Dextastic

Thanks for the detailed response! Yeah I understand masking and notching/boosting in theory, but I need a lot more practice learning the proper frequency ranges to do it for each instrument. I'm going to revisit this mix and work on it some more. One problem I've had is the same as Trism: My mix sounds really good on my headphones but not as good on my speakers or other systems. I recently learned that my headphones frequency response isn't as flat as I thought, and have added some corrective eq. I've also started playing with a binaural room impulse response vst so I can hear the phantom center correctly in my headphones. I know mixing is best done on monitors in an acoustically treated room, but that's just not in the cards for me right now. Let me make sure I understand what you said at the beginning: You are recommending starting with all instruments at 0 and bringing them into the mix one at a time, using only volume knobs/gainers, until everything is heard well enough, and then apply EQ/compression from there, right? Also, as far as "stage placement," do you think adding some additional reverb to the piano would help it stand out more by making it sound like I've moved it back on the stage? Is that a thing that commonly works? Right now it has the exact same reverb as all the guitars so it's in the same line as them. I promise I got more out of your post than I am asking here-I just need a little guidance to make sure I'm moving in the right direction.

Thanks! The guitars are all programmed (actually everything in my track is programmed), and part of what took me so long with this track was learning how to use my guitar VST. I've still got a few things to learn on it for sure. In case anyone cares, the guitars are all AME with some freeware distorition, and one of the lead guitars has a light flanger on it for parts of the song. I worked on that damn transition at 1:10 for a long time. I tried three or four things and finally settled on what you hear in the track. I don't know if you noticed but during the first few bars of Cutting Edge, one of the lead guitars continues playing the Mute City melody until it "links" up with the Cutting Edge melody. It's probably my favorite thing about my remix. Thanks for the mixing feedback. I'll work on it. I'm still new to mixing though and I don't understand what you meant by this part. I'm not sure what you mean by width or layering. Do you mean doing non-static panning and automating gainers, stuff like that? I'm trying to stay away from things like stereo expanders because of the problems they have if you listen to the song in mono. In the track I submitted I used the following static panning (everything on a scale from 50L to 50R). Rhythm guitar 1 panned hard L Rhythm guitar 2 same part, panned hard R Lead guitar 1 panned 29 L Piano left hand panned 15 L Bass center Piano right hand panned 15 R Lead guitar 2 panned 27 R Drums panned statically, each piece placed in its natural position in the kit.

FEEDBACK POST @Trism I like the organ. What vst is it? 1:50-2:05 uses a different organ. Is it part of the same vst? Unfortunately as Austin pointed out the organ part is often overshadowed by the choir parts. I'm not sure if you would want to adjust the volume levels or mix it differently to make the organ sound come through better. I still suck at mixing so I can't offer much feedback there. I like the choir part itself. I think it fits well with the song. I also like that you let instruments like the choir part and the organ at 1:50-2:05 come in and drop out over the course of the song and it all still fits together pretty well. I also agree with Austin that the drums sound like an afterthought. The drums on the original version are better, which should not happen in a remix. The original drum part is pretty complicated, bordering on overplaying, so replacing it with a simpler drum part would be fine, but what you have doesn't quite work. For instance, if you start counting after the first crash cymbal, the ninth snare hit should be part of a fill and doesn't sound right on its own. I know you didn't have a lot of time to work on this so it's fine, but what you wrote for the drum track sounds like an outline to be filled in later, and filling in a few little things like this fill can be enough to finish the part and make the whole song sound a lot better. My main instrument is drums so please let me know if you'd like more constructive criticism on the drum part. @APZX I love what you did with Cutting Edge. I wasn't sold on the idea of putting it in an EDM style when you first mentioned it, but you really made it work. As far as style goes I usually don't care much for electronic music (the kind you submitted this and the previous round)-I'm more of a rock guy-but this is something I would legitimately listen to in my normal playlist. The bass drum is heavy in the Cutting Edge section and I love it. I think you did a good job with the Mute City part too-particularly 1:30-2:07 (and 1:57-2:07 really kicks ass)-but I don't agree that it's high energy all the way through. This is probably just my inner drummer talking, but for me I don't feel like a whole lot is going on until around 0:40, and the break from 1:04-1:20 really kills the momentum you'd built up to that point. Musically it's all fine, but if high energy is what you were going for the whole way through, that's not what came across to me.

