prophetik music

what a great original! i knew nothing about this game but recognized the composer's style right away. this is a really punchy mastering job. the beater head of the kick and the snare are both pretty loud compared to everything. it also feels very center-channel. 0:56 is messy, hard to tell if it's from performance timing or effecting. there's a weird splash in the right ear that gets used a few times and sounds odd. there's a nice break at 1:06 thematically, but MW is right in that the melodic content gets hidden due to a combo of too-loud backing guitar and not-clear-enough arrangement in the orchestral parts. to be honest, though, overall it's a great big fierce feel to the whole thing, and i really like that i can feel the kick and chugs in my gut. the solo really whips the llama's ass and doesn't overstay. the drums overall are fairly bog-standard but there's some fun stuff that they're doing especially near the end, and the track does a good job of saying what it wants to say and then being done. as is, i think it's over the bar once we trim off the end silence. if this goes back for more work, i'd suggest turning down the kick beater tone some, the snare a bit, the chugs a bit, and focusing more on clarity in your lead guitar tone. YES

not a lot to go with on the original here. using it as a structure to build atmosphere from works fine. i'm not a huge fan of the fadeout when you could have just sat on the root to end it, but it wasn't terrible, just unimaginative. i didn't notice any specific issue with overall volume. there's a bit of headroom on here, and the majority of the peaks are single snare hits vs. anything mix-related. the main rhythm guitar is a bit loud and the drums are definitely louder than they need to be, and i think pulling them back would balance it a bit more, but again it's not egregious. the arrangement concept is solid given there's essentially no melodic content. i think production is fine, if not particularly strong. nothing really shines here but also nothing is really sticking out as "this isn't good enough". i think this is over the bar. YES

that part at 0:18 is absolutely a wrong note. the arpeggio in the beginning is outlining (i think) a Gsus with a flat 7 (G C D F) based around Gm, and the bass comes in and plays G B natural A, so you've got a C (fourth) next to a B natural (major third). this is extra weird because GCDF is not clearly in a key enough for the root to be super clear (could be a C2sus, F2 with a 6, a Dm with a sus...etc) so the B is super unsupported, and a Bb is elsewhere in the background, making it even worse. having the bass play Bb A or C A instead of B A would fix it. the jumps right after to other pitches are fine. it's still a little weird later because there's definitely a Bb in the pads somewhere and you've got the bass just jumping to a non-chord tone. i think the percs sound find. it's a really 80s sound, with a punchy beater-forward kick and a fat snare with less highs. i do think it would benefit a bit from more brightness but it is fine the way it is. the transition at 1:35 is actually pretty well handled, although a bit jarring since it feels very different from the beginning. i wouldn't mind if the drums did more in here outside of the fills, like some tom stuff, but it's a nice transition piece between fairly repetitive sections sandwiching it. the ending does a good job of setting down. i like going out of time at the end to help it kind of trail out. this is a cool idea for a track overall. i think. it's overly repetitive, and there's that weird bass note error, but the rest of the ensemble sounds good and is meaty. i think that it can't really go out with that B natural in the bass, but that will be a super easy fix and then it's ready to rock. YES (conditional)

this is a top ten original for me. i know everyone's done arrangements of it but the original is just so good. opening is pretty generic, albeit fine. the beat that comes in is great - love how dry it is compared to everything else, the bass has a great amount of blatt to it, and the wet melodic synth with a bunch of glide is great. it's pretty straightforward, but the work in the bass and some of the fadeout bits help keep it moving. there's a notable transition around 2:00 into more adaptive territory with a new synth and some great chord changes, and then a slick synthwave transition into a great IV-V-vi-I chord progression that still feels like the original while also being primo driving music. and then it ends, and that blows, because i wanted another solo section screaming over the top of a mid-range melody recap while the drums kept pumping and moving forward building to a big high release with the arpeggio synths trickling away in the background amidst shimmery glam pads and a bass pedal on the root. ugh. darn it. realistically, i want you to finish this track. but what's here is still great and absolutely worthy of making the front page. chimps is right though that this could go from fine to outrageous with, like, two hours of work. YES I GUESS edit: better ending. got a little cute with the chord structure, but it lets everything down much better than it did before. this is out of I GUESS territory ? YES

fun idea. i like the high energy from this arrangement. the brass are fun if repetitive, although they're a bit loud throughout. the violin on the melody is also super repetitive - there was a lot of opportunity there for more variety in what it was playing, but there's nothing specifically wrong with it. the violin and cello harmony parts are in one version of minor and then switch to a different mode when it's just the violin at the end of the track, but that's not wrong, it's just not properly set up or supported so it sounds weird. the track feels very low-mid heavy, and a quick glance at the spectral analysis confirms that there's a ton of content between 100-200. i suspect it's mostly the bass attack and the low end of the guitars. opening that up a bit would allow a lot of other stuff to speak easier, and would mean it wasn't as tiring on the ears. there's a fadeout but it has a hard stop in there too. i wouldn't mind a more subtle logarithmic or s-curve fadeout. overall this is a fun package. there's a great beat, some unexpected choices of instrumentation, and the track doesn't overstay its welcome. YES

