prophetik music

why are we using the excuse of your otherworldly mouse holding to call you a monster? we all know what you are.

original decision: updated vote: it is louder, and the hiss is not audible to me anymore. interesting to know it was indeed mechanical. the clarinet is still a little pitchy but i'm not noticing it as much this time around. this is a very evocative and interesting concept. i love that it's heavily based in repetition without sounding repetitive. i also really enjoy the live performances. thank you for taking another look! this is a great addition to the community. YES

the piano and drums do sound a bit disjointed in the intro, like they're not near each other in the mix, and there's a ton of sustain tone in the piano which sounds weird (like there's not enough attack and too much sustain tone). i also wasn't a fan of the drums being very rigid - there's some variation in dynamics, but they are mega-on the beat perfectly. some quant there would help that a lot. this is a subtle thing but immediately gave me a weird taste when listening to it. once everything gets going, though, as the other judges said, it feels better. the bass is a little quiet/hard to hear considering how small the ensemble is. i'd like to get a bit more of the finger tone off of it - some more treble would do wonders to help it be more audible. it's doing fine stuff so it just needs a bit more. that lead synth is so blah. it's played fine, but there's no tonal variation, essentially no dynamics until the end, and hardly any breaks. this is a hard pass by me - there needs to be some sort of envelope or variation on this. even just turning down the sustain volume to give it some natural movement off the attack would be a huge change. the intro feels weird, and the drums intro and outro isn't my favorite, but that synth is a deal-breaker for me. some more attention to the body of it would be huge. adding more space to the performance (and some glide) would also help vary it up a lot. as it is though, this feels like a workshop track still. NO

big synthy intro, and the first presentation of the drums and melodic content has a great vibe. the leads are a bit boring tone-wise, but are effectively used. the bass here is great, driving it forward, and the snare helps with that too. if anything this feels pretty frenetic for the way it sounds immediately after 1:03. i'd like the glitching better if it was specifically applied to instruments instead of the main. i agree it's a speed bump. the half-time section at 2:05 is fun. i like the envelope play that's going on in that synth right after, and there's a bunch of on-point long-attack synths that add the glam to the sound that's just perfect. fadeout is kinda blah and probably should be cut after about 3:16. this is definitely above the bar, nitpicks aside. YES

what a cool intro. agree with darksim that some sidechain against the kick would have been a really neat idea, but i actually like how perky the bass sounds hand in hand with the kick, and how it adds a lot of space for the orchestra parts to fill in. drives the track forward and keeps it moving despite being full of super low-focused synths. 0:55 sounds so charismatic. cello under the fun arpeggio at 1:20 is great, and the big bass buzz coming in right after it is great. feels very Frosthaven to me. the shift at 2:22 is interesting - a few little shifts in how you approached some of the synths (less space, a bit more sustain) really give it a much different feel. the heavily automated lead synth right after this is a great feel. i wanted the main body of the background to be bigger there as a payoff, but it's still big and fun and enjoyable to listen. there's a ton of great sound design in this. i appreciate your willingness to not go wall-of-sound and stick to a more beguiling atmosphere intentionally, which is a neat game-informs-remix correlation. this is great. YES

love the original. such a classic. your whistling intro is notably sharp on your first big sustain. the rest is fine. keep air going to keep it on pitch! my primary issue with this is the resonance on the lead instruments. the lead in the second half of the track has some cool movement on it, but it's got way too much presence up high and is shrill and uncomfortable to listen to, and the very broad frequency range it covers serves to cover up your great backing instrumentation. i am not certain a heavily effected lead like that really fits an acoustic ballad, to be honest, and simplifying it a bit in tone and frequency range might be for the better. similarly, the lead guitar in the first part is distorted so heavily it loses some context in the mix. i do like the tone, honestly, but again i think it's a bit too much distortion for the track. the lead instrument being so loud and present throughout is super obvious in the fadeout, where when it drops there's suddenly way less sound going on. making that sustain/fade a little more lined up will help a lot. i agree with darksim that there's no beater tone on the kick and so there's a bit of clashing down there. i also agree with LT that it's unbalanced in my ears occasionally. this needs some mastering love but is a fun idea. i like the personalization you've put on the original and the backing guitars and approach really fit it pretty well. NO