My bonus entry is up! As I posted on ThaSauce, I spent way too much time on this and am not totally happy with the result, but I learned a lot by doing it and that's kind of the point, right? It's a drums/guitars/bass/piano rock arrangement that starts in Mute City and ends up in Cutting Edge. Time for me to check out APZX's entry . Anyone else getting in on this?

For what it's worth I enjoyed your remix. The only parts I have issue with are: 1-the bass part is a little strange at times before the drums come in. 2-the drum parts from 2:30-2:52 and 3:24-3:44 (they are the same part) are not how a real drummer would play the part, at least not for more than a measure or so. For triplets like you're dealing with a typical drum beat would be X-xX-x (X=down beat hit, x=optional hit, -=no hit), not Xx-Xx- like you have. Also there would be no hi hat during tom fills.

I'm working on my bonus entry. I'm also planning on transitioning from Mute City to Cutting Edge, but so as to not spoil my ideas I won't listen to your entry until mine is done. I'm having some trouble getting some sounds right in Mute City so I haven't quite got to the transition yet.

I tried upping the kick around 80Hz and dropping the bass and piano around there but that didn't help much. Actually there's no oomph even with the kick track soloed , so I'm going to have to mess around with compression and the other tricks you suggest next. Thanks for your help!

Ohhh I thought when there were two tracks you'd have to incorporate both of them into your remix. I bet a mashup of these two would be really nice, actually!

Cool. I'm glad the rest of the mix sounded alright. I've been playing around with the mix a bit more today and I think I've got the drums sounding a little better now. I'm still having trouble getting the kicks to be punchy enough, but I suspect the problem there may be the samples themselves.

Thanks APZX. I might try to redo the mixing my submission and repost it here for further feedback if you have time. Yeah, I agree with you on the guitar harmonics. I wanted to include at least one but I may have gone overboard. The drums in my submission were from TMKD and the cymbals from MT Power Drum Kit (both free). I'm sure I could do better with some commercial samples but I'm also sure I could do a lot more with these with your advice. HoboKa mentioned he thought my "pad effects" were cool - just FYI to anyone who cares, those were all just layered samples from Orion Sound Module (free).

Looks good to me. Thanks!

Ok, I'll wait til voting closes. I didn't see anything about it in the rules so I'm glad I asked!

Is it ok to post our votes publicly here as well?

Sorry I missed the PM about thasauce being down earlier. Yes, that is my entry!

I've been playing with this a little this weekend. I could use some general feedback on my mixing and instrumentation so I'll be submitting something.

I'm also probably not the best source of advice, but it sounds pretty good to me. The only things I take issue with are: -The drums sound fake, partly in terms of sound quality, and partly because they're not quite arranged the way a real drummer would play the part. The first 30 seconds stood out to me the most in this regard. -I don't really like the part from 1:50-2:10. To me it sounds like filler. I think you could do something to make it more interesting.

What's up folks? Dex here. I've been playing live music for about 20 years but I'm pretty new to making music on a computer. I've always thought that Final Fantasy Legend II had an incredible battle theme, so I decided to learn more about computer music by remixing it! The remix is mostly in a metal style, but I change it up a bit toward the end. I'm planning on adding a little bit more to it and ending it in a metal style, but before I work on that I'm curious if anyone has any feedback on the work I've done so far. The first couple of seconds of the remix are from the overworld theme that you hear in the game right before you get into a battle, btw. Source material (overworld theme): Source material (battle theme): Current draft (Soundcloud compression damages the audio quality a bit, but I think the main ideas come through):