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Oshit it's dj carbunk1e! I had your tales of phantasia thor remix on repeat on my summer workout playlist some 20 years ago, haha. Good stuff! The idea of this track is that someone wakes up to their alarm clock on turbo mode and they have a total mental breakdown from having to wake up to the same obnoxious sound every day of their wretched life so they can waste their existence grinding away at a soul sucking job. So today, they make a very rational decision to pull out a gun to shoot their clock but miss every shot and have to deal with the ear-splitting repercussions of their insomanical actions as the alarm clock continues to taunt them while they're half-deaf until they finally kill it with the final bullet (Inspired by the first release of the Turok comic but with a gun instead of an ax, lol). The main "synth" in my track is the 808 cowbell sample. I was really minimalist on this track and besides a sax synth most everything is just FL drumkit samples. Not sure how much more range I can get out of a cowbell but you were right in the comparison that it's lacking midrange umph. Maybe some more EQ with reverb could pull it off? Also, I doubt I tuned any of the drums. That's something I totally neglected. Thanks for the reminder. The extreme rapid panning on some of the samples is deliberate and I made automation pulse waves that more or less matched the waveforms of the samples that were panning to make the listener feel somewhat disoriented while the main track continued unchanged (gotta take any excuse I can get to deliberately screw with people cause that was the whole point of the original LISA game, lol). I don't think the main drums and percussion moves much in the stereo field though, I'll have to doublecheck. The idea for a rumble in the beginning is fire, I'll have to take your advice on that. Thanks for the inspiration! I've been living under a rock for the last decade and a half, so I don't have a discord let alone even know what it is but maybe I'll get with the times and check into it. Thanks again for the input!

This was the original above Below is the remix The original track has a lot of room to breathe, very specifically tuned drums to match the synth, and the synth has some mid/low EQ to really fill the space coupled with some noticeable reverb. What you've added, especially around 0:48/0:49 with the bass really grounds the song, making it feel a lot fuller. You'll need to make sure that the song feels full of energy and not just "busy" by adding a little more room for the melody to breathe. Additionally, I would tune the drums in the same keys that the original song is to get a similar effect/feel. Also - if you listen to my songs, I love panning drums - but make sure you're not over doing it. We want it to feel frantic and full of energy - we don't want it to just feel busy and cluttered. To do this, you can pick and choose what's panning, usually you'll want your drums to have relatively set panning locations maybe with the exception of closed hats (as you'll see often that there are 2 to 4 closed hats in this style music each with a preset pan to give the perception of movement, usually between 20L and 20R). I think having the synth pan is fine, especially if the percussion is grounded - again the goal is chaos while avoiding clutter. As a style recommendation, having a low end drum or rumble would really add a semblance of stability in the first 30 seconds to foreshadow your bass entering later. This way it kind of teases that it's more than just this tension you have built up in the beginning. If you want to jump in the #workshop discord channel - feel free to @ me (@Xaleph) if you want to share screens to go over any of this, would love to see this song in a finished state!

I only now realized I got another wooden spoon to my proud collection in the final round ?