prophetik music

real basic source. recognizable source content at the beginning thanks to the chord progression being fairly easy to hear. there's a lot of really fun synth work throughout - the squelchy bass arp, the added percussive elements to fill out the drumloop, the bass drops. around 2:45 i was starting to get tired of the loop plus the bass being pretty repetitive too, and just in time a drop arrive to break it up a bit. i'd have preferred to hear a shift in the synths here so the lead, pad, and squelchy arp weren't still the same after that - it's essentially a retread of the earlier section for another minute before we get the choppy vox (which in itself is kind of a repetitive section). and then we get two more minutes of the same stuff with extremely minimal changes. this is just too much repeated stuff - no synth changes, the same drum fills, the same vox samples used the same way, and super simple changes (like a single piano chord every two bars) to differentiate it. it's four minutes of music (arguably about 3.25) spread over six minutes of bread...something's gotta give. there's a really catchy, fun idea here that i love the idea of - but it's completely played out at the end rather than making me want to listen to it again. i'd need this to be much shorter before i pass it. NO

yeah, this is fine. it's a weird original and a similarly weird interpretation. there's a lot of "fun Massive patch i found" ambiance going on, but some interesting use of vocals around 1:53 (i love the use of auto-tune to make it sound not quite normal). i liked the use of the throbbing, pulsing bass as well. the 'melodic' content - really, just the recognizable lead instrument stuff from the original - is clearly recognizable throughout. rubber stamp, it's good by me. YES

big dark mastering on this one. the initial chords under the organ sound super dark, and the synth choir, big room reverb, and heavy low presence certainly give it a specific vibe that's really fitting. i agree with larry that the lead guitar is pretty far back under the big drums (cymbals are nonexistent, though, it's just static that's filtered out from the sound of it). there is a lot of presence below 40hz, not much at all above 3khz, and a hard cut at 16khz. that's why it both sounds boomy in the lows and lacking in highs, and it does sound muddy in the kick/bass. a harder cut under 40hz would help a lot, as well as an EQ pass on the rhythm guitar, snare (the kick's got more treble in it than the snare does!), overhead/cymbals, synths, and lead (in that order). brightening it up would add a ton of clarity to it i think since you could smile the EQ some and turn down the upper mids a touch without losing punch. i admittedly like the cheesy lead synths and crappy string synth since it feels super 80s and IMO fits the style with the huge arena reverb and super bright and loud kick drum. arrangement-wise this is fun. there's more than enough expansion for me and it never loses the energetic feel through a variety of exploratory things. the ending is indeed two or three times as long as it should have been - use a proper parabolic curve to prevent it from overstaying its welcome. i actually think this is pretty close. it's pretty low-heavy and dense intentionally to give it a darker feel, but i think it's just too much. for me, just cut some of the sub-bass freqs, boost the highs a bit more so it's not dead above 3khz, and make the snare and lead less in the background, and this is done. fun track. NO

fun concept and title. it starts out very quiet, too much so. it's obvious that several instruments are being volumized to be quiet instead of velocitized (the cymbal roll for example). this track really needs compression. the brass at 1:10 are pretty slow-attacking and not suited for the quick runs they're doing. subsequently, the brass sample (supposed to be horns?) doesn't sound good at 1:23 either - it's too high for a french horn but doesn't sound like a trumpet. the drums are waaaaay too loud here and it's hard to hear anything else, and there's a ton of bass presence right there that should be trimmed out as it's just boom mud bass city. there is a lot under 50hz that's essentially just rumble and gets in the way. the arrangement itself is pretty fun though. i like the way you consistently are handing off the melodic content, your samples are just letting you down a lot. it sounds pretty good at 2:13 conceptually, albeit suffering from what i mentioned above around the drums. there's a nice transition to a quieter section at 2:30, and it does that for a while. your cymbal roll at 3:07 is a bit late (should arrive on the beat, not just after) but it's a cool layered building motion you get after that as it heads towards the end of the track. there's some chord soup at 3:55 but it goes up to a big ending. brass samples are behind the beat again here. i like the rising ending that just abandons us - it's a very epic way to end a big track. you've got some great ideas here arrangement-wise. i'd suggest getting out of your music editor and into your ears more when it comes to realization though - your brass are consistently slow (so maybe shift them a 32nd to the left), and several of your samples are used in a fashion where their timbre doesn't match what they're doing (like the brass comments above). also the mastering is all over the place - you need compression on this track to bring up the quiet parts so they're in the same universe as the strong parts. you can have a track that sounds quiet but is still audible on the same volume setting as the big epic parts with proper mastering. this isn't there yet but is a great idea. NO