what a fun idea! i can hear the influence right away. elephant in the room: it does sound pretty messily mastered. there's a huge amount of sub-40hz stuff, so it's muddy, and there's a big peak at like 120hz and essentially nothing above it for the rest of the eq range. there's a serious need to do some EQing here to notch everything in better. the live instruments especially need some love since they're really condensed freq-wise and it's affecting their tone a lot. for example, the violin's lack of upper range makes it sound more like a sine wave. the trumpet sound is fine, i thought, but the rhythm guitar is very low-heavy and focused exclusively in the low-mid right near the bass, so that's super boomy. that said, it is a fun track! there's a ton of interesting little ideas and performance elements that lean into the spag west concept. i like the arrangement a lot, it just sounds boomy and messy. NO

man, pkmn gen 1's soundtrack just sounds like booty. it's so grating throughout. i don't know how i never noticed that. this has a really fun, rich intro and takes its time getting anywhere, which is nice. the guitar at 0:58 is too loud and stays too loud compared to everything else (a few db down would do wonders with making everything feel more together for the entire length of the track). there is a big uptick in energy at 2:27 that sounds like it's straight off of We Lost The Sea's Departure Songs album. the part at 3:26 didn't sound particularly machine-gun to me, it's not like mike mangini's doing dynamics on his double bass pedal. it did feel a little blah in there in terms of not really doing anything with that energy. there's a short break and some huge blastbeat at 4:10. the bottom's a bit muddy here but not more so than i've heard on pro tracks. i will agree that it is pretty square with the quantization, but again for highly technical tracks it's not totally out of bounds to have a rigidity to it. this is a neat track. i would say that i wish there was more exploration tonally of the theme (there is a lot of repeating the same ideas ad nauseum), and i'd have preferred to hear more of the backing parts and synth leads and less of the lead guitar and kick/snare. but as a comprehensive piece of post-rock i think this does a good job exploring a really weird melodic concept in a pretty accessible and tonal fashion. YES

hey, what a fun idea! the performance is great, and it really has a nice overall structure. there's a lot of breaks that are enjoyably placed and sound good. the full band sound is detailed and the singing performance (while pronounced terribly) sounds good and is nice to listen to. darksim is right in that there's way too much sub-40hz for this style. also, a big part of the issue is that there is a ton of fundamental in the rhythm guitar, alongside the very loud beater tone. there's a ton of product in the 40-200hz range which should be notched more effectively via EQ to get some more space for everything else (like, anything above 4k would be great!). i do also think this needs more compression - this style doesn't need huge dynamic shifts as much as it needs a more consistent volume throughout. i like the breaks provided, but feel that the louds should be brought back a bit and the softs brought up a bit, if that makes sense. snare could come down quite a bit. i can't understand a word the singer sings, but tbh it's actually stylistically pretty on with most JRPG vocal tracks (not that i consider this a positive, just that it's thematic). it reminded me a lot of something from persona actually. it'd be great to emphasize the 2.5k range or so to help her voice sit over the top of the mix rather than just trying to make the fundamentals louder. fix the clipping and this is a slam dunk. it's definitely possible that just trimming back the sub freqs is all this needs and the other mastering complaints fix themselves with just that. NO

the direct sample is a deal-breaker - no chance of it passing with that in there. the snare at 1:00 is regularly ahead of the beat slightly and it's intensely distracting as well, especially since there's so little going on most of the time. those two would be each enough for me to say NO on this. i like the concept. adding a simple beat that isn't huge behind the original is fine since it's got such a spacious, loose vibe to it. that said, i think you stayed too close overall to the original. there is snippets of significant change that are great, but overall it just feels like you took the original and put a beat behind it (which, to be honest, you did for at least part of the track). that's not enough interpretation. make something that's more chiptop and less sakuraba and i think you'll have something pretty neat. as it is there's not much here. NO

