MindWanderer

"Unwilling transformations" is the whole theme of Dragon's Trap, so that makes perfect sense! I agree that it's a really strange soundscape. It's very mid-bass-heavy, with only a piercing triangle and tambourine occupying the high end. There's a cymbal, but it seems slightly filtered, and and the drums sound heavily filtered. There are lots of parts, but they're crowded into a small frequency range, despite being expertly EQ'ed, ducked, and panned around each other. So it does feel hollow and incomplete. The length of it also contributes to that feeling of being incomplete. The end sounds like it's supposed to be a drop into a climax or solo, something to bring up the energy level, but then it's just over. So yeah, "not fully baked" is a good description for how I feel about this. I'm coming down on the side of NO

It is indeed quite short, conservative, quiet, and thin. Those are the things that leap out at me right away. Structurally it's unchanged from the original, but it is genre-transformed and key-shifted, and there's some simple original part-writing. The background orchestration is pretty basic, though. This is borderline for me, too. Production is borderline, orchestration is borderline, development is borderline, interpretation is borderline. Altogether the issues are adding up enough for me to fall just on the other side.\ NO (borderline)

Haven't had a good chiptune submission in a while! And yeah, this is a good one. Tons of fun, and everything clicks nicely. It's sort of quasi-8-bit, since no real 8-bit system would have this many channels, but that's what lets you get a full, complex soundscape. Couldn't disagree more with Kris about either the limitations of the genre re: mixing or the instrumentation being static, as this runs through more specific waveforms than I can count. The ending is a bit of a letdown, but everything else is great. YES

This is a quote-vote for me, although I'd say there's more than a little muddiness. I'm actually confused how you managed to managed to reduce the sound quality so much without seeming to do anything besides speed it up. This is a definite NO

I had some initial reservations about source usage, since the main groove is pretty far removed from the source material, but after a few listens I get the connection, so I don't feel the need to timestamp the rest. It's pretty standard house, but it's house done well. It's repetitive, but that's the genre, and there's hardly any actual copy-pasta going on. Production is a little grainy and lo-fi, but it's not a dealbreaker. Definitely better than a lot of the Pixel Pirates submissions we've gotten of late. I'm on board. YES

I was about to chide Larry for not giving a serious review, but... yeah. It's hard to find words for this chicanery. You've got a recording artifact or something at 1:43, I dunno. You should get that looked at. Seriously, though, this sounds pretty great. For our usual definition of "great," anyway. 1:31-1:37 is a smidge muddy, but I'm nitpicking. YES

Ooh, nice rich soundscape to open this up with. Great tone. Gets a little muddy and buzzy at about 0:39. The muddiness clears up when the melody starts, but it still sounds scratchy. Quite a slow burn to get there, too. And then the accompaniment gradually gets louder while the lead gets quieter, and becomes muddy again. A few harmonies here sound wrong to me, too. 2:43-3:19 is seriously busy. Lots of parts all doing their own thing, steeped in reverb. It's really hard to even listen to, much less make out. Then 3:33, wow, this is loud. And yet it took me a second to even hear the melody; it's way, way in the back. Everything is drums and rhythm guitar. I knew this remix has a split vote already, so I avoided reading the other votes until I got this far. I was surprised there were any YESes at all, because it's so muddy. Emunator citing Viking Funeral for the Damned was smart, because I definitely hear the similarities, and that one was a direct post. And I had a hard time seeing why that one passed, too! So then I followed the trail of influences to Emperor and Dimmu Borgir, as well as the name-checked Vacuity by Gojira. Emperor is clearly the closest comparison. And the thing is, not only is the mix of instruments a little better by them, especially for the orchestral instruments, they're also vocal, and the vocals are clearly mixed in the front. (Dimmu Borgir and Gojira are mixed much, much more cleanly on every level; they're closer to what I expect from black metal.) So this does get more credit than I was originally going to give it. Orchestral black metal is a tough sell. For my own personal preferences, I wasn't keen on the mixing for nearly the whole piece. But with some context and consideration for genre, it really is only 3:33-4:26 that's below tolerance for the genre, IMHO. The funny thing is, if that section had something else to it (screaming/growling vocals, choir, orchestration) and the lead was still that quiet, I'd easily forgive it. I'm actually more borderline on this than I expected to be. I think there's a lot of room for improvement in the mixing and use of samples, but it's those 53 seconds of near-inaudible lead that are the make-or-break issue here, and I'm coming down on the majority opinion. NO (please resubmit) Edit 7/24/23: I listened to Shade Empire, as Emunator shared below. They certainly do mix the lead guitar below the rhythm guitar and especially the drums. They are, again, primarily vocal songs, but there are lengthy sections with no vocals. And I didn't mean to imply that mixing orchestral black metal, or any orchestral metal, is by any means easy; I've frequently commented that it's extremely difficult, combining all the sonically-greedy instruments of two genres that are already nontrivial to mix. There are clearly passionate fans of this style of music, including people who actively enjoy mixing which would be considered "bad" in a vacuum. And we don't want to have standards as high or higher than those on display in professional albums (a distinction which somewhat loses its meaning in this Spotify age; I frequently hear music on there which is definitely below our bar). In that light, I'll defer to the fans and flip my vote. YES