the drums on this track are all over the place. i love the variety in usage, but volume-wise they're nowhere near consistent. 0:11-0:22, the snare's not even in the same universe it's so quiet. then they're very loud and in your face, then at 0:41 the snare's back to being next door with a huge clicky kick, then it's back to the punchy electro drums. the constant shifts in volume and soundscape were confusing aurally. i also didn't care for the bigger set of drums just constantly playing the same kick/snare pattern for the majority of the piece with the same toms fill used several times. it got very tiring, especially with the bass not having any real unique parts either and the same lead used for the entire piece. the copy/paste section was already mentioned and i agree that it's a lot of repetition. the track also just sort of ends with little prep, something else i don't care for. i sound like i don't like it, and that's not true. it's got a ton of energy, it's got some nice fat mastering that feels good most of the time, and what you've chosen for your samples and synths is great (at least initially!). getting rid of the copy-paste stuff, varying up the drums (and turning them down just slightly) and your lead synth a bit, and a better ending will all go a long way towards a more complete track. NO

agree that the overall sample quality isn't great. my main issue is also the very slow string attack, but the mastering struggles too in a few ways - notably that the electric bass is totally divorced from the soundscape of the orchestra, and the orchestra feels pretty blah since it's all mashed down with no highs. from a writing standpoint, it's a lot of wall-of-sound sustains in the orchestra under the melody. that's not really an arrangement so much as a realization. it's also effectively 1:20 of music with an extended intro and outro, so even if there was a lot of good content, it's over so quickly you can't process it. there's some fun ideas going on but nothing really stands out. i think this needs more workshopping. NO

larry is right, that source is awesome. the fm bass is great. super punchy. yeah, there's a lot of issues with mastering here - namely, it doesn't sound like anything's actually been individually EQ'd, and there's no unified room verb / verb send so everything sounds like it's in different soundscapes. since it's being asked for, i'll go through part by part with suggestions about how to flesh it out. for the drums, there's a few things that are concerning. the snare has a lot of head attack and body in the sub-1k range. note that it sounds pitched unlike other similar styles where most of the snare sound is static higher in the freq range. scoop most of that head hit out and get a snappier, crisper sound. that'll take up less of the spectrum and require less overall volume to be heard. the kick is pretty much just sub frequencies and no beater, which is fine since it's still quite clear and the bass isn't sitting down there to interfere with it. the hats are pretty loud compared to everything else in the kit and have a lot of initial impact and not much sizzle - boosting their highs a bit and trimming back the initial strike will make them feel louder even if they're not since they'll be in an unused band. i like overall what the drums are playing, too - most of the volume issues are other instruments. the bass has essentially no low end and little attack tone. adding some notched treble to it will help with the finger attack it's got, and not scooping out the sub frequencies entirely will help give it more presence. the writing is great and it just needs a boost. for the rhythm guitar, it needs to be doubled and panned to expand it. this also sounds like it's been mid-boosted. this song sounds ripe for an 80s-style mid scoop job on the rhythm guitar - try putting a smile on the EQ and seeing if that gives some more body to the sound. there's a lot of synths and organ going on in different places, and overall i like the additions. you do use some pads in areas to help fill it in, but the leads are so loud over everything else (1:48ish is just egregiously loud) that all you can hear is the lead instrument and the hats. bringing everything down a bit and then using proper multiband compression will help a lot with balancing the tone out. that will also help it feel louder. the arrangement is great. i like the solos, i like the active bass, i like the drum work. it just sounds quiet and small right now. some mastering love (admittedly this is the hard part!) will help out a ton. NO

lot of interesting attention paid to the initial atmosphere. melodic content comes in at 0:31 (a little heavy in the right ear) and is both immediately recognizable and creatively realized via the synths. i really like the buzzy bass synth under all of the bubbly, undistorted synths above it. the build into 2:08 is fantastic, and the subsequent chord changes to the melodic content are just perfect...i wish i'd thought of the idea! the transition into the original Brinstar theme at 2:50 was also great, love the choral vox behind it. if i'm going to complain about any one part of it, it's that it meanders a little between maybe 3:00-4:00 simply because it goes through a lot of melodic content in a row without a break. a break to the lead synth in there may have helped prevent that, but it's a nitpick at most. there's a great drop beat that flows into an extended ending around 4:20. this is fantastic. what a great track. i have really nothing significant to complain about. YES

