Liontamer   Judges ⚖️

What did you think? Post your opinion of this ReMix.

What did you think? Post your opinion of this ReMix.

What did you think? Post your opinion of this ReMix.

What did you think? Post your opinion of this ReMix.

What did you think? Post your opinion of this ReMix.

Strings feel slightly behind in spots, but the overall flow's pretty smooth for ye olden days. A good choice for a mellow playlist!

Artist Name: jnWake Collabers: Jabo, Ivan Hakštok. Yet another Dwelling of Duels track by me. This one comes from february 2025's Katajun Month. Katajun is DoD's former director, who recently left that position. He's a big fan of PC games and even has a cover band himself so the theme was PC Games! One of my favorite games as a kid, and also one of few primarily PC games I've played, is Starcraft, so I took this month as an opportunity to finally cover a track from it. Starcraft music covers a couple different styles for its playable races, with the human race (called "Terran") featuring a mix of progressive rock and spacy synths. Since the game is a RTS, the music isn't super melodic and is more meant as background. Still, each track is quite long and varied so there's a lot of material for remixing! Source is already kind of prog. rock-ish so for my cover I went with a straight prog. metal style. There's heavy guitars, bass riffs, time signature and tempo changes, sudden transitions into a completely different genre and a lot of synths! My main inspiration was Symphony X but DoD compared it more to Dream Theater. Track features 2 collaborators. On guitar, we have my usual collaborator Jabo, who happens to be a big Starcraft just like myself (he's even covered Terran Theme One himself for DoD before!). Like always, he did a great job playing all sort of guitar parts, particularly the leads which are always a high point of Jabo's playing. He also helped me find silly samples for one particular transition. On bass we have another usual collaborator in Ivan Hakštok. This track was actually produced in a tight timeframe so we recruited a bass player instead of having Jabo play the bass. Naturally, Ivan completely nailed the part in a couple of days, adding the super fun slap section around the middle. Thanks a ton to both! To help judging I'll separate the main sections of the original: A - until 0:15 is the intro; B - until 0:45 is melody #1; C - until 1:16 is melody #2; D - until 1:32 is a variation of C; E - until 1:51 is a weird transition with some b5s; F - until 2:37 is the "funky section" and features melody #3; G - until 2:53 is a fun riff; H - until 3:29 is melody #4; I - until the end is a slow chord progression. And here's my breakdown: 0:00: Based on A, the riffs aren't identical but pretty recognizable. 0:15: Initial part of melody #1 (B) on lead guitar with the intro riff on guitar. 0:29: Full Melody #1 (B) on synths, now on 7/8. 0:56: Melody #2 (C) on guitar. 1:10: Return to the intro and a guitar solo. Chord progression at the end is from C. 1:46: Melody from D with an "original" chord progression. 2:15: Section E, pretty straightforward adaptation. 2:34: Fun transition! 2:37: Funky section! Made even funkier here. At 3:06 melody #3 (and accompanying keyboard lead) play. 3:36: Fun riff (G) plus a keyboard solo on a variation. 4:07: Chords from I. 4:22: Melody #4 (H), tempo raises here for extra urgency. 4:46: Repeat of the 0:29 section for the end. Hope you enjoy! Games & Sources Source: Terran Theme Two

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Theme finally arrives at :32. The grace notes added into the woodwind lead (:38, :44, 1:08, 1:11, 1:17, 1:21, 2:29, etc.) were awkward, with :38's feeling off-key, but it was just a blip. Even if the melodic personalization sounded a bit ham-fisted/try-hard, in principle, I like what was done there, and it sounds more comfy on repeated listens. The brass swell at 1:43 exposed the samples a lot; not a great sound, but thankfully only a brief moment. I'm not an orchestrator, but should this woodwind lead be so loud over the other orchestration around 1:06? In any case, the woodwind lead was getting tired, but I did like the change at 2:13, redoing the melody in a minor. Minor thing, and I might have missed more of these, but there was a faint pop at 2:45, usually meaning there's a problem with a sample. To me, this is getting it done on the bread-and-butter level, and I'm cool with that. I agree with proph that the mixing should be better balanced and the levels reined in, but I can actually live with this, and it would have been a shoo-in 20+ years ago. It's not the most fluid, but its earnestness is winning me over as good enough. Because Audiomancer has done/is doing/will do tons of revisions and resubs, it can be easy to take his availability and appetite for redos for granted; what I'm saying here is, if the source files were kaput, I'd rather we post this than not. YES (borderline)