A resub from 2009?! Well, we'll see where this went. Very minimalistic take. The "lead" instrument is a bass triangle wave, along with some simple beats. Piano and square wave are used for flavor. Occasionally the square plays the Corridors of Time melody, but otherwise it's in a supporting role. Source usage is still a little hard to pin down. There's a lot of usage of the chord progression and the pads, but those are subtle and I wouldn't count them as source usage. What I do count is 0:57-1:15, 1:42-1:48, 1:59-2:14, 2:44-3:57, and 4:09-4:14, a total of 117 seconds out of 286, which is 41%. On top of that, while I find this minimalist approach interesting it is, well, minimal. It's very repetitive and very quiet. The soundscape is very thin, which of course it would be when only percussion and a triangle wave are playing most of the time, accompanied only occasionally by a square wave and a very quiet, monophonic piano. If I didn't know this was from 2009, I'd consider it a bold concept in minimalism. This might have been considered pleasantly atmospheric back then, but by today's standards it just feels empty. I can see arguing the source usage (though the way Larry stopwatches, I'd expect him to come up with even less), but the repetitive minimalism isn't doing much for me. I like some of the arrangement decisions, blending your original hooks with the source material, but I think we need something a little less skeletal. NO

Whoa, wasn't expecting hard rock from a remix with "blues" in the title. Opens with some nice clean rhythm guitar, but then the lead guitar comes in very muddy. It's a weird transformation from studio to garage. It's not quite a cover. It stays close to the source until 1:29, where it loops into the hook an extra time instead of doing the next section of the source. Then they line back up again, and the remix does cover the omitted section (which repeats in the original). So they're nearly identical in structure, except that the remix gets one more loop of the hook in, in place of a loop of a different section. It also loops the hook in a straightfoward way in the ending, instead of what the original does, which is a significant riff on that. The result is that the remix feels much more repetitive than the source, fitting in two more loops of the hook in place of other content in the same amount of time. Generally speaking, a change in genre is usually considered sufficiently transformative, as long as it's not a 1:1 instrument swap. This is just more than that. The drum writing is actually quite good. But DarkSim is right: other than the drums, I can't pick out any novel writing at all, and the only arrangement changes actually remove content from the original rather than putting content in. And even that's done in a very minimal way. I'm afraid I'm coming to the same conclusion, and am just as unhappy about it. This is a great approach, and the tone is mostly good, just a little (inconsistently) dirty, but try as I might I'm coming up short when it comes to transformation. It's clearly not a "MIDI rip" since it's played live, but it's still an instrument swap. It's a very, very good instrument swap, but that's not what we're looking for. As DarkSim said, just a short section or two of original writing, or even just substantially transformative riffing, perhaps in place of the 1:29-1:43 loop, and this would be in a much safer spot. As it stand though, regretfully, I have to add my vote of NO (please resubmit)

Lots of good stuff has been said about the arrangement so far, and I agree with all of it. On the matter of bass, it feels a little light to me, but the bass synth and kick have enough low end to me that I don't feel like anything's egregiously missing. I didn't notice there was an issue at all until my fellow judges pointed it out, and I don't think it's enough reason to send this back by any means. YES

