Zanezooked

Bump, and a new mix. I decided to shorten the song, taking out the reprise of the M2 theme after the middle slower string part, and ramping directly into the M∞ theme. DL link in case the upload below doesn't work: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/d5a9713dua8ghzyutied7/Marathon-Shortened.mp3?rlkey=hsbiourne18qrcah6cxeaky44&st=ajei38mt&dl=0 Still hoping for feedback about whether I succeeded in addressing the muddiness and balance issues. Marathon Shortened.mp3

Hey everyone! I’m looking for help revising to the feedback of the judges for my Marathon remix. I tried attaching it but when I played it back it didn't work properly, so here's a link to an MP3: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/6r0yhvlom8nfga95ekzmm/Marathon-Remix.mp3?rlkey=w5h82npsu16by8f4wqt90tq6u&st=e8n1efnj&dl=0 For context, here’s the mix as originally sent to the judges: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MPDu8DWY5Q It was well-received in the Marathon community. Hamish Sinclair even featured it on the Marathon’s Story pages, which was surreal as I’ve been reading those pages since my first forays onto the internet as a teen in the 90s. The judges’ feedback was largely positive about the arrangement but negative about the production and mixdown, especially the balance of sounds and general muddiness. Changes I made in response to judges’ comments: Re-mixed pretty much everything, and changed a lot of the EQs Added more sidechain compression on the kick (there was some originally, but not enough) Took treble off the bass when the guitar is present. Swapped the bass in the opening sequence for cello and bass strings. Prophetik seemed to find the synth bass out of place, but I still wanted something in the low end to provide variety from the wall of pads and environmental sound. I really like the result! Changed some of the drum rhythms I should mention that the goal of this remix is to capture a certain Marathon “feel.” It’s not meant to improve on or sound like the source Marathon songs, which are amazing as-is. It’s intended instead to take those themes and give them another showing, in a setting that’s different but still evokes what Marathon feels like as a whole — which for me include not just the original Power of Seven (Psykosonik) music but also Craig Mullins concept art and the philosophical rantings of a rampant artificial intelligence intent on escaping the closure of the universe. I’m not going for a pristine sound, but a dense sound awash in spaciousness, layers, and grittiness that evokes cosmic vastness, ancient mystery, and aggression. Judging by the reception of my original version in the Marathon community, I think I did manage to capture the vibes. So I’d like to retain that, while working to remove muddiness and sound balance. Thanks for any feedback!

I have a particular use case for AI that I'm interested in getting others' opinions on. I'm working on revising and remastering a piece for resubmission. I perhaps too ambitiously decided to feature a choir singing Irish. In my original mix I tried very hard to finagle EW Hollywood Choirs' Wordbuilder system syllable by syllable based on online audio recordings of each individual word, but after hours of work I'm not very happy with the result. It's not a huge deal, since epic choirs are not usually expected to be understandable, but I worked hard on the lyrics and translation and I'd love to hear them more genuinely represented in the final version. Lately I've been eyeing AI voice transformers. It appears possible to record myself singing Irish, transform my voice into a handful of AI-generated voices, and layer those with Hollywood Choir's samples to create something that sounds like a choir actually singing in Irish. In this case nothing would be "generated by feeding a prompt into AI-software." The AI would instead be fed a recording of my voice and would duplicate the notes in a new, generated voice. My creative activity would not be too different from what I currently do with samples of choirs and instruments: every note and expression would be my creative choice, but the actual sound would not be created by me. I'm curious what others think about this. AI as a whole generally feels icky to me, not the least because AI companies are notoriously unscrupulous about using others' work for training their models, without compensation. On the other hand, some companies at least claim to be ethical in this regard; kits.ai for instance says that their models are trained using audio recorded by contracted and compensated session vocalists. This seems no different from how EastWest obtained the audio which they sampled for their choirs. My other option would be to record my wife and try to duplicate her voice with enough differentiation using a variety of filters and effects. My wife is doubtful about this working well, however! What do you all think? Acceptable use case? Not acceptable?

I subscribe to EastWest Composer Cloud. It's not free, but I get it with an education discount and find it to be very valuable for $10 a month. I quite like their EW Fantasy Orchestra bodhrán. You can hear it on this track: (Mixing and mastering isn't the best—I'm still learning—but the bodhrán should be pretty audible.) And also this track (where the mixing and mastering has improved, and also the bodhrán sits in a busier mix): So yeah, I'm pleased with their bodhrán! The subscription also includes a massive amount of other percussion, including Goliath as mentioned by Geoffrey Taucer, which if I remember is actually being used in the above track for the taikos and riqs.