prophetik music

most cities are totally hosed right now when it comes to postage delivery. it'll get there probably =)

this presents pretty quickly, like jive said. we're through several layers of intro and to the melody by under 40 seconds into the song. i'd encourage you to pace yourself a bit more - you said a lot right up front, and maybe either spreading that out a bit more or moving some of those parts to later in the song would let the track breathe a bit from a musical content perspective. separately, i also agree that overall everything's got too much lows on it, and it means that a lot of content is getting layered over instead of having its own window to speak clearly. i personally really like overly-complex EDM, and in general prefer more stuff vs less, but this is messy for most of the time when everything's playing together. 2:17 is a good example - i can hear at least six distinct lines, and there's pieces of more, and they're all in the same frequency windows. this needs an EQ pass and probably also some reflection on if you can pull out some of the extras, allowing what's left to speak clearer and be more impactful. right now it's not there yet. NO

what a fun original track! right away there's an interesting approach taken in your arrangement, lots of lush orchestra and bells. the heavy swell on the string sustains is real off-putting, but the rest of the scoring is pretty if simple. the transition at 1:00 is nice since it gives the mix a bit of a different feel to let it breathe. the choice of using some leading tones in the piano at 1:24 is likely what jive's talking about, and i agree it sounds kinda funky because of how sustains work, but it's not the worst. i'd want it to have been prepped in other instruments ahead of time to avoid that. speaking of funky notes, there's some weird notes in the low brass at 2:01, and then more noticeably at 2:07 and at 2:10 (those are straight-up wrong notes). the ending is a good recap and ends with some more delicate piano work. overall i agree with jive that production is ok, and that there isn't much arrangement aside from realizing the work in an orchestral ensemble (not to take away from that). it's quite mechanical and the instruments aren't great, notably the leads sound pretty low-quality, but the concept is nicely handled. i don't think this is on the level of passing but it's a great start. adding in more dynamics (that aren't just more or less instruments), some more humanization on the leads especially, and then giving it a little personalization in terms of chord progressions, melodic variance, more harmonies - this would all benefit the final version. even some of that would probably be enough to get this to pass. NO

remixers: prophetik music, PhrygianFingers name: The Slums of Traverse game: kingdom hearts source: 'traverse town' artist comments: zach and i recorded this track over christmas break in 2007 according to my file dates. we were goofing around with some music software one evening and he started playing the traverse theme in a minor key. i recognized it and pulled out my sax, and we recorded it in one take. due to some software limitations at the time, the keyboard midi data was in reason 3 (!!!), and we exported that and dropped the wav of my sax into FL and mastered it there. we had been meaning to come back to it for years and it just never became a thing. a little while later, i got married and moved away, and we fell out of touch. imagine my surprise when i happened across this arrangement on a fan tumblr account last year with tens of thousands of plays, and tons of comments about how much they enjoyed it! that brought it back into the front of my memory, and i went looking for the files in my (far too large) collection of old hard drives but couldn't find it. time passed and another forum-goer who i used to interact with a bunch 10+ years ago messaged to say hello, and ask what happened to this track. well, i went looking again, and this time i found my original files. i asked around for someone to help extract the midi data, and then did some crunching in the keyboard part to fix some sour notes and odd articulations. and here we are! probably not the first 13-year remix in the history of the site, but still a fun journey. from a mechanical standpoint, this uses komplete for the keyboards, some melodyne 6 studio to fix a few notes in the sax part, and FL 20 as the DAW. i tried to keep as much of the ensemble feel as possible in the keys, which allows for some lilt in the tempo without quantizing out what made the piano part so organic and fun. looking forward to hearing what people think. source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDizdSZB2Gw

wow. what a great celebration of skill and quality musicianship. this is a superb effort. this checks all my boxes. the transitions are delicately handled, the realizations are scaled well for the ensemble, the performances are excellent, and the orchestration is nuanced and enjoyable. there's really some excellently-voiced parts in here, probably my favorite is the realization of "crossing those hills", which uses ongoing movement in the supporting parts alongside floating choral sustains to simulate motion - which is a great example of story influencing the musical setting, since this music is used on the main map in FF9. if i'm going to complain about anything besides the little pops that emunator mentioned, it's that we don't sit anywhere long enough to really dig into it, and by extension the ending is a little abrupt for a 7:45 track. but these are nitpicks. i do think that the pops should be fixed (should be easy, either automate some silence there or delete the broken waveform bit by removing the last ms or so on those tracks), but this is a superlative work that i can't wait to see on the site. CONDITIONAL on removal of pops. update 6/7 - based on LT's comments, i will change this to a YES. i do want the pops at least silenced if possible before shipping but it's not enough to prevent it from being posted IMO.