Starts off conservatively: same genre, mostly the same instrumentation, but with a richer tone and some additional layers. Deviations from the original gradually increase until the halfway mark, where there's a breakdown and a brief violin bridge. Then we start another loop, back to being conservative at first, but this time breaking away from the source more quickly and radically, until going into a much more complicated climax, which fades out. It's a little quiet. That's a minor issue, though, easily corrected. I have some mixed feelings here. The tone is great. It's a rich soundscape with gorgeously orchestrated and realized instruments. But for the first half, it's squarely in "sound upgrade" territory. The extra layers add to the depth of the arrangement, but not the character. The cello in particular does sound great; it's the most transformative part of this section, but it is the only notably transformative part. The second half is much more transformative, with a change in tone from pastoral to epic. For about a minute there, there's no doubt that there's original interpretation going on. But then it fades out, folding back on the notion that it's an original creation and seeming more like a snippet from the game's OST. This does a great job of elevating the original piece into something with a much richer tone and grander scale. But ultimately I'm left with the feeling that that's mostly all it is: an elevation of the original piece. Most of the second half is fine, other than the fadeout, but between the conservative first half and the lack of conclusion, I'm borderline on whether this is substantially an original creation. I've started to type out this conclusion several times and keep waffling. Well, when I'm this close, better to fall on the side of YES (borderline)

Very nice. Gives me strong Enigma vibes, which I loved the hell out of back in the '90s. Soundscape is a touch bass-light, but otherwise is rich and full. A little busy and muddy at a couple of points. Great choice to slow down the melody in different ways while keeping the beat the same. Overall this sounds great! YES

Your sax performance is notably better than what we got in "Live for a Who / Oh War of Evil;" even though there are some notable missteps, they're less severe and are covered more by the other instruments. It's also clearly not as challenging a piece to perform. And while the key noises are a bit loud, for me they only barely detracted from my enjoyment. I'm not the biggest fan of the original sections, which seem sort of rambling, especially the repetitive runs, but they work well enough, and feel like they belong. None of these complaints are major enough to prevent my giving this a YES

Absolutely gorgeous. The vocals sound fantastic, and I really love how you've managed to riff on the source while keeping its main hook. The whole thing has a mystical, ethereal quality. I don't think you need to have any concerns about the mastering; overall loudness is fine, better than many of our submissions, and I don't hear any distortion. Strong work. I think this will be a favorite of many. YES

Opens with a heavy, pounding kick that really bothers my ears, especially while it's exposed. I got more used to it as the song went by and more parts were added, but it's still nearly disqualifying in my mind. The lower note in the main hook is difficult for me to wrap my brain around. It sounds wrong to me every time, but I can't tell if it's clashing with notes or just my expectations. Same for some of the low notes in the refrain. Seems like they're taken from The Secret Song, but with chords from Zelda? Maybe someone with more music theory knowledge can pick it apart better. Vocals are mixed a little quietly in the bridge, and are especially hard to make out there. Otherwise, this sounds great. It's an experiment that works. The Frost influence is strong but I think you skirted on the "homage" side of the line without drifting into using it as an actual source (other than the simple arp). The contralto vocals sound great. There are things that could be improved but even still, I think this is good for a YES

Really fun arrangement, sort of a ska/surf rock fusion. It's long but doesn't wear out its welcome too much, although I do think it would be stronger with a bit more room to breathe a few times. The mixing is still a little flat. Both the high and low ends are filtered a little too much, making the soundscape feel thin. The percussion especially feels weak: the kicks are all thwack and no boom, and the cymbals are mostly in the same frequency as the guitars instead of cutting over them. It could definitely use another pass on this front, though I don't think it's quite a dealbreaker. Good enough for me. YES

Unfortunately, this is an instrument swap of the original. It consists entirely of two loops that are structurally identical to the source, ending in a fadeout, just with different synths. It even plays at the exact same speed. We're looking for more interpretive arrangements than this. Otherwise, production is fine. Synths are a little vanilla but sufficient. Same with the electric guitars: they're clearly fake, but they're not even trying to be real, so it's fine. The main issue is the structure. NO

