DarkeSword

Short but sweet. This song has a nice vibe, cool texture, and great beat. Very groovy stuff. I don't think the arrangement is bad at all; it changes enough so that it doesn't get boring, and it doesn't drag itself out. Solid stuff. YES On a side note, I noticed that you mentioned that you took ideas about being too close to the original to heart. Good to see that you can do that without being a primadonna about it.

T_T I need an extension. I have so much Physics stuff due tomorrow.

Star already knows how much I like this piece. Happy-go-lucky stuff with lots of energy, great sounds, and a fun arrangement. YES!

Wow that drum sequencing is horrible. Your crash cymbal sample keeps cutting itself for some reason. Ride cymbal swinging sounds so square. Improvisation is incoherent and random. I can see what you're trying to do, but you're not doing a very good job. Vigilante said it best; you sound like you're just mashing keys. Charlie Parker without the logic, and even that's being generous. The song is experimental, and I know that you're trying to break the mold, but I don't think it works. The arrangement bounces around, and there's no logical progression between ideas. Even free jazz has some kind of underlying order in all the chaos. This piece doesn't show much in the way of development. I can skip around the mix and it sounds like the same thing at every single point. Drums are badly sequenced, piano is splashy, and nothing really locks together rhythmically or texturally. It sounds like each part is being played in a separate room, and then someone came and spliced it all together later. NO Also, since you chose to bring it up, I'm choosing to respond. Keep in mind, this has absolutely no bearing on the vote I just cast: What's with the rant? I realize you're frustrated because you're a sax player, and you see mixes like mine that use fake sax get posted, and because people flame your music and you when you don't think you deserve it, but in a submission email, we really don't need to know all that stuff. Just your name, the game and song you mixed, and a link to the file. I don't mind reading about your approach you took when writing this piece (interesting facts about production, arrangement, etc), but ranting about a the results of a remix contest isn't pertinent to your submission. Here's what I think: you have a nice tone when it comes to sax playing. And this piece also indicates that you have a good grasp of how to use your instrument. A lot of sax players even play random stuff like that so quickly without flubbing. However, I think you need to work on your songwriting and arrangement skills. Try writing and producing something more traditional, like a ballad or a latin tune; get a firm grasp on phrasing, progression, sequencing fake stuff (like drums), all that stuff. Then, go ahead and branch out to try more experimental stuff. You said that people might have flamed you because you were an ass in the forums; let me tell you, that is most likely exactly why they flamed you. If you weren't an ass, people would have given your more helpful responses, like "Here are some tips for sequencing man, good luck, you're a good sax player!" Nobody likes an asshole. So stop trying to be one all the time. It's not cool, it's not funny. You'll find that you can learn a lot here, if you just chill out and be less confrontational. Personally, I'd like to collaborate with you one day; I've got a song in the works where fakesax just won't cut it. However, there's no chance in that happening if you've got a confrontational attitude all the time. Just chill, man. Anyway, sorry for rant. Again, that had no bearing on my vote. If you took any kind of offense, I didn't mean it. I'm not trying to lecture you. The community needs more musicians who actually perform, as opposed to just compose, and wind players are hard to come by as far as our community goes. It would be to your benefit to just step back and think about working with people, instead of against them. That's all. Take care.

Another X4 Zero's Theme remix from DJ MetaZero. Wow man, you really like this song, don't you? There's a pervasive SHHHHHHHHH sound throughout this ENTIRE piece. It's because there's just too much damn reverb. Now I'm a big fan of what those not in the know call "the trance," and I fully endorse reverberation, but there's just too damn much here to make the trance enjoyable at all. It's muddy and the vocals get drowned out by the big, bleeding synths. Some mastering would definitely help. Arrangement is straightforward; not terrible, but it's in-your-face the whole time. Back off a bit around the middle. NO