big initial presentation. the drums have a lot more tone than i'm used to hearing in this style (tom and snare heads sit in the freq of rhythm guitar a lot, which is part of why the mix sounds cluttered). there's also not much above about 3k which is why it sounds very low-mid heavy. performance sounds great, really. if i'm going to complain about anything in the performance, it's that the lead guitar doesn't really have much in the way of fun on the sustained notes. no squeals, no vibrato, not really any audible effecting, nothing to make the longer sustains more interesting to listen to. this is where filling in riffs would have helped make it less of a cover and more of an arrangement. as it is, darksim covered it - this is a straight cover with a bucket of copy-pasta throughout. it's a fun track but it doesn't pass the submission standards unfortunately. NO

i love that all the PC soundtracks that were around this time sound the same. it's such an iconic sound. the intro section is about twice as long as it needs to be at everything, but the beat and bass are a great groove, but those hard-left hats are real irritating. the bass and kick are running into each other also, a bit more beater tone and less sub freqs on the kick will help give it impact without losing the meat of the bass. the melodic content is clear, although i thought that the synth needed some more natural movement or dynamics to keep it more alive with the long sustains and slower overall tempo. same with the reedy synth that's right after it. i wasn't a fan of then hearing the first lower synth section copy-pasta'd right after it, too. it wouldn't have taken much to give it a bit more noodling to make it more unique. the squelch in the bass opening up was fun, and the next section here with the toots in each ear echoing is a creative idea. i still wish the leads had more movement. the break is wholly too long - this is 45 seconds of nothing in the middle of a groove-based track - and i agree with MW that the drum break could have been prepped better both from an instrumentation standpoint and by introducing glitchy drums earlier (maybe during that overly-long break?). it also is notably louder than the entire rest of the track so that's distracting too. we then get copy-pasta'd material for like a minute and it ends on a too-long fade-out that isn't parabolic (i don't mind the repetition in the bassline, but it could have just stopped, it didn't need 20 seconds of fadeout where 10 of it was almost inaudible). the difference between the drum break and the main body of the work is much more noticeable here since the drumloop feels mostly the same (and not glitchy at all) for the rest of this. there's way too much below 40hz which lends to it feeling quiet overall. cutting out that will make it easier to properly compress it and fill it in. lowering the snare volume a touch also will free up a lot of middle freqs. that'll allow for some more aggressive compression which should let the bass feel beefier. overall i think the mastering is lackluster and the copy-pasted parts really are a downer. you've got some great ideas. i think if you cut like 30-45s off the total track time, beefed up the mastering notably by cutting out extraneous freqs, and added more humanization / creativity to the copy-paste parts so they're not copy-paste, and you'll have a great track that's ready to go. NO

what an interesting concept. this kind of low-electronica vibe, centered around some fun live performances, is not at all what i'd have expected. first up, the good: the live stuff is all really neat. i especially liked the ancillary percussion when it was present, and hearing a live oud for this was such a fun and different thing. there's some real variety in what's being played, and some cool concepts from an arrangement perspective being delivered. the bad? i'm guessing the drum machine and pad are intended to drive a low-key intense heat under the live noodling, and instead it just sounds like you accidentally left the click track in. i don't get any verve from those parts at all. the overall lack of dynamic contrast or drive or resolution really kills this about halfway through. also, honestly, i don't understand having these creative different live performances and then layering a simplistic drum pattern under it - make that creative and different too! give it some life. right now it sounds super blah as a result. i love the ideas here, but it really doesn't feel like it goes anywhere for four minutes. some more intentionality especially on the backing parts will make a huge difference. NO

