Emunator

I found this to be comfortably above the bar. The guitar performance is incredibly tight, and Psamathes adds a ton of character to the sound palette. As always, I love your ambition with changing up rhythm at a moment's notice while never feeling like you're just tacking disparate concepts together without any glue between them. The mixing felt serviceable and never obscured my ability to hear anything important, even if the frequency balance felt imperfect. YES

I find myself agreeing 100% with Deia on this - it's very anticlimactic to end the arrangement on a 1-for-1 repetition of a section that was already run through earlier in the track. Even a little arpeggio/countermelody or a change in synth patch to offer some variation is all this needs. It's so close, but the way it's currently presented feels like a letdown. And I also agree that the vocal clips could be better integrated into the mix with some reverb/leveling. This should be a super-easy resubmission if this doesn't pass - love everything else you've got going on here! NO (resubmit!)

I've been holding off on this one for a while because I hate to reject a track that is clearly well put together, well-performed, and by all measures an enjoyable listen, that doesn't meet the standards of interpretation that we're looking for at OCR, but I don't want to keep this languishing for any longer. I love this in a bubble and want to commend your musicianship, but the two judges who have already chimed in have the right call. No shade intended, and I certainly hope to hear something from you with a bit more of an interpretive take in the future! NO

I have to agree the gentlemen above - this has a ton of potential and it's clear that you're doing some fun stuff with the original source material. Prophetik hit the nail on the head that the lack of attention paid to volume is hurting this track a lot. It gives the impression that there's not enough dynamics or "breath" in your arrangement. This is a simple fix that could be accomplished with more selective volume automation, or if you want to give it even more character, filter sweep automation with a bit of resonance baked into your filter. This will help the dynamics of your mix match the natural rise and fall of your arrangement, and also clear up some room so that the synths you really want to highlight at any given point are front-and-center. It will also help some of your synth lines from sounding too vanilla, and add that extra touch of texture to the track overall. Solid stuff overall, but the mixing still sounds like it's unfinished. Hope to hear this again! NO (resubmit)

I've been sitting on this one for a long time. I don't really have a lot to say because I'm not really a fan of this style on a personal level, but the execution is solid enough in my book and is certainly bolstered by the ambition of the arrangement as a whole. Cyril and HeavenWraith both gave spirited performances that carry the track in spite of the technical issues that have been covered, and the mixing is honestly pretty good overall too! The main issues I see are timing-related and some inconsistent reverb levels, but none of that sinks the overall product for me. I'm happy to sign off on this in its current form. YES

This resubmission certainly fixes the issue with the harshness of the original mix, so my ears are grateful for that! However, as a result, you've backslid a bit too far in the other direction and taken all of the bite out of the high end entirely and now the mix sounds muddy and imbalanced toward the low end. When evaluating this, I have your new version and old version lined up with each other, and when A/B comparing, one mixdown is clearly treble heavy and one is bass heavy. Curiously enough, when I play both of the tracks in tandem at 50% volume each, the track actually sounds way better, to the point where I literally think you just need to find a midpoint between these two mixdowns, and you'll be golden. I hate to bounce this back without a ton of new input, but if you want to get in touch with me directly, I'd love to workshop this with you and get into the weeds, because I want to see this track posted! Your arrangement and performances are, and always have been, very strong. Keep at it! NO (resubmit!)

I love the palette of instruments you chose to work with here! The eclectic mix of plucky, whimsical instruments, mixed with a wash of chimes and shaker effects all comes together quite nicely. I also appreciated the very sparse use of vocals for additional texture. The only weak link, sequencing-wise, would be the panflute, which has a very unnatural release that causes the notes to cut off abruptly and not join together naturally. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. Great expansion on a relatively simple theme - you managed to give it a totally unique character while still keeping the spirit of the original track present at all times. Nice work! YES