Sax is sequenced pretty poorly. That's the sample I got off of DJ Orange; it can sound pretty decent if you sequence it right, however there's no attention paid to velocities at all. Everything sounds really unexpressive and flatline. The arrangement itself doesn't go anywhere either; it's pretty boring and reiterative. Not much substance; drums sound empty as well; all of the parts sound separate from eachother, and the piano drops out from the groove for a while. This is a 'jazz' piece, right? You've got to think of everyone as live players who are INTERACTING with eachother. Parts like piano, bass, and percussion; that's your rhythm section. Those cats need to lock together and establish a tight groove that take the song places. Right now it feels like all the guys got together, played their own thing in separate rooms, and then spliced them all together later. There's no interaction there, and that's why the piece comes off as VERY fake sounding. Sequencing jazzy music is hard, because there's a whole 'nother level of realism that you have to attain. This piece just doesn't seem to pull that off very well. Unexpressive, boring, repetitive. NO

Fairly typical trance/dance/generic club music sound, but that build-up into the main source material is ridiculously long. More than half the mix (all the way upto 3:20) is devoted to a single bar of material repeated over and over again, built up. I think the chord changes, once, but then it changes back. The single bar theme comes back at 4:44 and leads out the mix. Now, I'm not one to quantify music, but looking strictly at the number of seconds, we've got about 75.5 percent of this mix covering a single measure of source material. It gets old. When the more melodic parts do show up, the percussion is BOOM-TSS, the synths are generic, and the construction is typical. Sorry, but if you're really going to mix 1 bar of source material for over four minutes, at least do some rhythmically interesting stuff with it, instead of just building it up with a typical stacking trance progression. NO

Piano sounds like the last iteration of Jingle Bells Schroeder plays in the Charlie Brown Christmas special, when Lucy is bothering him and getting on his nerves. He's playing jingle bells with one finger and smashing each key down with the force of a falling brick. What I'm saying here is that the piano patch here has no trace of velocity sensetivity. I can hear it in the sequencing, but there are many points in the piece where it really feels like the piano key is getting hit with a hammer. Something as delicate as this kind of arrangement requires a softer, warmer, more subdued touch, as opposed to the harsh, bright sound. This isn't a minor quibble either; it's a big deal, because choice of sound is extremely important. Vibraphone sounds a little of place too, and and the string work could use some beefing up. Arrangement is so-so; nice arpeggios in the piano later on; too bad they're ruined by the hammering sample. Needs work. NO

Gotta disagree on this point. I'm intimately familiar with the samples used in this mix, and I have to say that they're used quite well here. Note choices, textural choices, as well as sequencing in terms of velocities, durations, and articulations are clearly indicative of having lots of attention paid to them. As for other comments, the mix is clear sounding; levels work and there's a tight balance kept between instruments.

The orchestral section of the song comes off as sounding very cliché, and the percussion at that point in the song is painfully simple. Single snare hits along with overuse of the crash cymbal does not an orchestral percussion part make. Wow that last sentence sucks. Anyway, the guitar playing is certainly competent, but I agree with Dan B that the electic guitar section is mixed too loud. Some weird stuff going on with the percussion hits around 2:49—might just be the double kick, but the guitar is loud and isn't in balance with other elements, it makes it hard to tell. Otherwise I think it's a pretty good track with nice arrrangement. The guitar playing is competent enough, but I think there are some issues, especially that orchestral section, that comes off as amateurish. NO (polish and russian...I mean polish and resubmit)

Here are my issues with it. There's way too much high register stuff going on. It's a bit ridiculous. Also, a lot of chromatic percussion.. There's too much xylophone and music box everywhere, and it never lets up at all. It's constantly going and going and going, and there are hardly any bass elements to balance that out. Saxophone sounds out of place as well. Also, you could cut out the entire middle section starting at 3:26 and going until 4:50, because alot of that doesn't even relate to the source material at all. It's certainly not bad, but I think it needs major revision.

Wow. Not everyone's cup of tea, I'll tell you that. This is very experimental stuff. I wasn't so sure when it started out—seemed really dry—but after a minute or so it really started to develop into something sonically interesting. Nice texture going on with all of the pure electronic stuff. Drum filtering is crazy. Pretty avant guarde stuff. I like it. YES

Just call it Chrono Trigger: The Motion Picture Soundtrack.