oh, great source choice, and great genre choice for the remix. i really love the vibe throughout this track. it's got the high-energy presentation combined with chilled synths that you'd expect from liquid dnb, and faseeh does a great job mixing in the guitar elements without losing that grounding. there's source throughout and it's well-handled each time it comes up. i agree with emunator that a higher-compression mix wouldn't have been a bad thing, but overall this is just a rubber stamp for a great track. rubber stamp go. nice work. YES

oh, what a fun intro. guitars sound real fun on the intro as well. i agree with jive that the drums are pretty punchy/overcompressed, but i can hear what they're doing without too much trouble. i do agree that the bass parts are pretty much sub only and you're not getting much attack throughout, and the result is that it's a bit muddy in the full band parts. vox parts sound great. if i'm pointing out anything it's that the vox parts at the very end could use some tuning from the center of the note - the lower parts sound slightly flat compared to her singing up higher (honestly beautiful tone on those high parts, it's so difficult to keep head voice clear like that while trying to keep it straight-tone). the 'wrong note' that is being called out isn't wrong at all, it's just later in the original track. the major 6 that sounds 'wrong' (comes up at 1:07 as well as other places) is the section from 0:57-1:04 in the source track. the song fits better into a dorian than a minor, given that there's a ton of g naturals and a heavy emphasis on b throughout, plus the E major chords used on cadences sound real borrowed next to the G major and e minors used elsewhere. anyways, lots of nerd talk to say that an F# in this song is in keeping with the original and it's not wrong. after several listen-throughs i'm not hearing any crunchy notes. this is a great track. there's definitely some mastering tweaks that could make it better but i think this is well-handled and approachable. excellent work. YES

the intro does a nice job setting up the feel. i liked the switch between duple and triple meter, and the increasing tempo was well handled. the break at 1:12 is well-timed, and the main body of the piece that happens right after is great. i liked the solo section as well, as it didn't carry on too long and then immediately got back to the melodic content. the ending section at 2:55 was also fun and a good way to help the track wrap. from a mastering perspective, this sounds fine. it's a bit bass-heavy and it's hard to hear the drums in some areas but overall it does a good job conveying what you're going for. this is a solid track. nice work. YES

what a thoroughly wretched original track, at least as represented in the youtube link. that wiggle synth is terrible. this starts with some interesting strings work, which while creatively applied unfortunately don't mask that the samples aren't suited for the part writing. once everything comes in it's a little more covered up which is good. once the entire group comes in at 1:14, it's a fun sound, but it's also dramatically louder (ie. lacking compression throughout) and pretty muddy, especially on the fast runs. i like what you're trying to do here a lot, but it's failing on execution. the power of that section needs to come from good scoring and part-writing and timbral expansion, not just because you quadrupled the volume of what was there. there's a break back to the opening scoring at 2:00 that emphasizes how dramatic the dynamic shift you're demonstrating is. 2:26 features a recap and expansion of the last part of your prior orchestral section, and a fairly well-handled ending. from an arrangement standpoint, this is a fun listen that falls a bit short on the implementation of your part-writing specifically. you've got very dynamic and score-oriented samples, and so they're very vibrant but they're just not suited for the speed and flexibility of the parts that you're asking for, and they're suffering a bit from that. something that'd help is finding a patch that's got less vibrato on sustained notes (notably in your vin 1 part), and then relying less on wall of volume for your more intense parts and more on instrument timbre to drive home the excitement. a compressor will help significantly with this, and it may help level the opening sections where your arpeggiated solo violin switches to stepwise motion where it sounds so different right now. this is fun but not there. this may require better samples before it does what you want, but i think it's worth the effort as there's a dynamic and interesting piece under the plodding attacks right now. NO