Considering you've said that you're not a musician by trade, this is a pretty solid first attempt! There's a good deal of interpretation in how you adapted the original source to a slowed-down, vibed-out synthwave style, and there's a lot of creative sound choices to drive home that mood. I thoroughly enjoyed the bones of this track! However, the production side is not living up to the potential of your arrangement, as I'm immediately picking up on several mixing/sequencing issues that could be addressed. First off, let's talk about the overall mixing on the track. This is VERY heavily compressed beyond what the genre calls for. I think I can best illustrate this with a screengrab of the overall track waveform, which can be helpful to evaluate the overall dynamic curve of your track... What this immediately tells me is that you've slammed the levels of your instruments as loud as you can go, and you're engaging the limiter on your master track way too frequently. Especially when your waveform looks like this during sections like 1:40 or 2:49, where there's really only a few instruments going on, it's immediately obvious that the levels of your instruments need to be brought down so that there's some breathing room for the natural dynamics to show through. This especially becomes an issue with some of your high pitched bell samples, or the sound effects that bookend the track on the front and back - these are mixed so loudly, the high frequencies are physically painful on the ears. Rebalancing each instrument in your arrangement, and adding some high-end EQ cuts to certain patches would be an excellent starting point. Aside from that, the second major issue I want to bring attention to is the velocities. It sounds like nearly all of your instruments are rigidly quantized to the beat and play at the same velocity for each note, with the exception of your plucked synth arpeggio and the bass. Now, I wouldn't expect the humanization in a synthwave arrangement to be totally realistic, but for example, the piano at 1:00 sounds excessively rigid. Even some slight variance in the timing/velocity of the notes would help that melody blend better. Lastly, for lack of a better word, the kick drum just sounds weird in this context. It sounds like it may have been heavily time-warped, but the sample used is just not cutting it for me. For the first few bars when it is first introduced, it actually sounds kind of cool, but for the remainder of the track, the sample just seems like a strange choice that doesn't have an ideal frequency balance for this style. Consider trying out some new samples to see how it affects the overall sound of your mix. I am definitely impressed with what you were able to put together here, so please don't take the feedback negatively - this is an excellent first take. However, the mixing and sequencing need to be polished before this is ready for primetime. Good luck! NO

I'm not quite as sold on the execution as Gario, but I will solidly agree that this is a unique, atmospheric electronic track that captures exactly the feel you were going for. When you go for a more explicit dubstep style at 1:34, it all comes together. Very tastefully done. I love the saw chords going on at 2:03, but I can't shake the feeling that simply automating the volume to make it more prominent in the mix (which is what I'm assuming you did) wasn't the right approach, since it currently sticks out as unnaturally loud. A filter sweep with a high resonance or a riser sweep would likely achieve the same effect, but sound more natural. I'm also not in love with the snare sound in the first minute of the track; again, it simply sounds too loud and dry and it feels mildly distracting. Also seconding the notion that the track should probably cut off at 2:50. All these things aside, this is clearly above the bar, but I did want to note some of these small details to keep in mind for future submissions. Nice work! YES

Props to you for pulling something out of the vault and sending it our way! There's always a risk of something sounding dated, but it's also really unfortunate when a great arrangement languishes in the vault, unheard by anyone. I am fond of this throwback style of trance! Your production is pretty good across the board, although there's a few builds/transitions that are noticeably slammed against the limiter and causing some unwanted distortion (for example, :27, 1:23, and 2:58, it sounds like you have a kick that might be double-layered and not balanced correctly.) The ending also cuts off extremely abruptly and would need a clean fadeout. My bigger gripe with the arrangement is unfortunately the repetitiveness of it. Listening to the source, I understand that there's really not much to work with - the original essentially rides the same bass note for the entire duration. Unfortunately, I feel that this works better for a short looping track than a full-fledged arrangement. When I scan through random points in your track, no matter where I click, it always seems like most of your instruments are doing the same thing at any given point. The breakdown at 1:50 was an excellent reprieve, but for the most part, the meat of this track feels like it's based around a few simple loops without a lot of growth or dynamics throughout the arrangement, bookended by some traditional trance intros/outros. With the drums staying fairly static outside of major transition points, this ultimately feels like it was built as a short loop and not fully realized as a standalone arrangement. Great work in a bubble, and I'm glad that you chose to share this, but for the standard of arrangement and interpretation that we're looking for at OCR, I don't feel that this quite hits the mark. NO