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I was fine with the previous version, though I can certainly empathize with why it got voted down. There's a very stilted quality to this from the drum programming, but I feel what's here overcomes this. Same with the synth timing for the line at 2:25 and the bass at 2:41, it's not pleasing. Second verse, same as the first, the overall interpretation and treatment carry it over for me more than the stiff timing holds this back, but I can see the case for arguing otherwise. I've heard plenty of tracks where the metronome-like timing is a feature not a bug, and this isn't a case where it's the same. For me the live guitar and the some of the synth design are solid enough as well to walk it over the line. :-) YES

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In the shadows, we stay busy. ;-) Joining us as a Sage, we now have @Treyt, who's shown off a lot of skills, enthusiasm, and potential since his fateful forum post nearly three years ago! We're proud to announce some staff promotions with the twin magic of Sages @pixelseph & @paradiddlesjosh stepping up to become two of our newest judges! We had some fun internally joking that they were a package deal, yet I'm happy to say they both independantly have done well and proven themselves capable to help us out in this new capacity on the panel! We've also honored to have another judges panel addition in @jnWake, who cut his teeth in OCR way back and has massively grown since becoming a Dwelling of Duels regular! All three of the new judges should help us NO every VGM arrangement submitted to us with more speed, politeness, and class. ;-D Be sure to use our resources in the Workshop forums and our #workshop Discord channel and you may just get some feedback from our new staffers!

Artist Name: Michael Hudak There was an awful lot going through my mind when I made this, but not much I want to actually say... I approached this piece like I was painting a picture as much as I was making a piece of music (I'm an awful visual artist). That's often how I work, but for a ReMix I'm a slave to the source, so it's exciting to find more ambient sources that I can find a reflective quality in that also happen to be from a game I love. The source is based around the following (seemingly endless) arpeggio progression: Ax6, Bx6, Cx3, Ax4, Bx7, Dx7, Ax3, Ex6, Fx6, Gx3, Hx3, Ix4, Jx3, Kx6, Lx6, Ax6, Mx6 I don't know what these chords are, but essentially what I did was this - Line them up the proper order, use some as arps, use some as held chords, test out instruments with different granular synth and reverb sends (sometimes just using the sends' audio and ditching the instrument VST audio after bouncing them separately into the track), and start painting. Lots field recording snippets. I faded out a lot of the transients in lieu of the smeared nature of the song, but kept some because I like how they sound and the rhythms they generate. There are all kinds of extra bits of melodic content floating over top of these arps in the source, and I was happy to ignore them, aside from the magical bit at 1:58 that appears at the very end of my version. It's a quiet master, but it's ambient/post-rock/room noise/whatever, so I think it's fine. The dynamic range is much more important to me in this particular case (I think it's around 15 LUFS of range). Originally, I had a bit more in the subs in the mix, but I rolled them back because they were too overpowering and IDM-like. The granular plugins I used were Fritz Granular Engine, which is part of the Reason rack, and Imagiro Autochroma. This write-up looks a little pretentious reading it back. A couple of the songs I listened to while making this were "New Grass" by Talk Talk and "In a Silent Way" by Miles Davis. Now it looks even more pretentious! Games & Sources "Ancient Temple Dungeon" from Skies of Arcadia is the lone source. YouTube link. That is the official song title listed on the game's OST. Yutaka Minobe & Tatsuyuki Maeda are the composers.

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