timaeus222

We're almost there? Sweet! Unfortunately, due to how busy I am in grad school, I probably have to retract my offer for mixing and mastering (seeing as I can't get home until Thanksgiving/Christmas), but good luck with everything!

Okay, now that I've had a listen to this, here are my major thoughts: The amount of arrangement development that actually occurs is not enough compared to the actual length of the ReMix. In other words, you need to be more concise with your arrangement. I still hear a lot of copy/paste with some instrument swapping, and that means not much interpretation going on, particularly according to OCR standards. The textures are fairly sparse, or the mix is fairly quiet, or both. You can focus on addressing this after managing to make the arrangement more concise. The sequencing is fairly rigid still. So I think I can safely say that all of my previous concerns still hold. There might have been an improvement in mixing but for the most part the arrangement sounds unchanged (having been 2 years, I'm just listening fresh). I would certainly echo @Garpocalypse on his advice. I usually try not to suggest simply starting from scratch, but... this time I almost would. My advice is to pick one of the iterations of your arrangement with textures that you would think is easiest to expand on for partwriting (I would consider the segment containing the lead guitar since that's what you gravitate towards), and start fresh from there.

Yeah, I should have said that although sometimes it sounds like loss of breath in the middle of a phrase, having them isn't necessarily a bad thing. So you should use your best judgment whether to keep some of them and whether to make some of them quieter.

Before I even say anything else, didn't @Kat suggest that you shorten the track to focus it more? @Garpocalypse also hinted at it. It looks either the same length or a bit longer. So, you should read back through the feedback more carefully, and note patterns in what people are saying. Consider the issues previously at hand: mechanical sequencing, or lacking expression, or both too long for the amount of arrangement development it has too repetitive (similar partwriting with a lot of copy/paste, with swapped instruments) You should really ask yourself, "did I actually take these feedback into account, or do I just think I did?" Be honest with yourself and really think about it. Some newer composers lead themselves to believe that they took certain feedback into account, when they only believe they did and actually objectively did not. That, and it's been 2 years. Again, I haven't listened to this newer version yet, but I want you to focus your attention on this concern and to think about this.

I still recommend the Beyers, for both quality and comfort. I can use the Beyers for 5+ hours if I wanted to, and not get ear fatigue (sometimes I forget I even have them on).

There's a reason why I hesitate to label something as epic---it's so that I can say it for a ReMix like this! If this is the last Dark Souls ReMix you want to do, at least you blew us out of the water. The dense textures could have easily washed out the mix, and the choir could have felt cheesy or made this sound like any other overly straightforward symphonic piece, but you made it work. The apparent energy stayed fairly constant for the most part, and most of the changing dynamics were in the addition and removal of textures, rather than the variation of the core rhythm, which is probably the only critique I had about this.

Kinda reminds me of Phantasy Star Online, crossed with some of the Mega Man Battle Network internet themes. Some nice reverb going on here, and despite the obvious drum loops, I like the atmosphere and there is some reasonable care going on with the realism. Was somewhat disappointed with the fade-out, but that's a minor thing. Overall, I did enjoy it and would recommend it as good chillout music, or background music, say, while studying.

Hey, I think this sounds pretty good! The accompaniment sounds reasonably polished, and Chris's violin sounds great. The first and probably only major crit that comes to mind is the vocal performance. The singer (JoyDreamer?) noticeably takes a breath in the middle of phrases in such a way that it distracts me from the rest of the track (having taken 6+ years of choir, breath control is extremely important). It just sounds like she runs out of breath in the middle of a phrase and then quickly takes in another breath. Those might have been possible to cut out during editing and still result in natural-sounding phrases. Other than that though, two thumbs up from me.

I would definitely recommend the Beyerdynamic DT 880's, specifically the 32 ohm model. I got the 250 ohm model, which needed a properly calibrated headphone amp to get a full bass and treble response due to the high impedance. Presumably the lower impedance allows the extreme lows and highs to come through more evenly, so you shouldn't need an amp to get a proper frequency distribution. Besides the frequency response, they are very durable and long-lasting, and they have an honest stereo field. I've had them since Dec 2013, and they still are super comfortable while allowing me to mix with utmost awareness of stereo space and frequency fullness. As an example, here is something recent that I made using these headphones (note: you'd have to download it to hear properly clean treble frequencies since soundcloud embeds at 128 kbps), and here is something zircon made also using them.

Sounds pretty good! Nice and anthemic. I think one minor gripe I might have about it is that I can't distinguish the hi hats from the supersaw fuzz, and that, for me, reduces the perceived energy of the drums since I only perceive the kick and snare.

In a way, early in the mix, this reminds me of some of Mazedude's wonkier microtuned stuff. Some good lofi goodness going on!