I keep waiting for the percussion do defilter and bust out with some crazy ass big beat, but it never happens. The percussion track is just TOO lo-fi, and gets a bit loopy as well. Sounds are nice though; like analoq said, they sound old-school. I don't mind 'em at all. However, what you do with them is another story. The structure and phrasing in this whole song is really boring. Everything is really low key and not very exciting. And I don't mean it's not loud; you can be quiet and still build a certain kind of intensity. This song lacks it. Also, lay off a bit on the analog seashore sounds. Rework the arrangement in terms of structure, and fix that percussion up. Not a lost cause, but still needs a lot of work. GO FOR THE GOLD!!! NO

And stopping all of this talk about cover art is a must, too. Seriously. Lay off on the cover art. At this point int the project I don't even give a damn about the cover art. The title of the album has not even been decided yet, so designing anything is moot. I appreciate the effort, but I'm not interested in looking at art right now.

Hey hey guys...hold up on the cover design. I want to worry about all of that AFTER the music is finished.

I don't like the cover design.

you know, you can use the easiest damn thing to do this that has nothing to do with pitchbending or the MIDI PWOD. its called edit events. if you want to adjust one note on a monophonic line, just adjust the volume for that section by using your right click diagonal drag. its so easy. now, if you're talking one note in a polyphonic piano roll, then you've gotta use the pitchbend thing. it sucks but its all that you can use. to avoid that, put the melody line seperate from the rest of the stuff. But that just changes the volume, as opposed to the velocity. I prefer using pitch bends for the monophonic stuff too though, because it's easier to manage the velocities when you're looking straight at them in the piano roll. It's a lot easier to humanize stuff when you get notes and velocities in the same view. edit: of course i'm talking about native fruity stuff, like SF player, etc. I use mostly samples anyway, as opposed to external synths.

I'll talk to you about that. IM me about it sometime tonight.

You know, I did a nice write up on this exact subject in this very thread. Anyway, you can use the pitch bend notes to do it. Just overlap the pitch bend on the regular note (so that the pitch doesn't actually bend), and adjust the velocities accordingly. The regular note has the initial velocity, and the pitch bend gets the velocity that you want to shift to. The duration of the pitch bend specifies the duration of the (de)crescendo. You can do some rudimentary sfortzando (sp?) stuff like that, with multiple pitch bend notes.

Hm, I'll keep this brief, because Jesse, Larry, and Mike already summed up my issues with the mix. I still don't like that whistle sound; it's very unexpressive and lifeless, despite the good sequencing. As I said before, try layering it with something airier to combine the sounds into something new. The arrangement is also kind of strange; there are parts in the middle that sound like they'd make good endings, yet the piece moves to new sections. It doesn't feel like a logical progression of ideas. I'm also still not feeling that ending. I can hear it resolve, but it's still abrupt, and doesn't jive with the build at all. I really suggest bringing in some kind of short, quieter section to finish out the piece, for some contrast. Brass also blares in the ending build; might want to scale it back a bit. Don't get me wrong here; it's a good interpretation with lots of great ideas, as well as some decent execution, but I think that the few issues we have with this piece are what are keeping it off the site. I realize this is the second version submitted to the panel, but please don't be disheartened. It's CERTAINLY not a lost cause here, and it's better than many submissions we judge. NO (tweak and resubmit!)

How about just 'Chrono Trigger - The Motion Picture Soundtrack'

I think that the piece starts out really great, but as it gets further along, it really starts becoming quite bland. The guitar sound is pretty good (yay slayer?), but I really think that some sonic variety could do this piece some good; more of the kind of thing we get around the 3:03 mark. I'm pretty borderline on this track. It seems to lose some steam halfway through. Work on a stronger, tighter sounding drum track, and some sonic variety. NO (resubmit)

I like this. There's a nice quirky texture going on with all of the different sounds; percussive elements really work will alongside the synth stuff. Piano solo is fun stuff too. Nicely done. Arrangement side of things gets the job done. No real dead spots, and there's a logical progression. Nice variation. Don't see any issues here. Nice work. YES

Too much muddiness as far as reverb and delay goes. The mix has a crowded feeling that doesn't seem to exhibit and kind of real balance between instruments. I like the arrangement though, but it does start plodding a bit later on. Go for more interpretation. REWORK NO