i feel the dynamics compare favorably to several other wide-dynamic works that i've heard in the past. the recording of martin's mass by the westminster cathedral choir won awards for its mastering of a highly dynamic work and it has a wider ranger than this one (the sanctus movement is a great example of this if you can find it unaltered, i can send it if you want). the nature of the medium is such that significant variation in volume is a big part of the instrument. also i really want to hear the 7.1 mix on a proper set of speakers.

i agree that this is a cover. the performance is fun and exciting, but there's little melodically that's new and different or re-arranged. some sick drum work though! the keys at 1:35 are super robotic and lacking any sense of velocitization, which is noticeable. there's also basically not a break of the strings/keys playing the melody for most of the track outside the pretty sick guitar lead near the end, which gets tiresome quickly. ultimately the lead work in the guitar might be enough for me to squeak it by on arrangement, but it falls too short on production. agree with MW on production for sure. there's nothing below 70hz and nothing really above about 2k either. it's remarkable actually how little highs there are when it still sounds pretty good. i wish there was more attention on the rhythm guitars, too - it just sounds like a single take and isn't layered from what i can hear, so it's pretty thin. i think that it's a fun track to listen to but doesn't meet our arrangement guidelines. it'd be a sick DoD track though ? Cleaning up the EQing so it has, like, any lows or highs will be a big help. stretching more on the arrangement would help a lot too in terms of meeting our guidelines. NO

what a disparate group of games. i love how this comes together, though. great job picking ideas and representing them in ways that are immediately recognizable but definitely different from one another. this is a bit of a mess in terms of instrumentation and realization, but there's absolutely a great track under this. in fact, i think just fixing the mastering would be enough, although some additional attention to most of the individual parts would result in a really huge upgrade overall. so i don't mind the opening bell section. sounds like you've got a basic pad under a very sine-y bell, and aside from the high notes being a bit too loud it's a very peaceful opening. i lost track a few times of where the measure start was in here - using lower notes to delineate an overall measure structure will help ears keep track of where you are. i like the initial guitar part as well! there's a fun concept of space you're working on here. the issue is that your bass, rhythm, and lead instruments all are a little too similar in tone. i would suggest adding some grit to the lead to make it more distinct from the rhythm instrument, removing some of the bass out of the rhythm instrument, and then make your bass guitar a little more distinct in tone by removing a bit of the highs and also probably using a different style (finger instead of picked would help differentiate for example). lastly, adding some panning or chorus to your rhythm will help spread it out of the exact middle of everything, where it's getting lost. i love the strum at 1:19. the drums sound pretty generic. if it was me, i'd tone them back a touch overall in volume, and use less busy patterns when everything's going on the snare at least (the snare seems to mostly be doing the same thing throughout). at 1:30 when everything comes in, the lead's a little too quiet next to everything else. i'd bring pretty much everything down (rather than the lead up) a bit. i like the simplicity of the strings but they're definitely too loud for a pad role - the rhythm guitar's more interesting, so let that be more in front. the subsequent piano section is nice but everything's the same velocity. bringing the velocities down a bit and letting the volume knob handle how it speaks out will help there. many of your transitions are twice as long as they need to be and serve to highlight your not-real bass and drums. i'd cut them down. the texture at 2:20 is simpler, but again the not-real bass and drums take the fore rather than the interesting rhythm guitar and lead (and later the synth). some more automation in your mastering will help with that. i found the ending to be unsatisfying ending where it did. i liked the arpeggiation going on, but didn't think it needed to change chord or end on such an unsupported chord form. sitting on the root would have been fine there. to be honest, i think it's short for the amount of stuff it covers. you're not really in the song until 1:29, and it's done by 3:05. that's a good feeling to have. to recap - i think volume-wise there's a lot of automation and attention needed, and some EQing to help filter out unneeded freqs in the low-mid would help clear it up. i think some panning would be good - there's essentially none, and you've got lots of instruments that could really be clearer with that - and i think that once that's done, brightening it up a bit with some multiband compression would be the icing on the cake. however, some attention to what things are playing what (like the opening being difficult to follow, or the piano's velocities) will help a ton as well. this is a great start that will be really fun with some workshopping. please do follow through, i'd love to hear it done. NO