I have to agree that the mixing comes across as unfinished on my first impression. As you start to add heavier guitars, the choice of patch for the bass and drums makes a lot more sense, but for the first minute and a half, the tone of the bass and drums just doesn't match with the rest of the instrumentation. Because you're using the same drum pattern throughout the whole track, it also feels very repetitive and by the time you actually bring in the rhythm/lead guitars, the pattern starts to feel extremely stale. I would consider revisiting your drumming and adding in variation/fills throughout the track, rather than just at major transition points, and developing some new base patterns that are better suited for each point in the song (more relaxed/ethereal for the first half, and more intense later on when the guitars kick in.) My overall impression is that this is a pretty strong concept once the guitars are introduced, but up until that point, the soundscape feels underdeveloped. Gario has some great feedback on the mixing side, but I would also like to see more sounds and textures added to keep the first part of the arrangement more engaging and cohesive and give the listener more to latch onto. Love the bold concept, but the execution needs another pass or two to get it up to par. Keep at it! NO

I love what you're going for overall and think you picked a perfect source to execute it with. This melody adapts perfectly to synthwave, and I appreciate the decision to go with a less-common Mario World theme. I hear where Gario is coming from with regards to the back-half repetition, and I will say that I think the track is weaker for it. I think you could have ramped things up in the final section a bit more with some additional countermelodies or even some original writing to close things out in more dramatic fashion. The shift to double-time prevents this from being a straight-up copy/paste scenario, but once I noticed it, it did sour my overall impression of the track. It seems like an especially curious choice when you already have an alternate melody/chord progression at :57 that would fit right in and offer a counterpoint to round the track out more wholly. On the mixing side, there's a bit of muddiness that's endemic to the synthwave genre, but aside from that, the production does feel slightly sterile. Some of your individual synths could use more bite, possibly by way of saturation or very subtle distortion, as well as some overall compression to glue everything together better. This is more of a "want" than a "need", but I felt it was worth mentioning anyway. Ultimately, I think the repetition could be forgiven if there was more content in the track overall, but when it's such a large part of a short arrangement, it sticks out like a sore thumb and leaves things sounding unresolved. It's very close and I wouldn't be torn up if this does eventually pass, but addressing it would certainly make this a much stronger package. NO (borderline, resubmit!)

YES! I wasn't sure if this would ever see the light of day again. I love this, you have at least one person eagerly awaiting this track's completion!

The two J's above absolutely nailed this and hit on a few specifics that could tighten this up, as well as the assessment that your orchestral sequencing is steadily improving with each submission. The mixing and mastering during the main section of this track, aside from the rumbling in the atmospheric effects that can easily be highpassed out, is quite good. However, the lack of any game-related content late in the arrangement is more of a dealbreaker than the length of the outro itself. In fact, I like the very slow wind-down, but if there was a bit more of a connection to the source, or any Zelda tune for that matter, it would seal the deal for me. NO (resubmit)

I can fully sympathize with your difficulty keeping a Celeste remix to just one source - the songs all weave together so easily that it's hard not to turn every arrangement into a full-blown medley! I personally think your arrangement is all the stronger for it though, keeping things fresh and dynamic over the course of 6 minutes. The mixing is loud, but thankfully nothing gets lost in the sauce at any point and all of your instruments come through clean. The Scattered and Lost breakdown provides a bit of a reprieve before jumping back into full force with some of the heaviest metal riffs I've heard in recent memory on the panel! My only nit, and it's a VERY small one, is the artifact at 1:35 when the song cuts to silence, there's a slight echo from the guitar that sounds awkward. I'm not going to go conditional on it, but if that could be ironed out before posting, that would be much appreciated! YES

This is a fabulous example of a resubmission done right! While the humanization still isn't perfect on the piano and some of the more exposed legato leads, it's more than enough to get the job done! The orchestration is still lush and dynamic on the mixing side, but your sequencing is far more lifelike now. This reminds me strongly of Nutritious' grandiose orchestral arrangements, which I consider the gold standard for full-ensemble orchestral arrangements. Excellent work! Excited to hear more from you in the future YES