Seemed fairly conservative to me at first, but once we got to the 1-minute mark, it got more interpretive. I dig the solo at the 1.5 minute mark!

I think the main thing that is lacking is reverb. I literally don't hear any. This musical style seems kind of 80's, Phoenix Wright-esque. You should compare with the following music, and that may help you to determine how much works for your track. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - 'True Evening' by WillRock (Listen for the general spaciousness the reverb gives) Pokemon Gold Version - 'Slowpoke Shuffle' (Listen for the drum reverb) Some free reverbs that I would recommend are Tal-Reverb 2 and Ambience. You may also want to watch this overview of common reverb features:

More guitar than we may have expected from WillRock (I suppose? I mean, he DoesRock...), but it's a good side trip out of pure 80s synth rock and into a synth-augmented, Rudess/Satriani-styled rockfest. \m/

I actually listened to this on its own merits, rather than for its being Zelda. Sam Dillard is one of those guys who we know has already nailed his orchestral production. To me, it came as no big surprise that he did exceptionally well with this composition, irrespective of the source tunes. He has a careful hand with soft dynamics (the shifts at 2:03 - 2:06 and 2:41 - 2:44, for example) and with writing practical parts for each instrument (3:43 - 4:14 was a particularly seamless interplay between the french horn and violins/violas). What he has brought to the originals was also innovative; I particularly liked the modulation at 2:57 - 3:11, and how the chord progression and new melodic contour at 3:52 - 4:15 cleverly enhanced the "Overworld" melody in a clearly recognizable manner.

Huh?

Well, seeing as how the remix was by Nitro Fun, AND was of a song composed by Porter Robinson, I would try contacting Porter Robinson and Nitro Fun, making sure you: Make it sound like they're worth your time, so to speak, and that you're genuine. I'm only saying this because it's possible they might think it's spam, or they might not be impressed, or some other reason that convinces them they don't have to read the message. Consequently, try to make the message look nicely formatted, so that they can (hopefully) see you put some care into the message. Try to be concise, if that's something you have a hard time with. Shorter emails with fewer big paragraphs are more enticing to read. Do show evidence that you have an actual game going on, so that they're not just giving away permissions for a song to you for no reason That's my take on it, anyway. Hope that helps. I agree, Porter might be hard to contact... he might be your bottleneck, but worth a shot...

Sounds good to me. If I were to nitpick, I would say that the snare used in the middle breakdown (near 1:32) seems unfittingly powerful. Maybe have it be more filtered (maybe band-passed?) and softer to reflect the dynamics of the atmosphere around it. The hi hat transient near 1:32 could also be slightly softer, and the FM lead at 2:45 seems fairly abrasive for the ambient atmosphere you have... (especially at 3:06).

As a further note, I wouldn't actually necessarily stick with the stock plugins the whole time, and I would be open to adding on or replacing some of them with better external plugins that you get elsewhere. For example, I don't actually think Fruity Reeverb or Reeverb 2 is nearly as flexible as ArtsAcoustic Reverb, and so I don't use them as much as I do ArtsAcoustic, but they are all reverb plugins.

Haha, I have a pretty good excuse for not improving the strings further: FL crashed at least 20 times due to being dangerously close to the 32-bit 4 GB limit, and that may be an understatement. It was to the point where I was cautious about when precisely to save so that I wouldn't have to open the project file again to see that 64-bit bridged Kontakt unloaded itself. That, and the literal 5-day time limit from start to finish. Anyways, you'll still be hearing more stuff from me technically---just not uber-recent stuff. Lots of it is album work (e.g. Shonen Jump, Goemon, Assassin's Creed, SNATCHER, etc), so there'll be bits and remnants of me scattered about in the later years.

FYI, there is both "sfz" and "sforzando". They are different soundfont players, so you should try searching for "sfz" (even though it should be shorthand for the word sforzando) to see if that works better.

Gotta emphasize this.

Yep, this is exactly what I tell the people who ask me to master their ReMix: Take out any instruments you don't need, i.e. those that contribute nothing but mud to the soundscape. Reduce excess reverb until you can't hear a difference (as some headphones have more reverb response than others). In addition to that, I also carefully pick my sound resources so that I have access to the cleanest sounds right out of the box (Omnisphere and Impact Soundworks are great examples). That's why these days, I barely EQ---the most I do are some basic extreme high/low passes, some cuts here and there on the accompaniment to free up the midrange for leads, some small cuts in the low-mids to clean up frequency overlap that is bound to happen so that the bass can punch through, etc. In short, the people whose music sounds good didn't just use some sort of magic EQ tool; cleanly recorded samples take you a long way, and EQ doesn't have to play a major role.

@Chernabogue Kinda curious what you think!

Thanks! The drums are just from the original instrumental. Someone made an instrumental of this already.