wow, only 1.5db of headroom. a turning point?! this is an intentionally difficult choice for a remix as there's only a few motifs to hang your hat on. there's the offbeat percussive sound, the I-bVII-I piano chord pattern, and a bucket of sfx. there's some wind samples initially and the original's downbeats in the piano. there's some attempts at replicating the sfx with orchestral instruments, and some really badly exposed samples of winds. the clarinet and bassoon's attacks just sound very unreal. at 1:07, they're attacking just separate from each other and it's intensely distracting from anything else going on, until the keys come in at 1:27. those keys have zero room effect on them and also sound very strange in a bad way - no verb, right up front in the mix when everything else has more atmosphere on it. it seems so baffling to me that rebecca can have these incredibly handled sections that are so atmospheric like at 2:25 and then put a keyboard with zero reverb right next to it. i think that the source is prevalent and what interpretation there is is more than sufficient. there's a lot of what i'll call adjacent arrangement (that is, taking the original idea and applying various techniques to transform it into something relative but not obviously the same) and a lot of interesting uses of orchestral percussion to keep it different in my ear. the lack of a cohesive soundscape and sample issues are what kills this for me. if rebecca takes a bucket of reverb and slathers it on so that there's more of a cohesive sound to this, it's a pass for me and i'd grit my teeth about the samples. fixing up the sample quality or using them in a method where it's not very obvious they're not real would be even better. NO

classic track. initial filtro needs some q. it was hard to tell what was going on there. once it comes in though, it's a big, dark, heavy soundscape. i can hear what you're going for, but MW's right - there's very little above maybe 2khz. additionally, the bass is pretty muddy since the guitars, bass, and kick are all living down there with nothing above to help them be differentiated. it's hard to really hear the bass (which when i can hear it seems like it's doing some interesting rhythmic stuff) since there's no finger tone, it's all cut out. in terms of the drums, there's a good amount of beater tone on the kick which is nice, the snare's pretty full-sounding, but the cymbals are essentially static. that's affected a lot by the lack of high-end. from an arrangement side, this is pretty much a cover outside of the intro/outro. the melody's the same with very little personalization, the chords are pretty much the same, and i didn't hear much in the background that indicates new countermelodic content. the mastering might have been enough to get through with a really transformative arrangement but there's not one here that i can hear. this needs some more work. the arrangement needs to be intentional and much more present - there needs to be more Sarvoth and less Uematsu in it - and the mastering needs a big lift in the high end in the least, likely all compression needs to be removed, a volume rebalance done, and the mids scooped, then put in a multiband to prevent the cymbals and other instruments from being crushed by the heavy low mid presence of everything. right now, it's hard finding high points that aren't present in the original already. NO

there is nearly 8db headroom on this, with more there if you exclude a single peak. this is years of ignoring basic requests for mastering. i'm tempted to reject this on this grounds only. lots of FMy bells to start us off with the arpeggio. rebecca also provides a lot of space around these, which is an effective way to reinforce the feeling of lonliness she describes. the bells that enter at 0:30 are notably louder than the other instruments, but after they move on, it's a nice soundscape that is indeed reminiscent of snow as she mentioned in her writeup. the glock playing the melodic content after this is a nice touch - having it in a lower register helps it stand out. there's some weird artifacts around 1:10 due to how bells fade out and the borrowed chords used there. 1:29 is a shift in tempo and focus, albeit using mostly the same set of instruments. 2:25 adds in a sustained instrument for the first time, which is a subtle but nice change. there's some flourishes as the track noodles to an ending which are very mechanical and took me out of the vibe. arrangement-wise, there's a lot of original here being manipulated in various ways. it's clear it's FFA throughout so i didn't have a problem there. the instrumentation choices are interesting at first and get pretty boring quickly as it's just the same set of bells over and over again with little changes to the usage except from the time change at 1:29 and the sustained synth at 2:25. from a mastering perspective, i like the level of nuance the wide dynamic range provides - after i boosted the output by 8dba. there's room for light compression here, too, as the variety of bell timbres used would allow for bringing up the quieter parts without losing the dynamic impact of those quieter parts. this is the same comment on every RET track, really. overall this is a great arrangement that chooses mastering decisions i wouldn't have made. i think it's definitely above the bar though and i like the deviation from the standard winds, plectrals, and percs formula that RET's done a lot lately. YES

