MindWanderer

Nice breezy take on the theme. Great performances, great sound. It sure does sound improvised in places, but I also suspect it's not actually so; it's just a little too coherent. This'll be great on the project. YES

Cute and fun. The tenor sax performance aside, the only thing that really bugs me is how noodly and random it gets in place. 1:22-2:00 in particular is kind of all over the place, and that's a big chunk. Other than that, this is pretty great, and my reservations aren't enough to kick this back over. Nice work. YES

A Gario resub? Was not expecting to see that. I'd have remembered a Gario NO if it had happened any time in the last few years. Of course, I recognize it from the project. I never realized it wasn't actually published already. There's lots of complexity, and even though the synths are narrow-spectrum, they do still get cluttered in the mid-highs when everything is firing at once. The pads in particular eat up a lot of bandwidth: 2:49-3:47 is all busy enough that I'm losing stuff. That's my only complaint, though. Happy to help this get up on the front page. YES

Even after the correct source was identified, the source connections still seem loose to me, and would benefit from some timestamping. But the mixing, as Brad and Kris pointed out, is a dealbreaking issue regardless. NO (maybe resubmit with a source breakdown)

Seemed pretty conservative to start off with, similar tone to the original but with some extra layers. Then the throat singing and the drums kick in, and wow, not conservative anymore! The opening cuts in abruptly and should be edited slightly to give it just a fraction of a second of breathing room before the first note hits. Other than that and the throat singing being a bit too loud (which, given that it probably represents the dragon itself, is not surprising), and a bit of muddiness in the original-writing bridge, this sounds unequivocally great. Very clever, and a fascinating direction to take this source. YES

So, this is hitting me with problematic levels right off the bat. It starts off so quiet I had to turn up my volume, which was a mistake, because at 0:22 the guitar hits a deeply resonant note that slams my eardrums hard. It's not that it's super loud or piercing, but it's extremely uncomfortable. I'm not sure if it's the peak at C4 or the harmonic at C8 that's really getting to me. After that, it gets much louder, and I have to turn my volume back down again. The kicks in particular are really loud, and things are frequently so busy that I have a hard time making things out (1:18-1:24 and 4:00-4:15, for instance). The uncomfortable harmonics are never quite as bad, but they do return a few times. I'd love to give you more detailed thoughts about the arrangement, but I literally cannot listen to it another time without the discomfort becoming too much... and indeed I have to take a break from listening/judging for the rest of today, because my ears are now shot and need a rest. NO Update 12/28: The frequency that was stabbing my eardrums has been fixed, so now I can listen to this all the way through repeatedly. I still think the intro is too quiet, but the wide swings in volume have been tuned down. I can listen to it now. I'm actually confused by my colleagues' praise of the dynamic arrangement. What I'm hearing is mainly the scale from Artifact Temple and a main hook (e.g. 0:31-0:47) that I can't place. I do hear snippets of other sources, usually in different keys, but I'm not picking up this huge breadth that others are mentioning. There's certainly enough source, but to me it's actually kind of repetitive. None of those are dealbreaking issues, though. I can give this a YES

Obviously this would need a different title if it were to pass, but... Yeah, those levels are mad. Nothing, then a rapid fade-in to an assault on my eardrums. Even with my volume turned down by almost half, those pounding drums are uncomfortable to listen to. Then we have vanilla, static synths on top of a beat that barely changes at all. I don't hear any deviation from the source material, either; sounds to me like a simple MIDI rip. Sorry, but this isn't what we're looking for in any respect. Arrangement, production, instrumentation, interpretation, and dynamic interest are all out of line with the things we post here. I hate to be so harsh, but I strongly recommend not only hitting up our workshop forum and/or Discord for advice, but listening to more of our library and reviewing our submission standards before submitting again. NO

I don't think the performances are all that bad, though I agree there's plenty of room for improvement. The mixing is more of an issue; there's frequent pumping, some muddiness in the busier sections and transitions, and the kicks cut right through everything. But the arrangement is actually my biggest hangup: There are the tape deck FX and a little bit of riffing here and there, but mostly it's that plodding drum line under a very conservative take on the theme, and I don't think this is interpretive enough for us. NO

Stellar blending of all these sources. Even knowing them well, it didn't register on me that there were 7 different sources here (although two are so subtle I wouldn't have noticed them without the breakdown). It all sounds great; it's an homage, an expansion, and a medley all at once, respecting the tone of the originals while still evolving them into something more. Strong work. YES

This is quite short: The music doesn't really start until 0:41 and basically ends at 3:12, so there's only 2:31 of actual music. However, what's there is solid. Good exploration of the theme, and the production sounds fine to me. I'm not feeling a lack of pads or a dominance of drums, although the bass and kick make a pretty heavy combination, and yeah, the announcer could be a little easier to understand. Highly competent guitar work. I'd prefer a little more development, but there's enough, and it's all good. YES