yeah, the initial presentation doesn't sound good. it's a great idea and fun to listen to, but in terms of sound quality it's really blah with no highs and way too much low mids. this needs some mega mastering love, it's so dull. inspired choice to include fabula nova christallis - i didn't even catch the transition the first time, what a great choice there. and going right back to dissidia was great too. i thought the transition to the FF7 battle theme was pretty abrupt since the instrumentation changed so much, but using it to build back to dissidia again was again a great choice. the prelude admittedly made me laugh a bit since it's such an iconic theme to use as a transition, but using a very major-oriented theme to transition to JENOVA of all things was surprising. i love the nasty bass through here, and just really wish the mastering was better for this section specifically. and again, the transition to FF13 was perfectly dovetailed, almost didn't catch it at first. to be honest, the arrangement idea here is just great throughout. there's some rough spots, but you took a bucket of tunes and made them work seamlessly outside of a few spots which are more personal preference against it than anything. if you can get this mastering dressed up so it doesn't sound so blah, this will be a real highlight. NO

not much melodic content in the original, really - it's mostly done via the top note in each arpeggio. there's a single descending line, and a shamisen-esque line, and that's pretty much it. in terms of the remix vs. the original, i could hear most all of the correlations that were called out by the remixer in their breakdown. 2:45 was more of a stretch IMO, and the solo actually had some elements of the melody in it too which was fun. from a mastering standpoint, there's some unevenness in volume (the solo guitar is really loud), i wouldn't mind a touch less kick beater tone, and a few times where the EQing for the acoustics to make them clearer made them a bit uncomfortable, but overall it's mastered clearly and well-performed. the sextuplet kick stuff was great =D the fade-out at the end is way too long IMO, probably should be done around 5:40 instead of almost another 20s of nearly inaudible stuff. this is way awesome and sounds great. nice work. YES

big flourish to start. there's a weird note at 0:04 that sounds like an unsupported extended pitch in the chimes - remember that chimes have a ton of non-fundamental pitches which is what makes them sound like that, and so extended chord tones aren't a great fit for that instrument. I love the soaring trumpet line right after that, however. it settles down for the first presentation of the melody, with expected flourishes and idiomatic usage of other strings and swells through this section. bold choice going with a bVII at 0:39 as your dominant chord. i also like the echoing of the melody in the strings right after that at about 0:54. great articulation in the flute at 1:08 as well. a fun brass flourish and the next set of melodic content is on its way. picc was a bit bright in this section but i love the idea - maybe just a touch less. 2:10 has several handoffs of the same pitch between the instrument and is a fun touch. the string tune at 2:38 is great, love how lush it sounds. this builds up to a big blow at 2:56. there's some really fun altered and borrowed chords in this section, especially through the brass flourish that heads back to root, and a great fanfare-style ending. this is superb. excellent work. YES

love that intro. this is a pretty good example of subtractive and additive arrangement concepts. there's the melodic content, which is pretty similar every time it comes in, but everything around it is different each time - one time is featuring the kamancheh (i think? bowed lap viol, played in a persian style), once is featuring the descending unpitched synth, and once is featuring the vocal samples. the drums are super basic throughout - especially the hats, i always associate trap with clever hat rhythms - and there's not as much variety in the instrumentation as i'd want, but it sounds dope and certainly adds a new character to the original without losing sight of it. the mastering on this one is very good and it definitely carries the arrangement, which is fine but not super standout. i think this is easily over the bar. YES