both originals are great. love how ethereal the opening is. very suspenseful. the alyx riff is immediately recognizable, and the continuing build is great. 0:43's full band sounds great - i love the heavy gating on the guitar to really open up the space around the riffs. i agree that the rhythm parts are very loud and cover some parts, but tbh the extreme emphasis on the rhythm parts combined with the heavy gating felt a lot like something off of one of breaking benjamin's early albums. the solo is pretty long but the track is prevalent with half-life themes.my only nitpick is that the solo kind of wheedles on and then suddenly the track's over. i'd like an ending that feels more intentional. this is a great track and very fun to listen to. excellent work. YES

wow, that's...different. the initial bleeps are an inversion of the marimba part. the swells after it are the string tremelos. 1:15 is an expansion of 0:30ish's bagpipes in the original with the final high note of the first phrase inverted. again, i think, this is a stretch tbh. 1:36 uses that same melodic content pretty clearly for a while. the gliss chords in the background are reminiscent of the bagpipes playing the melody in the original. 2:30ish sounds like an inversion again but it's tenuous at best. the subsequent fm-like blurbs are melodic content from the violin. the chords behind it are around 1:20 onward in the original. so there's quite a bit of source, but it's often academic. regarding the sudden tempo changes, there are a lot of examples in pop and especially indie styles that feature lots of time changes. the #1 example is always bohemian rhapsody, with another example being SOTD's toxicity off the top of my head. i listen to too much prog to really think that the time changes were even notable tbh. should they be there? that's another question, but their existence wasn't troublesome. so i need to look at it as a whole. from a mastering perspective, the bass is way too loud, although admittedly i liked the heavily filtered approach and how fat it was. the track doesn't sound bad per-se, either - really just toning down the bass would make a world of difference there. from an arrangement perspective, though, i do feel this has enough to qualify it for judging, so i'd be looking at overall cohesiveness, instrumentation, and direction. this is where it fails ultimately. looking at instrumentation, there's a bass, drum machine, sweep, a few lead synths, and not much else. each section, as they are, sound pretty hollow since there's few pads being used to flesh it out. in fact, the few times that there IS a pad chording some body to the track is where it sounds the best, like the last minute or so. there's also very little variance in those synths being used, so they get boring pretty quickly. in terms of direction and cohesiveness - there really isn't any. the track doesn't have a shape. there's no real intro, no real prep for the ending before it happens, no highs and lows. without anything for the ear to grab onto, it goes into forgettable territory too quickly. conceptually, i like the approach you've demonstrated here. i love the academic approach to interpreting the original, and while i understand that our arrangements need to demonstrate a dominant usage of source material that is identifiable, i'm perfectly fine with that identification being done with a pencil and paper vs. my ears. that's the case here. the architecture of the work around that interpretation is where you've slipped, and that'll require some more significant rework to rebuild. ultimately this is a cool idea but doesn't demonstrate enough in the execution to pass the bar, nor is it particularly close in the current state. NO

this is a really interesting concept! there's a lot of great stuff going on here. the initial presentation of the arpeggio is just gorgeous. that initial percussion loop - and it is a loop, it's unchanged for >1 minute - is really disappointing because there's so much interesting stuff happening elsewhere, and it just doesn't sound good. same with the sweeper transition, as emu said it's just too loud. the lack of compression overall is notable here too, as it just feels quiet. the track picks up a lot at 1:30 and it's still great in terms of ideas and poor in terms of mastering. at this point i feel like i'm repeating myself, but it still has no bass, the drums are still very loop-oriented (although there's some more work here to mix it up), and it just feels like it's not done. there's a big string section that comes in and does some melodic tutti stuff, and then it starts to fade down. the piano work feels very heavy with how hard the articulation is - i don't know if that's the intention but it's pretty strong and i don't feel like it fits the end of a track as well. there's the bones of a great track here. a bass instrument and some better drum samples (and drum writing) will make a huge difference. Right now it's missing too much. NO