Great structure, amazing arrangement. Every second of this is engaging, which is not something I can say for every 5 ½-minute mix we see. The intro is pretty strange. Not sure how 12 seconds of faux opera connects to any of the rest of this, and there's no callback to it at any time. I'm a little iffy on the vocals. Both male and female vocals are frequently a little pitchy (3:05-3:16 really stands out) and they're pretty loud compared to everything else except the drums and bass. The rap is a little conversational in tone, and lacks the rhythmic, almost percussive pattern of really good rap. No idea what Larry's talking about regarding the percussion being "soft" in the choruses. Sounds fine. Nice work overall. Very creative, and good job stepping out of your comfort zone. YES

I don't have as many problems with this as my fellow judges above. There might not be a pad, but by 30 seconds in, there's bass, arps, and rhythm filling out the soundscape, so it doesn't feel empty or incomplete to me. The samples are of course fake, but there's no effort to make realistic instrumentation here. I do think that there's a lack of ideas here. The entire first minute takes its sweet time adding elements in, one or two at a time, then dropping some out and adding them back, before getting to the actual melody. The rest is a fairly minimal expansion of the source material, of which the main hook repeats many, many times. Balance isn't great but isn't horrible. The bass is quite loud, and the leads are inconsistent: the flute is much too quiet, and the strings and steel drums are a little too quiet, but the saw is fine; it doesn't sound like you accounted for how timbre can affect how loud a sound seems to be in a complex soundscape. The master volume doesn't seem too loud, and although I can definitely see the brickwall limiting proph mentioned in the waveform, I don't hear it. There are indeed a lot of little issues here, but to me they don't add up to enough to merit a rejection. There's certainly room for improvement, but there's enough here that it doesn't get in the way of my enjoying the piece. YES

I don't think it's necessarily too short, but the 2-minute guideline is there for a reason: it's very difficult to both respect the additional material and transform it in that short a time. In this case, we have a genre transformation, but it's basically just a slowed-down instrument swap. There's 20 seconds of interpretive material at the end, and that's it. We need more. NO

Also not what I was expecting, but after I got over my initial surprise, it was a pleasant one. The lyrics are great, and the rap performance is fantastic. However, I do have a couple of hangups. That loud, slow 808-style kick is severely detuned and is way off-key to my ears. It doesn't sound good at all, and unfortunately it's a major part of the minimal soundscape. The singing (1:40-1:54 and 2:33-2:47) seems a little pitchy, too. Fortunately it's only two short sections, and one of the things it's clashing with is those kicks (which clash with everything), so it's not that big an issue. There's a ton I like about this, even though I'm not a rap aficionado, but those detuned kicks bug the heck out of me and I can't get past them. NO (please resubmit!)

I actually don't mind the composition here. I do see how it's a bit follow-the-bouncing-ball in that the vocals are usually echoing one of the instruments, but that didn't really leap out at me on first blush. I hate to say it, but Jett's vocals being pitchy is a real issue here. In such a minimal environment, it's hard to ignore, as are the timing inconsistencies. The other problem for me is that the bells have a piercing harmonic to them that hurts my ears and gives me a bit of tinnitus. They could stand to be low-passed a bit, certainly cutting out the 17kHz+ range. Ultimately, this approach needs the vocals to carry the piece, and they don't. Certainly doing more with harmony and percussion would help, but I'd personally vote in favor of this even without that if the vocals were better. NO

It's not often we get a remix that goes less off the rails than the original, but here we are. Quite conservative for a while. When other instruments get added in, it really does get quite heavy; I didn't understand what proph meant by that at first, but now I totally agree that it's the right word. The bass is so loud, so repetitive, and has so much presence that it's crushing everything else. Listen to 2:02-2:17 for a good illustration; the bass is so overwhelming that it's muffling the lead, even though most of the bass presence isn't even where the lead is. The climax (3:10+) is quite dense overall, not leaving the instruments any room to breathe at all. That said, this is quite personalized, the performances are excellent, and it's just generally fun. The production bothers me enough that I wouldn't want to listen to it too many times in a row, but it's not enough to send this back over. YES Update 12/4: The new mix isn't worse. While the bass is not quite so heavy, the overall mix is still quite dense, with the ensemble leads especially sounding quite smushed. Still, it was a YES before and it's a YES now.

Opens with a very loud, rumbling, distorted bass pad. I have to turn down my volume by 25%, and it still sounds really unpleasant to me. Of more concern to me is source usage. The source is a drone in two pitches and two notes. Literally the entire thing consists of a two note "melody," a one-note/two-tone pad, and a "laugh" effect. This remix uses a similar pad (same pitch, different timbre). The original writing here uses the same chord progression as the source, but we have a long-established tradition that chord progression in and of itself does not constitute source usage. And finally, the "laugh" has been broken down into its component parts and remixed into a melody: directly once or twice, then riffed on extensively. It's clever, but it took me literally a half-dozen listens before it dawned on me what was going on here, even with Zach's explanation. I'm extremely borderline on the question of source usage here. The connections exist, but they're in no small part academic, and I think few people will put them together without having it spelled out for them. Most of the melodic writing departs significantly from the inspiration. Fortunately I'm not in a position to have to decide one way or another, because that pad is way too loud and blown-out for me to get my vote. I'm very curious to see how the rest of these votes go. This is extremely clever, well-performed, and demonstrates a lot of proficiency and intuition about music theory. I'm really not sure whether it's too loose and esoteric for the majority of our listeners, but I need that pad adjusted anyway. NO