i will note that while i refuse to remix a track unless i believe it's better/more listenable/more engaging than the original to some extent, there's no official guideline around that. so darksim's original point - that the flute isn't nearly as good as the original despite being the same instrument in the same style - is a correct statement, but only as a note, not as a definitive. the panflute right away just doesn't sound good. it's fine on sustains but not at movement, too much uncanny valley. the subsequent plectral, idiophonic, and percussive elements sound great however and put forth a very evocative (if overdone) atmosphere. the flutes mentioned above do sound pretty robotic, as i alluded to before, and the attempts to make them more lively via intentional early releases don't really do a great job of mixing it up as much as it could be. the resolution at 2:15 is nice. the extended tremolo isn't egregious imo. the ending drags quite a bit after that section is cleared (starting around 3:02) and kinda noodles its way out the door. overall it's quiet, heavily reliant on plectral and percussive elements (easy to sample well and to use well) that sound slightly out-of-place in the soundscape vs. the rest of the chamber orchestra, and it's clearly over the bar. it's just the same rebecca track we've heard for the last several years, which is tiring. this could have been from thirty different games with a few changes in the melodic line. but there's nothing in the standards about uniqueness of arrangement being a requisite element. YES

usually i really don't like the sfx approach to some things, but this pretty clearly handled in terms of what you were hoping to do. so that's kinda fun. agree with chimps that there is a ton of overlapping frequencies throughout. the dance piano and pizz are in the same freq space, for example, and it's very confusing. there's some notes that don't work in the piano, as well, and the bass is all over the place (close to half of what it's doing are conflicting with the organ and pad). the concept is also really long without a lot that's measurably different - i don't know that there's really four minutes of music (after the intro) here, it's probably closer to 2.5ish. trimming down the extra would help a lot. my suggestion would be to take out all of the sfx and vox, make a song that's able to stand on its own and submit that, and then maybe do an edit that has that in it for your personal pages. NO

several db headroom. marimba is a great starting instrument. the choice of recorders is a great one - very evocative sound. the clarinet is pretty out of tune around the top of the lower octave, when the air column is at its shortest, but you've got a nice singing tone in the upper register. the arrangement is also really fun overall, even with repetitive elements like the mallets and chimes being used so prominently. i thought the ending was fine, certainly not enough to hold it back. i agree that overall i'd have preferred more dynamic shaping to the work, a louder final version, and some pitch fixing in terms of general critiques. the ambient hiss is certainly notable, but it almost sounds like reverb that's not well-implemented to me, or an aggressive compressor/noise gate setup. if it's ambient hiss, i'd suggest filtering it out with a low-pass filter with the freq set really high. if it's some level of reverb/room sound, i'd suggest removing it entirely and using a different method to generate room sound for those bells and the winds where i heard it. if it's being heavily compressor to normalize the volume of the recording with a hard gate to remove the hiss that results from ambient being boosted, i'd just cut that entirely and find another way to get the volume normalized. in short, it's weird and anything you can do to remove it is a good idea. i want to know what's the deal with that hiss. if it's mechanical and we can remove it, this is not perfect but fine by me. if it's not removable - that is, it's due to the recording technique - i'd say this isn't there. NO

i believe this is at least my third vote on this one. here's the wrap of my last vote: so let's see where it landed. the intro is still neat. the drums sound heavily processed, for better or worse. there's a lot of tone in the kick that in general feels like it gets in the way of everything else. glancing at the freq analysis, i think it's because there is not as much sub-100hz tones as i'd expect. there's a dip between 110 and 70, peak at 70, and then very little else. the kick's mainly present in that beater tone and not really in the sub-bass range, and the bass is almost unable to be heard throughout. i believe turning down the kick/snare (leaving the rest where it is) just a bit and giving some more EQ love to that bass will help a lot by letting everything else speak, and then adjust the kick a bit by scooping some of that pitched tone from it a bit and reinforcing the 40-60hz range. i still really like that arp going through the first break. there's definitely some more attention paid to the lead. it still tends to be more zappy and doesn't really move too much, but there's some automation on there that's a nice change from what there was last time. i still think it could use more! finding ways to vary articulations (glides, maybe?), more use of space in the lines so it's not constantly on, and also it could be brought down a touch since it's very loud compared to everything else, especially in the second half of the track. i am not really sure if i'm making perfect the enemy of good here. i think there's a lot of places it can improve but it's a fun track to listen to right now. i think it's got a bit farther to go but this is closer to my not-sure list than i've been in some time. NO