I was a little concerned about the arrangement initially, since it seemed like a conservative cover with vocals added. Fortunately, then it got into metal. The arrangement is still conservative, but the performances and change to genre are sufficiently transformative for our standards. Now, let's talk about that vocal performance. It certainly doesn't lack in energy, but I think Larry did a disservice by pointing out a couple of off notes and flatness. It's off-key a lot, too many times to count. Some of them are attempts to be stylistic that are just ill-advised, since they slide across clashing notes, but many of them are just missing the note they should be hitting. Many of these are in the intro, where they're exposed and hard to ignore. Unfortunately, auto-tuning would also flatten out all of the intentional catches and glides, which could sound good. Larry's also right about the vocals being mixed too quietly, but it's throughout the whole thing and not just the intro, and I disagree that it's passable. The instrumental arrangement and performance are great, but the vocals aren't carrying it through. Connor, this isn't your first rodeo when it comes to vocals, but I notice that you've racked up a fair number of NO votes on this front in the past. You've pushed problematic vocals over the top with previous resubmissions, so I'm hoping you can do that again here. NO (resubmit)

An atmospheric take that would almost be a sound upgrade if it weren't such a transformation from "impending violence" to "mysteriously threatening." I would have preferred something that stood on its own as a song, with an ending and more of a defined progression, but it checks all our official boxes. YES

A good chunk of this goes back to our long-standing debate over whether something counts as source if you can sit down and map out how it's derived from the source, even if it's hard to hear on a subjective level. And that "subjective" part means we won't all agree on whether we can hear it or not. That's fine; that's why we have multiple people vote. If Larry can hear where each part comes from, just by listening to it and not analyzing it, then I'm not going to knock him for a YES vote on those grounds. I will knock a YES vote where that's not the case, and more importantly I will knock an effort to strong-arm people into changing their votes on the grounds that they should be able to hear it and if they can't it's their fault.

I'm in agreement with Larry about the extent of copy-pasta: it's just shy of 1/3 of the total runtime, which is definitely too much (my own rule of thumb is that 25% is about the limit). I also wasn't the biggest fan of the heavy phasing sidechain. It's so impactful that it's dominating the overall tone of the piece, over the musical aspects of it. It's a cool sound, but it should have a supporting role, not a leading one. There's a fair amount of ducking used for effect even during the piano solo sections, which to me felt distracting. The repetition is the main issue, though. NO

I was one of the NOs, and Treyt asked me to preview his revision before he resubmitted. I did tell him he overcorrected and it's overall too quiet now, which is still the case (there's almost 2dB of headroom), but it's not horrendously so. He also seems to have introduced a very loud machine-gun kick at 2:10-2:21, which was not the best idea. I'm almost CONDITIONAL based on those two issues, but I can live with them. I wouldn't be upset if this got sent back to have those addressed, but I'm okay giving this a YES

Well, you certainly set yourselves a challenge here! To get the hard part out of the way, I think the performance is great. Solo trumpet isn't my personal idea of enjoyment, but it's certainly valid, and it's executed very well here. The tone is clear, the production is clean. I have no objections on that front. I'm not as thrilled with the arrangement. The transitions are frequently really abrupt; with no accompaniment to act as connective tissue, this is an extreme challenge, especially when the two sources don't have much in common. 2:53 in particular starts to feel like it's just doing whatever. I understand the intention of it, especially given your explanation, but it sounds really random and disjointed. There are a lot of sections, such as 1:18-1:31, that I have no doubt are in fact from the source material, but don't sound like it at all. I can't tell if you're playing a part that wasn't originally melody, or if you're just riffing in a way that becomes unrecognizable. I really like the ambition of this, and I hate to reject TSori's epic performance here. But I feel like it's ultimately too disjointed, and the more liberal parts are too hard to grok on multiple levels. NO (regretfully)

This certainly comes across as an older effort, right off the bat. Not only is the synth choice pretty vanilla, but... well, frankly, it's a little messy. There's an immediate wall of sound, with really loud sweeps and kicks and quiet leads. This gets better at times, but worse at others: take a listen at 2:11 for a bit where the lead is nearly inaudible among a wash of arps, kicks, and even a triangle wave that's trying to act like a bass but is squarely in the trebel range. I also caught what sounded to me like severely clashing notes at 1:03. Otherwise, it's a fun arrangement, with an infectious four-on-the-floor beat and a lot of twists and turns to hold the listener's interest. Just needs to have the production cleaned up. NO

Opens with a really rich soundscape. Bass+piano+synth is a classic for a reason. Great job using a different sound palette to take a melody and elevate it without changing its essential components at all. It's clearly a remix of Aria, and of Minecraft in general, but so much more. It is a little short, but that may be a good thing, because it's done everything it set out to do. The ending could be a little more conclusive; I wouldn't mind if it were extended by just a few measures to give it a chance to wind down. Great job overall. YES