I love what you've attempted here, I feel an incredible amount of ambition and intensity in your arrangement. The variety of instruments, moods, and colors throughout the arrangement absolutely justify its length. Before I dive into any of my critiques, I want to offer my admiration for the work that you've put into this already. I'm sure it was a monumental effort to arrange and I don't want any of my crits to suggest I didn't enjoy this, because I genuinely did. However, I do need to highlight a number of small production/sequencing issues that I picked up on during my first listen that, while insignificant on their own, definitely compound and leave this track feeling underwhelming and in need of another round of polishing before it's ready for the front page. Right off the bat, you have some really cool ambient sound design and pads that feel very organic, but the piano sequencing is clearly more rigid and locked to the beat. Some minor velocity and timing adjustments, and perhaps a sustain pedal, would smooth this out and make the whole section sound more natural. With the sampled vocals, the tone is perfect for the track, but there's some very noticeable sequencing artifacts that take me out of the moment. For example, 1:25 has an extremely abrupt cut during the middle of a phrase, which needs to be ironed out. 1:06-1:08 has a similar set of issues, where the final note ends unexpectedly and then the next note fades in rather synthetically. Right now, the vocals are in this uncanny valley, so some extra TLC to smooth out those transitions would go a long way. This issue is unfortunately present later on when the solo vocals return for a second time, too. The drums that come in at 2:42 are incredibly thin, and generally feel like they should be more dramatic. That whole section has a huge gap in the low end of the frequency spectrum that just sounds unnatural, compared to the lushness of the rest of the arrangement. Layering in a bass drum would help fill that out. Alternatively, you could also go a different route to provide more contrast as you bring in the full orchestra, and put a high-pass filter on your master track that sweeps out when your brass finally comes in to make things extra dramatic when the bass frequencies return. There's a few ways you could tackle this problem, but right now that section sticks out like a sore thumb because of the frequency imbalance. The strings and choir sound pretty great to me, but the prominence of the ensemble brass does expose the weakness of the samples. When you write longer legato lines, there's not a lot of articulations to help smooth out the note transitions, leaving you with sequencing that still feels lifeless to an extent. I also want to touch on some of your transitions. The transition around 3:03 stood out to me on my first few listens as abrupt. A bigger problematic area would be 5:29, which really needs some sort of upsweep or some sort of transition sound to help smooth out the impact hit. It's simply too abrupt in its current form, and the dead air between sections comes off as awkward. These are a few of my preliminary thoughts, and in my book, resolving even some of these would leave you with a much stronger product that would elevate your concept to new heights. Again, I need to stress how much I enjoyed what you've put down, but the unnatural sequencing on many of your instruments and frequency imbalance/dead air during some parts of the arrangement are preventing this from reaching its full potential. Happy to talk more in detail offline if you'd like clarification on any of this or would like to bounce revisions off of me. I'd really love to see this posted in some form! For now though, it's not quite ready. NO (resubmit!)

I have to agree with both gentlemen above, who covered the issues with the track quite a bit. There's a lot of strength in your textures and the way that they evolve over time, but things get pretty muddy and compressed due to the pads. The buildup around the 2:30 mark, for example, should have a lot more impact but because everything is pushed against the limiter so hard, it just sounds like a wall of mud instead of a dramatic final sweep. There's simply not a lot of dynamic range in the mix, which is hurting this quite a bit because your arrangement itself really has a lot of movement to it. I will also note that the outro didn't really add anything to the arrangement in my opinion, and didn't offer much in the way of resolution. The fadeout just felt lazy to me, and given the drama of the section preceding it, I was hoping for something a bit more to close out the track. Excellent sound design and dramatic tension here, but the mixing is not doing full justice to the approach you took. Another EQ/compression pass, and possibly something more in the outro to leave listeners with a stronger final impression, would seal the deal here. Good start! NO (resubmit)

This track starts off rather understated and sparse, but with each instrument and tone standing out in its own way. For example, I thought the drumming was a ton of fun with some excellent use of fills throughout, and I appreciate the back and forth between the bubbly synths and the vintage guitar lead. The guitar tones were adeptly chosen and extremely vibey across the board as well. I see where the other judges are coming from regarding balance, but I felt like it was overstated in terms of how much it impacted the quality of the final product - overall, this is definitely above the bar in my book. Well done! YES

Wow! This is my first time hearing the version with updated mixing. Tremendous job improving an already-great track, you really knocked this out of the park with one of the strongest debut mixes I've heard in quite some time.

