown - it doesn't feel like it's quite baked yet, specifically in terms of relative volume levels. The lead doesn't always feel like the lead, and there's certain elements (like the synth bass at 2:40-ish, for example) that feel inexplicably louder than everything else. There's also several elements that don't quite feel glued together with appropriate level of bus compression or reverb to really give this a sense of place. When both tracks are full of great ideas but in totally different ways, I need to fall back to execution, and in this case, I have to trust the mix from Team Rage. There's no dead air this round, every team brought the heat in terms of concepts and energy! Execution was a little more of a mixed bag, ultimately I feel like any of these matchups could have been swayed with different levels of polish on the execution, which means that you all hit the mark in terms of blending the sources well. I am well familiar with the time crunch element of GSM, and it does tend to play out tougher for more ambitious, multi-genre concepts that will always take longer to polish. Even though I ended up generally voting for the tracks that felt tighter and maybe took a few less stylistic risks, it's not for lack of enjoyment of the more ambitious ones! If you didn't get my vote here, it just means that I thought the song needed a little more time in the oven - everyone did excellent work and I enjoyed it a lot!

Guess which (dope AF) remix just taught me that Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine and Puyo Puyo are the same game 😬

This was a super fun showing! Just writing down stuff I've brought up in the discord and listening party: - I helmed (arranged, produced, mixed) the lion's share of Dead Waste. seph was super helpful in spicing up the guitar parts I wrote and doing some extra textures/transitions. H36T did stems for piano and female vocals, Ronald did some dark ambient synths/FX, and I consulted with josh and Moebius on drum part-writing and mastering, respectively. - both the gf and I thought the ocarina in Shifting Sands was a soprano sax, lol, but after the drop I can hear it better. - Shifting Sands is also the most VVVVVV-sounding thing JSA has done, imo. The low end profile right before the drop kicks in is great. Xaleph(?) did a great job with the mixing. - "Seven Fists" is the punchiest one this round, imo. I joked with seveneyes/alex that he was gonna master it to -7LUFSi and it came out to -6.9. "Dead Waste" and "Mix" both sat around -10 to -11LUFSi (different people mastering). Its Run, Lola, Run-sounding transition is awesome. - I'm pretty sure all of Team Streets was floored by the Etrian!Sakura arrangement. It took us a while to figure out the flow of ours, in part because the Cherry Blossoms MIDI was formatted as triplets instead of "true" 6/8 or 12/8. The buildup/sound design in the intro is great. - I also had no idea Weeks also did the low vocals during the breakdown in Etrian Sakura! Her range is crazy. - Moe's time changes were super fun and Moe/josh overdubbed seph like three or four times in Mix. Moe also schooled on josh and I by making one of his transitions a seagull when we were trying to arrange it with drums or guitar, lmao. - Sun Shine (In My Heart) has some good vocal balancing for the time-crunch. I also can't hear "Azure Sea and Sky" without hearing the lyrics now. I joked in the listening party that Moe should have stuck like 30 seagulls in his to make it a fair fight. I also thought it was neat how many credits each track had - it seemed like each team member had a hand in nearly all of each others' tracks. Looking forward to Round 2!

These are fucking bangers. I am glad I got to finally listen to them. Wonderful job to both teams. <3 Kinda funny how I can directly distinguish who is in what team, just based on the sound palettes, techniques used and their individualistic motifs from previous work of theirs!! It's a highlight to hear everyone's hearts and passions and skills mingle together to make something this unique, and both series' OSTs are pretty crazy and gives such a weird, lively, and wide variety of possibilities to the imagination on arranging a remix! So, kudos to the series selection, source choices and the end results! Look forward to more, and remember, no matter the result, these are fire and I was thrilled listening to each and every one of them (several times over.) :)

good job everyone

I'm coming into this fresh-ish, having not voted on the original track. What I'm hearing is a well-balanced, punchy mix with some really cool delay-based atmospheric effects that give this a totally unique feel, despite using a pretty traditional set of complementary instruments. There's a tremendous amount of personality and swagger here, and enough going on that, even though the beat is fairly low-tempo and unassuming, it still propels the arrangement forward and makes for a track you can really bob your head to. The arrangement breezes by, running through a lot of ideas but still managing to remain cohesive, and not feeling like you just threw everything at the wall indiscriminately. It's a really great piece that came together well. I find a few of the synth elements to be a little shrill, partly due to the octave that they're written in, but in the future this could also be mitigated with a dynamic EQ or compression to tame those frequencies. It's also worth considering lowering the range of bells and flutes specifically, which tend to have some of the most shrill high harmonic content, but this is hardly a dealbreaker - just a comment for the future. Great work on the resubmission!! YES

In my original vote on this track, I heard the potential and also the amount of love, effort and detail that went into the production, but I felt that there were too many ideas thrown in at any given time, and a lot of the parts sounded so random and didn't mesh well together, and it was exhausting to listen to as a result. It doesn't help that the source song is somewhat odd melodically. But VQ had already received some excellent guidance from the Sages to help her uncluster this arrangement, and then she reached out to me for further advice. It already sounded much better to me, but I was able to help her get it mixed even a little bit better, and then she had me master it. I think it sounds significantly better and I can now appreciate the vision that she originally had for the piece. The positive aspects of the sound-design and writing all shine through now without anything being overshadowed, and I really like it! And others will as well. The result is a dreamy, groovy, Eastern-themed soundscape that sounds really full and open yet loaded with fun details and ear candy, telling a story as it moves along. I love the vocal clips! Just a great track. Thank you for your trust, VQ, and this was fun to work on with you! Good job! Definitely "Chimp-approved," let's go! YES

i YES'd this last time but noted a few elements that i wasn't into. i still think the opening kick is too boomy (this might be a headphone adequacy issue here, there's a ton of subbass there). i still like all the interplay between the elements. there's less low-mid density which is nice. the outro's kind of all over the place, and without the backing elements the shamisen loses some luster. overall it's still a noodly melody that isn't for everyone, and there's still a lot of static and that's not my favorite backing element. but i like the complexity and find the creativity to be evident in a lot of places. this is still a pass to me. YES

The Judges Panel has been talking about ways to work through the queue of submitted remixes at a faster pace, and after a lot of discussion and weighing the pros and cons, we've come to a decision that's probably one of the biggest adjustments to our process in a long time: Submissions no longer require four (4) YES votes to pass. A decision is reached as soon as the difference in votes is three (3). To clarify the key change here: when a submission receives three (3) YES votes and there are zero (0) NO votes, the submission is accepted, because the difference in votes is three (3). If a submission continues to go back and forth without reaching +3 in either direction, the panel will continue to vote until all active judges have voted and the majority will determine the decision. This update to our decision making process will immediately apply to any submissions on the panel at the time of this announcement going live, and for all decisions moving forward. We won't be going back to previous rejections to find decisions that started with three (3) uncontested YES votes but eventually got rejected; in those cases, what's done is done. We hope that artists will find this new criteria a little bit easier to understand. Overall, we've been impressed with the quality of work being sent in these past months, and this should make it easier for us to get the slam dunk tracks through the process faster. Thanks to all the artists who continue to participate in our curation process. Hope to hear your work soon. - DarkeSword