nearly 3dba headroom, if not a lot more outside of a few spikes. well, i like your new instrument libraries! unfortunately, i'm with MW on this one - i didn't hear a lot of new or personalized content at all. there's a lot of machine gun articulations, and the lack of reverb and room management is really glaring and makes the articulations even more egregious. i like the concept of the instrumentation, but this is a concept demo at this point. there's a lot more mastering and arrangement woodshedding needed here. NO

this theme always made me laugh with how perky it is. i agree with MW that there's a lot of generic synths being used. i like the scoopy bass, though, and the track does feel a lot like the original's peppy personality. i liked the big personality shift at 1:00 as well, getting into the minor vibe for the entire middle section. there's a recap that's pretty square and then it ends. i like a lot of the automation to keep the synths interesting, and i like the middle part a lot. i actually don't mind the arrangement at all - i think it's fine albeit not stellar or adding a ton of newness to the theme. i do think it sounds generic and loud. your caustic tracks all have very loud leads which is possibly a side effect of whatever headset you're using to make them. some ideas that would help the track get over the bar for me would be to give it some dynamics besides the obvious transition points, mix up the synths further so they're not all sounding very similar, and tone back the compression that's making it so loud. some more verve in the arrangement would help as well. i think i'm closer on this one than MW, but it's too 2004 to make it right now. NO

suitably funky opening. i like the idea that you're going for here, even if that snare isn't quite snappy enough. immediate head bob. there's a build through 0:39, and even that part is a bigger build to 0:50 to what's clearly the best part of the track. love the altered chord progression, and the macro/micro beat stuff going is very catchy. there's a drop around 1:15, which is good timing. i wish the bass had mixed up what it was doing there, but i still like the overall build. there's a recap of 0:50, and some melodic content layered in, and then a drop at 2:02 as it goes towards the ending. i am gonna echo MW - i think the production is a bit lacking. this track wants a beefy kick and some more brightness, a lot. it does feel cluttered in the mids to a point and it doesn't have the sparkle and snap you'd expect from a track where the beat is a big highlight. but it's fun and i love it! so i'm good with where it is. nice job. YES

i love music plots. thanks for the breakdown. there's lots of fun sound design in the first minute. i appreciate the care taken to have lots of interesting percussion when they come in, since there's not a ton going on elsewhere. the steadily-increasing amount of distortion is a great touch that helps build intensity without just layering in more volume. there's a great build that starts around 3:18 in terms of intensity of timbres. it moves to a great payoff section that is nonetheless probably a bit too loud compared to the rest of the track. the arrangement elements are definitely there. the breakdown is very helpful as they're fragmented, but once you know where to look, you can see them. this is great work. there is a lot of nuance going on. YES

some fun stuttering heavily-filtered stuff to start off with viridian forest. the instrument choices have a pretty lo-fi feel to them, and especially the bass is super heavy in the sub-bass frequencies and does not have much tone to it above that. there's some fun countermelodic content going on, and there is a ton of arrangement going on behind the melody with the bass work and the drums changing it up regularly. the addition of brinstar's content is seamless, really awesome job there, and tbh i didn't even realize it was there until i started looking and then it was very obvious. it just felt like part of the original 1:53 starts a transition point with a heavily-filtered kick again, and there's a build towards a recap of the melodic content and a subtractive outro. 2:36 sounds like a recap of 1:24, but there's some small differences between the two sections. this arrangement is gangbusters. i love it. there's tons of personalization, you're combining tracks from two areas in disparate games that have similar conceptual ideas in a seamless fashion, and you don't let it sit on one thing for any period of time. fantastic job. your synth choice overall is pretty solid (the brinstar arp lead is a bit buzzy for me but that's personal taste) but i did feel the mastering's a bit suspect. there's a lot of sub-bass freqs that should be rolled off - there's a ton of stuff below 40hz that shouldn't be there (in fact <40hz is one of the loudest buckets on a freq analysis). there's very little in the highs (which surprised me since there's a lot of noise sweeps used), so spending some time EQing your leads and percussion especially would be great, and some moderate freq-based compression could help there. i also think that volumizing it a bit would help - the leads are pretty loud compared to the background (especially the aforementioned brinstar arp) so i think dropping that a touch would be very helpful. i was going to pass this solely on the strength of the arrangement. i think ultimately though there's so much to be gained with some pretty straightforward mastering efforts that i'd like to see this take another try. it's so good though! i am super excited to hear it with the sub-bass gone and some volumization done. NO

