Anorax

This is why I should have continued learning guitar. I'm now sad that I didn't because of this remix. Uno, dos, tres, four! Nice! That title though, what is that, the mountain of youthful horses?

I think you may want to look at some Mid/Side EQing and compression, especially on the bell synth that's doubled over the piano (most notable at 0:45). Bring out the mids, and add slight reverb to the sides. You might want to consider adding a touch of reverb to the violin at the end, and to the rising FX at the beginning - the latter sounds rather flat. I like how this sounds, keep it up! EDIT: Skrypnyk mentioned the arps that you took from the game. Personally I don't know how I feel about them, especially with every panned center, incl. said arps. Beyond their central panning, they are also slightly off-key to the mix. The lower arp (which I noticed was out of key the most at 3:05) isn't built in the same key as your mix (which is D Major / b minor, right?). The lower one is in conflict because it plays on B, D#, F#, and A — a BMaj7 chord which by virtue clashes with b minor (without any sort of modulation). The D# lies outside the key you're working in. This is only a small nitpick because you can't fix the arp without recreating it because you probably just sampled it from the game or .spc. Also to build on what Skrypnyk mentioned (the lead at 1:20), I feel that lead is a bit... empty. It sounds like the generic "Trance Pad" sound, which in theory is fine. However, if you are going to use it, you would want to spice it up more. Use some filter modulation. Duplicate it into two instances, and have one panned far left and the other far right and then screw with the fine tuning. This is one of the parts where you're allowed to have fun experimenting with your synths (by both experimenting with one instance and with multiple instances to see how they can work together or against each other). My suggestion here is to take whatever VSTi you used for this sound and learn it inside and outside. Become the master of that one synth, and then go crazy with sound design. Make it dance. Make it spit sparkling acoustic fireworks of amazing. Make it sing like an epic trance-fueled canary of awesome. I'm talking gibberish again. Point is, that current spot needs to have some rejuvenation, so find out what can work for it, and make it happen! (out of curiosity, what DAW are you using?) Good luck!

From the start, my advice would be to add some reverb to the pianos. Not a lot, but just enough to breathe life into them and give them room, because they sound utterly dead without reverb. There are also a few spots near the end where you have chord clashes, you might want to take a look at the pianos towards the end. Keep this up, alright?

From the get go, your bass is really loud compared to the rest of the mix. When the rest of the track really increases in volume, it levels out, but it's still a tad loud and overcompressed. I do like your arrangement though!

Oy, what happened to your soundcloud links? I wanted to take a listen to this...

oooh, nice!

I think you've posted in the wrong thread buddy. For recruitment purposes, regardless of project goal, use the recruit and collaborate forums. Good luck with your album!

What DAW do you use? I think that you may want to work on one of two things right now: quantization and velocities. You'll want to focus on quantization for the bass and the drums in order to smooth out rhythms that are a bit sloppy. You'll want to work on velocities (how loud each note is) all over to try to prevent having a very mechanical, robotic sound. Little volume change per note sounds very robotic and when you're trying to create a piece in a very live, humanlike style (jazz in general, mostly) you want to work on making it sound more human (humanization). When I first started I literally had no idea what quantization was and refused to touch the function in my DAW for my first few mixes. It wasn't pretty.

I'm guessing including forum smileys (e.g. ) wasn't part of the mix page forum embed upgrade?

If you had the right version of FL, you could record straight into your FL project. I don't know if you do or not (you very well could), so what you can do in either case is record in audacity (with a metronome) and import into FL. Did you record all the instruments in this version? I like what you did with this, even if it is unplanned. This is pretty good for a first attempt at recording! Only thing I really noticed was some cable noise at the very beginning.

Well this is miles ahead of my first remix attempt. I'm not going to mention repetitiveness because you've already stated it's a short loop Sample quality isn't bad, but the quality of your samples shouldn't be something you focus on from the beginning. What I like: I like the strings (the trebles and mids), and I like the piano. What I don't like: The muddiness between the bass guitar (?) and the bass strings. I'm going to say it sounds amateurish, but far beyond what my personal example of ameteurish is You've got a good start, if you were to try to improve the current loop in its current state I'd say you might want to work on EQing, and bringing out the piano some more. It feels buried a bit in the track. I also think one thing you might want to practice is reverb use, because reverberation can be a great tool, especially when lightly applied to drums and cymbals.

Personally I have no idea what OA's talking about when he mentions "soundfield", although I think he's talking about the stereo field and imitating depth (which would be using reverb somewhat, as well as some EQing. The roomsound reference is probably exactly what reverb is - the ambient sound a room makes. As you probably know, reverb is used primarily to imitate something being played in a certain-sized space.) Lack of knowledge of music theory isn't the problem here, because music theory is the guidelines for writing music (the notes themselves). Here they're focusing more on production itself. As for my own notes, I will have to agree with the judges that the intro was rather lengthy, and you will want to brush up on EQing. My suggestion is, when recreating this mix, determine the frequency range of each instrument (within the track itself, not in general), and use EQs on other instruments to lower the other instruments' volume at that range. For instance if I had a hand drum sound and a cello on a song (I can't think of a plausible application of why I would have those two instruments at this very moment, but bear with me), I want the hand drum to stand out. I figure out that the hand drum has the strongest frequency range at 850Hz and 15000Hz. Now, the cello covers up the drum because it also exists at 850Hz (as well as other frequencies). What I can do is put an EQ on the cello and "scoop out" the 850Hz range a little bit so that the cello isn't so loud there. Because the cello is now quieter, the hand drum stands out more. You can think of this as "subtractive EQing". This helps build the clarity that the judges were talking about without trying to make an instrument louder, which can eventually lead to distortion.

Holy crap. I love this mix. I feel a bit nitpicky about the bass frequencies which sound a bit muddied. 1:42 is beautiful to me and I love how you make such good use of the stereo field to bring out the symphonic instruments throughout the entire track. I hope you can think of an ending for this, it's absolutely stellar!

I'm going to admit, I didn't know we had so many Workshop Mods. I honestly thought that Rozo was the only one for a long time. I'm glad to have stumbled across this (read as: finally clicked on a stickied thread)

well, it doesn't help that ThaSauce sigs appear to be inoperable... that, and I can't listen from my phone (which is when I last was in this thread). Give me a few minutes to vote. EDIT: Voted. HoboKa, your bonus mix is terrifying.

It still does if you have an older account with a working "Public" folder, which allows hotlinking (I use dropbox as my hotlink host for just about anything, incl. the pic in my last post)

Mr. Pretzel... what were you thinking? This is probably the funniest remix I've heard on OCR (surpassing Music Of My Groin, believe it or not). No joke, I couldn't breathe when you (or someone else?) started singing vocables (vocaloids? I don't know the technical terms for that) at 1:20 up until the end. You sir, should be shot. Either that, or get a big giant hug. Preferably the one that is not illegal. can i remix your remix?

Protip: Don't right-click > Save as... The link isn't a direct link to the file, it goes to a download page. You probably downloaded the HTML page as a WAV file. If you renamed it to .html, I'm sure it'll load a dropbox page. EDIT: that's exactly what happened. here's an image of me downloading the file twice, once by clicking through and once by right click > save as.

is that a challenge?

Ich habe keine butterbrezel, entschuldigung.

.. Anorax shared a status.

What, I don't get a wooden spoon? Hope you guys enjoy the source I picked for next time. I may make a bonus mix too, we'll have to wait and see!

I need to bookmark this thread for later. You guys have all sorts of awesome ideas I need to look into. Chimpazilla, that has got to be the best compound term I've seen all day.

You should sing an entire song with just that as the lyrics