The arrangement is just as dynamic and vibrant as I've come to expect from Guillaume, so that aspect is firing on all cylinders as expected. However, the instrumentation is definitely something different than expected. I've always suspected that many of your piano arrangements might function really nicely as a full ensemble, so this validates that theory quite nicely! I will agree that the mixing is overbearing in a lot of places. The flute cuts through nicely, but Chris' violin unfortunately gets almost completely lost in the sauce a lot of the time. The percussion and overall master compression is definitely the culprit, making the end product harsher on the ears than it really needs to be. At the end of the day, I fell in the same camp as my fellow judges that this is carried by the strength of the arrangement. In the future though, a less heavy-handed approach to the final mastering would definitely suit you well! YES

I agree with the rest of the team here - this is not your most polished submission but I admire the ambition put forth, even though you had to cut it short from your original vision. The accordion timing in the intro is particularly egregious, but I feel that it's too significant of a change to qualify as a Conditional YES, but also not enough of a dealbreaker to warrant a NO, either. C'est la vie! Aside from that, I also found some less-noticeable timing issues in the metal section that followed immediately after, and the ending was anticlimactic for sure. All things considered though, I think the track's strengths - skillful integration of Celtic instrumentation with a standard prog metal band setup, and slick fusion of multiple themes - are good enough to pass this even without any revisions. Good work! YES

This checks out! Not a ton to say here, but I do appreciate the frequent rhythm changes and how that was executed. The ending sections are heavy as hell. This feels way more seamless than it really has any right to be. Production is crisp and clear and carries a lot of punch, if a bit bassy as others have pointed out. To the front page with you! If we're contacting the artist about a new track title, we should also see about getting a render that trims off the silence at the front/end of the export. YES

This one starts off with some very loud synth melodies that I definitely wouldn't have mixed that loudly. In general, I found the lead synths to be lackluster and too clean for the texture you were going for. I think a synth sample with more bite and distortion would have set the stage a lot better. Later on, they're not as noticeable because there's more supporting instrumentation and the texture has more to blend in with. The samples used for the choir/orchestral instruments aren't the most sophisticated in terms of articulation, but I'd say they get the job done in terms of adding texture to the track. When we get to the guitar, that's when things really kick in for me. Both the rhythm and lead guitars sound ridiculously heavy and have an excellent tone to them, so I really dig that part of the arrangement. The solo rips, though there's some times where it almost sounds like it gets too ambitious for its own good and trips over itself on some of the faster runs. I will say that, musically, the section of the solo from 2:48 - 2:58 didn't jive quite right to my ears. I can't tell if it's explicitly out of key or just playing odd/unexpected notes, but aside from that, it was all pretty good to me. The ending fizzles out unexpectedly; I can't say I'm a huge fan of how that was executed. This is a tough call - overall, the arrangement is very strong and the guitars add a lot to the final package, but the synthetic instrumentation is not as strong. I'm inclined to say that the strengths here outweigh the detractors, none of which are absolute dealbreakers in my opinion, but it's a borderline call for me. Best of luck with the vote either way, I hope to hear this on the front page either in this form or a revised one! EDIT: Upon relistening, I do agree that this could benefit from one more pass before posting. No need to hold this up - hope to hear this back here soon! NO (resbumit)

Not all of us have the luxury of pulling old project files from 13 years ago (!!!) and still have them be worthy of submission, but I'm certainly glad you did! I actually remember this from the WIP forums and even saved it to my library in its incomplete form. I always felt such an intense sense of warmth from this arrangement, like basking in golden sunset light. This new iteration only improves on the foundation that was put down so many years ago. The few minor quibbles I had were neatly ironed out through the revision process, so I think this is ready to go. Better late than never, Brad! YES