a bucket list track to remix for me. just such a classic. intro is great and i love the initial hit. i almost wish there was more intro before the melody came in - starting with the melodic content right away almost feels rushed. the melody is handled in a zipper synth that's gliding everywhere and that's fun. the background has some altered chords (notably a major resolution). besides that the initial part is fairly straightforward. there's some fun volumized stuff in the break at 1:02, and a nice sidechained drop before the second section comes back in. i love the customization on the lead here - there's a lot of attention paid to a really fun part of the original, and a ton of soloing around the melody to keep it moving. when the harmonized part of the solo comes in, it's certainly too loud, but it sounds really fun. after this, around 2:15, there's a simpler section, and we get what sounds like copypasta from the beginning for another recap of the melody. there's a drop at 2:55 to take us out via filtro and that's the ballgame. there's some pad holdover that sounds weird at the very end but it's not a huge deal. in terms of negatives, the snare has a bunch of verb baked into it but there's not much that i can hear in the track on it, so it sounds kind of weird. it's also pretty loud. separately, the lead is too loud as well - it completely crushes everything else. i'd think both the snare and leads could come down by at least 3db and still be very clearly audible. overall this is closer to the bar than i initially thought. the first minute is pretty conservative but sounds nice. the second minute or so features a great breakdown and fantastic solo work (admittedly too loud), and then the last minute is copypasta and then a super generic ending. i think it sounds like a track that i want to listen to a lot, though, so i am willing to overlook what i considered to be missteps and give this one a passing grade. YES

love me some SF64. opening piano is pretty obviously fakey - essentially no pianist is using one finger on each hand for something like that. once the chords come in, though, it feels pretty chill and has a nice initial vibe. there's some crunchy notes at 0:37 (the combination of the third in the bass and the b7 in the melody sounds weird because it's a tritone), and there is obvious and continual clipping from roughly where the sax comes in onward for some time - every time the sax bops, it's clipping there by about 0.5db. the saxophone is playing some fun stuff but sounds like it's been recorded on a phone camera - there's just no high end to the tone. the sustained bass section with the piano doing its thing is nice, but the bass feels oppressively loud and super static quickly. the chorus effects on the higher lines for the sax sound neat (like around 1:37), but if anything they emphasize the low-poly recording. after that, there's a recap and then a sudden ending with nothing besides the sax...and 45 seconds of silence...? this is pretty far below the bar still, unfortunately. from an arrangement standpoint, i think what you're doing is fine, but it feels like a demo. there's little going on besides a piano and bass in the background, and while it's got some fun ideas with the style, there really needs to be some filler in there. sustained pads or some synth work would do wonders to make it not feel so empty and to draw away from the lower-quality recording of the sax. the beginning is too rudimentary and the ending is strange, too. even a cymbal ride let to ring behind the sax would help. on the mastering side, there's a ton of clipping, and the sax's micing makes it feel very blah with no body. i think some workshopping would really help this one a lot. NO

yeah, the samples are pretty rough right off the beginning. the slow attacks on the early strings mean you essentially can't hear them half the time, and since they're not velocity-switched, everything sounds like a loud timbre even when it's obviously volumized way down. the whole opening section is intentionally quiet despite being orchestrated in a fairly full manner, same with the end. remember that your orchestral timbre is influenced by what you're including, and a low number on the gain dial doesn't mean an orchestra sounds quiet - it just means that it has a lower db value. orchestration matters a lot in those instances. the transitional element where you put a V chord with both the 3rd and 4th next to each other is offputting. i would suggest either doing a traditional sus 4-3 or else just sitting on the 4 or the 3, not having both. the big payoff here is the melody playing at 1:18, and i love the eighths leading into it. there's some messy arrangement going on here - the melody is well represented (sounds like you're layering marcato and legato strings to cover the attacks? that sounds weird), but everything else is block chords. the more you can use background instruments as detail rather than a wide brush, the better. the fast articulated strings doing the rhythmic driver aren't able to hack what you're trying to do, either - they just don't have a fast enough attack. the copypasta that MW mentions is obvious, and it's most of the main body of the work. that'd be a no just like that - there needs to be more to differentiate between the two minute-long sections. unfortunately the sample quality issues described are enough to NO this outright. i think the arrangement needs some work as well ultimately. NO