I really like the French café feel to this, which I got even before the vocals kicked in. That combined with interleaving You Are Not Alone in as a bridge made this sufficiently transformative to me. It's smooth enough that if you don't know the sources, the addition is mostly seamless, except that it pushes the singer's range a bit below their comfortable range. The singing is simple but adequate, although it does get a trifle flat at moments. The conclusion is unfortunately the most dramatic of these, literally ending on a sour note. My nitpicks are nitpicks. Overall this was well-realized and creative. YES

Wow, that's loud! I had to cut my volume by a full 50%. The votes above mine capture the major issues. Production is a major issue, with balance and distortion issues throughout, and it's also far too conservative. Along with that conservativeness comes repetition: 0:38-1:06 is repeated at 1:50-2:18, and the ending is a loop straight back to the beginning; this makes the last minute of a 3-minute piece a repeat, and 1/3 of a piece being repetition is too much. NO

Those instruments are dryyy-y-y! The articulation is really good, but everything still sounds unrealistic because there's no delay or reverb on anything. It's like every individual instrument was recorded in an absolutely pristine sound booth. The arrangement is largely very good. It's a great orchestration of Heartache until 2:20, although I did hear a few notes that sounded wrong to me. At 2:20-2:39, arguably through 3:07, the arrangement gets a little schizophrenic, with several rapid-fire, awkward transitions in a row. The ending is a little random, too. Overall I'm not as keen on this as the judges above. The improved articulation is very good but balanced out by the lack of resonance. The arrangement is very good but marred by that bizarre middle non-sequitur. Overall I can live with both issues, though. YES

I'm in instant agreement with proph. The synths and production are downright difficult to listen to. It's muddy and overly simplistic at the same time, with the lack of percussion being a big part of that. It's also pretty loud. I almost didn't listen all the way to the end even once, and I would have missed how the last 25% of the arrangement is outtro. There are a lot of good arrangement ideas. Other than the lack of percussion, there's some intriguing complexity going on here, and you took the source in some exciting directions. But the execution needs some more work. NO

As proph said, there's not a whole lot to this original, so it presents a challenge to remix. And I think that challenge was easily met. The remix expands on it in multiple ways, adding instrumentation, breaks, additive and subtractive sections, and just generally turning out a solid piece of music. Production and performances are up to The Plasma's usual high standards. Lots to like here. YES

Wow, this is crazy loud. Right off the bat I had to cut the volume to 3/4 of my normal listening level, and at 1:08 I had to cut it down to 2/3. And then it drops so low at 2:23-2:50 that I could barely hear it. There's nowhere I can set my volume where it doesn't either blow out my eardrums or be too quiet to make out. That alone is enough of an issue for me to vote for sending this back. As for the repetitiveness, yeah, it's still two loops. There are some differences in the percussion, in the rise, and in the FX, and that does help a lot. I'd consider 2:37-3:19 to be different enough from 0:54-1:35, though not by a ton. But that still leaves 64 seconds of the loop that I'd consider effectively copy-pasta, which is 29% of the total length. Too much. I'll add Clementine's temperature visualizer for emphasis: The loop is really obvious when you see it like that. Again, I give credit for audible differences that are too subtle for that visualizer to pick up, but it still gives you an idea of the problem. NO

There's definitely some mud around the bass range: the massive reverb on the kettle drums, the bass pad, the low end of the piano, and the bass/cello are all fighting for a fairly narrow range there. If this does get sent back, there's a lot of room for improvement in the clarity there. Some stereo separation would help as well. As for length, yes, the treatment certainly does lend itself to something larger in scope. There's 44 seconds of build-up and 28 seconds of conclusion, leaving only 52 seconds of epic cinematic meat on a 2:04 piece. It really does feel like it was originally something longer and was trimmed down to trailer length. All that said, I don't think either issue sinks the piece. It feels too short, but that's a subjective impression and not a standards violation. Production is within tolerance, IMHO. The arrangement is such a smooth use of the two sources that I had to go back and listen to the FFV piece a few times to remind myself that this wasn't all Fisherman's Horizon, and it's definitely not. It's a great orchestration with a great sound. From me, this earns a YES

VVVVVV has such a catchy soundtrack. Too bad it's so brutally hard. Really nice old-school EDM here. Even catchier than the original. Lots of fun. Production could be cleaner, though. The soundscape is pretty muddy and flat, especially 0:46-1:28 like Larry pointed out. The whole drum kit also lacks punch, with squishy hats and claps, and thin kicks. The arrangement carries this, though. Expert job of making the original melody into something fresh. YES