Liontamer   Judges ⚖️

Rocks out at :13. Hate the piano at :19, which sounds super fake and blocky, but it's well-produced enough (and doubled by the belltones) to take the uncanny valley stink off of them; kudos for making good use of the sample. :-) The vocal delivery at :27 sounds awesome to me; when I look at the lyrics, then you notice some ESL tendencies in the delivery. That said, the overall pronunciation is done well. I had no inherent problem with the prosody and felt the timing and inflections of the lyrics sound nicely stylized. From :45-1:02 & 1:35-1:52, I wish the vocals didn't get as pushed down, but they definitely sound like they're surrounded by the music, so I'll have to live with it. At 1:46 & 1:50 though, the vocal parts of "(This is all I'm worth)"/"(Never mind the hurt)" and at 2:58 & 3:02 "(Set myself free)"/"(Show love to me)" all get so, so buried, they might as well not be there, which I'm sure wasn't the intention. If one thing were to be tweaked here, making those lines more audible would be it. That said, it's not a dealbreaker. Really, really enjoyed the stereo panning of the chorused vocals from 1:10-1:18, as well as the clock ticks ping-ponging around the field from 1:52-1:56; small details that sound great and separate the good from the great. All of the musicianship sounds awesome, and the theme treatment is creatively comprehensive. I really dug the countermelodic and rhythm guitar work underneath the second verse from 1:57-2:13. I don't want to miss the forest for the trees. I do understand the comments on the prosody and some mixing nice-to-haves, it just didn't come off as anything dealbreaking with the standards. The source is creatively arranged and the production's solid. The same type of voting dynamic happened with his Silent Hill 4 mix where production/mixing stuff got nitpicked. This is above our bar all day, don't get it twisted. YES

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Well, isn't that lovely? You wouldn't be able to readily tell that this had such a protracted development history based on how cohesive and straightforward it seems, including the gradual increases in personalization from verse to verse. A bread-and-butter/meat-and-potatoes arrangement approach success! :-) YES

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Now that's a fun playlist theme. :-P

Artist Name: zykO Hello there. Back from the outer rim with offerings; it's been some time so let's cook. The source sorta fell randomly into my lap, the sort of serendipitous flurry of inspiration that spurred this whole video game remix thing for me all the way back in 1998; June Chikuma's Bomberman 93 Blossom Planet tune popped up on a YouTube playlist and I was running over myself to fire up the ol' furnace. I've been studying ancient Egyptian music for the past few years as an Egyptology grad student in Cairo and, as a part of my exploration into wonderful new things, I've also been studying the Arab musical tradition proper (leading to such experimentation as my most recent album, the Dune-inspired "Long Live the Fighters," for example). So stumbling upon Chikuma's masterclass in the form was well met. Around the same time, President Trump suggested that he intended to SimCity the Gaza Strip and "do a job with it." Political leanings aside, treating the Levante as if it were a map pack for Civ VI is bizarrely ambitious at best… even if most of us wish the world was more like a video game. In that sense, this tune is meant to serve as the spiritual successor to 2017's "The Long War," although the two songs deal with fundamentally different scenarios and contexts despite both describing geopolitical quagmires in the MENA region. Of course blowing shit up isn't exactly the solution for any of the Middle East's problems either and I did find it darkly ironic that the source tune comes from a Bomberman game. So I juxtaposed the whole thing by opening with a classic Egyptian folk tune by the famed late-19th century composer Sayed Darwish called "El Helwa Di" which some may recognize as Egypt's theme from Civ VI. It's a simple song about the sunrise and the good day to be had no matter one's circumstance. It's the sort of idealistic work song that is commonplace and deeply ingrained in the Egyptian cultural memory and a form that actually dates all the way back to the earliest days of dynastic Egypt. It's the sort of scene, I think, that reminds us that simpler, calmer times did and still do exist and they are the things worth fighting for when the bullies come knocking. The orchestration is fairly straightforward oriental fanfare: darabuka, daf, riq and shakers make up the percussion section while a ney and organ lead the way atop a bed of strings including an acoustic guitar. If I haven't lost you by the end, you'll catch the nod to Sonic 2's "Oil Ocean Zone" to close us out. Anyway, hope y'all enjoy. Dig it. Games & Sources Bomberman 93 just the first bit:

Artist Name: H36T Hey guys, another sub by me, this time with a tiiiiny tiny source of just about 14 seconds or so. Still, i wanted to challenge myself to take something that small and try and make it my own or at least create something expansive off of it. To be honest the arrangement wasn't that tough this time. A lot of it came in a few days. It was...everything else that pushed me and my skills to their limits. I think it is just outside of or the edge of my skill level to try and tackle a sound palate like this and make it sound good. Some aspects I'm quite confident with still much to learn and others....I still have a long ways to go haha. Also usually I come at composing and the like with a story first and then the music goes from there. Here it was the opposite. The story came along as I was writing and I might try more of that. I'm interested in how others approach writing in this regard! Welp, that's it for me. I hope you and others can enjoy Manoria Cathedral: Corruption! P.S. Them demons was wiln' in that cathedral Games & Sources

Artist Name: Michael Hudak I wanted this remix to be as if the listener were in the environment. It was an experiment in creating different lived-in spaces with a lot of different reverbs, some used as sends and others as inserts, often time layered into the same instrument or mix bus. Animal Well takes place in what's basically an enormous cave with dozens and dozens of rooms, so I thought it made sense to make it sound cave-like from a thematic standpoint (and even if it didn't, I guess that would be fine too, now that I think about it...doing a remix in this style from another type of game could be fun to try). Overall, it's similar to what I did on the GoldenEye mix I made, but here I took things a step further in terms of telling a story, because I tried to recreate moments from the Animal Well game itself, down to "defeating" the Manticore with fireworks, and inserting a lot of animal sounds (that aren't from the game - I recorded/made them) into the quieter rooms of the cave/well. The Flames/save room theme has some very close sounds (as do moments of the driving percussion earlier on) panned close to the ear, to kind of simulate moving through an area. I've used this kind of "technique" before on OCR, definitely on the Tiberian Sun mix, and a few others as well. I do 95% of my arranging and mixing with over-ear headphones; maybe my obsession with near and far sounds wouldn't be what it is if I had my old studio monitors and mixed in a treated room. Source usage: 0:26 - 1:43 and 1:54 - 2:19 in remix is from MANTICORE. The quieter middle sections use the same riff and chord progression, but in half-time. 2:26 - 3:00 in remix is from FLAMES. Thanks for listening, as always. P.S. I think there is an official soundtrack release coming out soon for Animal Well, so maybe a more accurate track-listing will become available then. Games & Sources The game is Animal Well, which I played on Switch. There actually isn't an official OST track list that I could find online, so I'm going off of what YouTube is calling the two tracks I remixed here: MANTICORE (essentially the final boss music) and FLAMES (essentially the rest area/save music).