pretty opening, although the sub-bass water effects (i think?) were very strange and kind of jarring. there is not a lot of personalization / care taken with articulations throughout. it is a lot of full sustains with no breaks in any instrument, and it does not sound particularly natural. the horn sample at 1:49 is super bad. the tremolos in the string bass around 2:13 are also really bad - there's no resonance from the instrument or natural fade, just an abrupt stop every time they change notes. the song kind of just ends. there's a lot of evolving background work, which is nice. i think that overall the ensemble has a nice lush tone with good stereo separation especially in the middle of the track when you've got most of the group playing. MW put it pretty well. rebecca did rebecca things, and it makes for a flawed but palatable track. YES

funny writeup. love the hatchet line. this has a real dark vibe to it. i agree it's very light in the highs, to the point it feels kind of weird on headphones. there is also WAY too much sub-40hz content, anything with reasonable bass response is going to be absolutely wiped by it. not many tracks need 20hz at -19db, or 12hz at -24db. filtering out the mess below 35hz and a hard cutoff at 20hz would be a huge improvement in the feel of the track so it's not so thick-feeling. the melody is recognizable right away, and the big parts of the track have a really big, beefy, epic feel to it that's interestingly conflicted against synthwave's usual feel. i particularly liked the intentional stripping down of the texture for some of the melodic content - it is great contrast and a really neat way to focus on what's important there. the pitchy part at 1:14 is just not doing it for me personally, but i think the pitch drop into 1:32 was nice and a clever idea for a transition. the slides in the leads (like 2:04) sounded straight out of Oblivion, love that. the ending is very sudden and doesn't feel like an ending. this is an interesting one. there's some intentional lo-fi techniques used that work in the bounds of the piece but individually are pretty weird - lots of intentionally atonal or overtone-heavy cluster pitches used, 6/8 instead of a 4-based time signature, tons of filtering to remove highs on purpose...and then the crazy bass response. i think that this is right on the border for me. i rarely use conditional but i think that fits here, as there really needs to be a filter on the low end before it'd be functional. that's a quick change though, the export will take longer than the configuration. CONDITIONAL edit 6/15: i've been informed this track can't be loaded in its original form. i still want the filter on the low end - i feel we could do that in post and it wouldn't be bad? - but not enough to hold this back still. YES

that's a fun intro. i really like the repetitive synth initially, and the ongoing shifts to the filter and release on it. as more stuff is added in, i think MW's right - it just doesn't really progress anywhere. there's a ton of interesting stuff going on everywhere - the sweeps, the heavy stereo separation, the ongoing vocal noodling - this all does a nice job keeping it active, but it doesn't feel like it progresses. every time there's a natural breakpoint for something to change (1:44 and 2:30ish's build), there's not really a functional change to the track, it's just more of the same. i found the guitar that comes in at 2:35 to sound really non-idiomatic and strange. the changes at 3:28ish are nice, but too little too late. it's still the same voice, repeating synth, and drums as the beginning. we're at four minutes of cinematic slams - it's just too repetitive here. i love the arrangement and the liberty taken, but i'm done with it at about 2-2.25 minutes. finding new ways to keep it fresh (a new repeated tone instead of the synth? mix up the drums? lean away from vox and into the other ethnic concepts more?) would help a ton. NO

this is already NO'd based on 3N at this point, so i won't do a full commentary, but rather just talk about the harmonic content. although there is a TON of lows from the various keys that is not good, it's mega mud city even if there's no mud in space. my one comment overall is going to be that you can make a sparse, spare soundscape that evokes the deep nothingness of space without cutting it down to two instruments and an echo pad and 65x too much reverb. there's a lot more that could be done in here both in terms of synthesis and in terms of countermelodic content and sfx to keep it interesting without just repeating it twice and slapping a major chord on the end. space is simultaneously empty and enormously full of otherworldly things that we can't comprehend. i get that you're going for mass effect galaxy map feel, but there really does need to be more here. i actually like what the instruments are being played (although it's hard to hear everything over the mega sustain), but intentional simplicity in a track is actually pretty complicated usually. i'd encourage you to experiment more. re: harmonies, much of what could be called weirdness that i'm hearing is a result of long-sustain stuff that has a lot of overtones. the stuff kris is talking about didn't sound 'wrong' on first listen. at least part of it though maybe is because it's in g dorian (key of F, sounds like it has a flat 3, normal 6, flat 7). dorian has some odd chords, not the least of which is a major IV (normally in minor, which dorian feels like, iv is flat) and a flat ii (in minor, ii is diminished and often used in fully diminished form with a vii as the root, or as a major chord with a flat vii in melodic minor, both are used in dominant fashion and dorian ii isn't). so i think it's because you're expecting to hear minor stuff and you're hearing dorian, and it feels weird. those weird chords are used in odd inversions too which doesn't help, it's unsupported and so it's hard for your ear to sort in the short time it hears it. there aren't many Es in this piece to wake you up to that it's not minor either, but that's not a problem, just not ideal. so i don't think there's anything wrong about the harmonic content specifically.

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