you ARE ahead of the curve, larry =D oh man, the initial hit with the orchestral taikos sounds so much better without the mud. there's a lot of energy in these parts that i simply couldn't hear before. i really like the section from 3:20 to 3:40 now. ending being in 6/8 is a great way to use the same material in a new way. i still really like the ending, but can see how it could be a turnoff for some. a slight sustain there might have reinforced the intentionality of the choice. silence at the end is unneeded and can be removed. the opening's still way, way too quiet comparatively speaking, but this is a lot better. always nice to see a resub make it. YES

that's a pile of good originals there. intro is far too quiet. needs to be much louder - it'll still sound quiet next to everything else. the initial presentation is super fun though! i love the idea. one of the issues with this type of arrangement in general is that there's a lot of doubling to get everyone playing as often as possible, and it makes the track muddy. there's a huge over-emphasis in the low mids throughout from a mastering perspective which is why it sounds so dense. cutting out the snare fundamental would help a lot there (use a snappier snare rather than one with so much head tone), same with some of the head tone off the kick while leaving the click. the vocal part was really surprising! i agree it's way too quiet compared to everything else. the waveform says it all: that should be, like, a quarter of the difference there to sound right. the volumization issues become worse as the track goes on. the growls are difficult to understand next to everything else (boosting the formant of all of the vocals will help a lot too! boost around 2-3k depending on sex of singer). the big blow at 5:35 is fun, and the loud sustains of the instruments cover up the lead guitar pretty bad here. they've gotta be loud to compete with the drums, though, and i do believe the drums are louder here than at the beginning. bringing them down a bit makes the rest of it balance out, i'd suspect. this whole section is a sausage and needs to have some serious work done to make it feel better. overall this is a fun track! it's so all over the place in terms of volumization though, and needs some EQ love especially on the drums and vocals. i'd love to hear it again. NO

about 3db of headroom. what a great source tune. super weird. i love GS's soundtrack. intro does a good job of setting the stage. that first lead is super generic and sounds like a gladiator preset, though, and the tons of reverb don't really do it any favors. it's much louder than everything else too. the varying of the beat around it is interesting though, and it's got a plodding nature to the bass that actually is pretty neat since it drives it forward through some weird tonalities. there's a big transition at about 1:13 that is more energetic in the drums, and some further time signature tomfoolery with some fun backing synths that give it a lot more drive. a significant ritard around the 2:00 mark and a big fanfare, followed by a transition to a different groove and a recap of the plucked synths from the intro. this second section has a much more singing quality to the writing, and focuses on a more traditional vi-IV-I-V chord pattern to help anchor it. a M7 chord to finish it and it's done. this is a tough one for me. on the positive side, it's a recognizable take of a super weird track, it's got a clear A/B format that you're going for, there's some fun intentional detuning and playing with the synths you're using throughout, the intentional atonality of some of the harmonies is neat, and the overall concept is one that i like. on the negative side, that main lead is way too loud and also super not in the soundscape at all with so much verb, the kick snare is almost inaudible, the toms have no punch, the snare has no attack tone, the hats aren't really there much, the first minute plus meanders around in a not-positive way, and the bass doesn't have any punch and sounds very generic too. as an example, the faster part at 1:29 sounds like you're going for a big groove-driven transition with a punchy bass and rhythmic synths to emphasize the tempo right before the big ritard, but little of that is speaking out. there's a lot of room for less generic, more active synths throughout and better mastering (and probably better samples on the drums) to make that entire first two minutes more impactful. right now it is really lacking verve. i think this needs more workshopping. i don't hear a finished mastering job. i do think the arrangement itself meanders a bit but is good enough, but i don't think it's as good as the other votes so far. NO