this is very quiet outside of a single spike - at least room for 4db increase, if not more. the kalimba's got a nice sound. once the rest of the band comes in, this has a very Stardew Valley sound to it - very organic, very present. i agree that the kalimba's pretty repetitive but it's placed in the soundscape well so it's not obnoxious. the arrangement does a nice job expanding on the melody throughout. the ending's pretty lackluster, which is unfortunate when the main body of the piece is actually pretty clever in its simplicity. my only other complaint would be that some of the guitar performance is stiff, but as a whole it's well-played and feels nice. this is certainly not perfect, as rexy said, but you nailed the vibe and made a short and sweet track that is fun to listen to. i think this is over the bar. YES

hey, this is a great genre adaptation for this track. i always felt this was kind of a ballad feel, and the switching it to downtempo r'n'b is a fun idea. right off the bat i noticed the mix of wet and dry that rexy mentioned. it's really noticeable, especially since you've done a nice job with replicating a lot of the common genre staples like the super-echo snap. it extends elsewhere too - this style really needs a clearly defined soundscape with a lot more verb presence throughout to match up to the vocal set. i did like the vocals but they're too loud when they come in, as well. beyond that, there's heavy use of panning (simply too much) - a great example is the strings in the left ear at 2:17, they're just too wide to the point that they gave me an earache very quickly. right after that is the pretty fun arp that you bring in, which sounds great but emphasizes some wrong notes in the backing pads for the last two chords, at 2:43.2 and 2:43.8 - sounds like the sustain is hanging into the next chord. beyond that, there's a lot of copy-paste here - at least twice, where the vocal sections happen - and then a really, really long tail that's the expected parabolic curve but is a straight fade for nearly 30 seconds (should probably be closer to 10, with the top and bottom of that fade being much slower than the middle). i probably sound like i hate it, and that's not true at all. i actually really dig this style and think you did a great job making the base level of what should be a pretty fun remix! i think right now it needs a bunch of updates in the soundscape in terms of effecting, volumization, and layering, and i think the arrangement is like ~1:45 of music scraped over 3:45 of bread. this definitely needs a clear B section that stands up in terms of content and quality to the pretty fun A section with your singer, and separately needs some attention paid to the repeated sections so they're not just restatements of the same ideas. always do one less repeat than you think you need, to bring the listener back again to hear it again =) soundscape and arrangement issues are holding this back. i think this could really benefit from some workshopping, and then it'll be one i'd love to hear again for round 2. NO

beautiful opening, and the very warm piano tone really fits the feel. the presentation of the melody at 0:42 is fairly straightforward, but flows well and is voiced well. i agree with rexy that this is a very organic performance - there's a lot of fluctuations of tempo, but it works well to keep it feeling very real. the big dynamic jump at 1:51 was sudden but well-played. this entire section until 2:33 is a bit more hammering and intense, and it wasn't really the same feel as the beginning. the subsequent marcato section was fun but had a lot of timing issues to my ears. not unenjoyable, but definitely noticeable. the quick shift to quieter playing was a nice transition as well. 3:05 definitely feels like a recap, and does a nice job going through the melodic content again before the extended ending/outro. the last five or six seconds of playing are really well-handled. there's a lot of extra silence at the end that can be trimmed. from a mastering perspective, this is much more dynamic than we usually get for submissions, but the instrumental medium supports it well so i didn't mind. i thought the piano sounded great throughout, and felt very well-performed and well-supported. this is a pretty easy vote. nice work as always. YES

i didn't vote on the first decision. let's take a listen here. intro is really great. i love the opening riff on the violin. initial presentation of the band was just drums and bass, and the bass felt pretty top-heavy and had an odd tone. brass coming in around 0:59 was rough, but it sounded better when everything was in and playing. the sax lead was pretty well humanized which was nice, although it was a bit quiet. the addition of the rhythm guitar in the right ear for the second play-through of the melody was nice, although this section felt lopsided since there was more in the right than left. 2:15's dropout was nice, really cinematic. drums felt on autopilot when they came in again, but the fill into the next section was nice (the weird pad falloff wasn't as good). guitar solo was really fun, loved the extended drum fill under it. the melody recaps around 3:17ish, and putting the guitar in replacing the sax was a good touch. repeating the melody a second time here was definitely extending into "too many repeats" territory. the outro was unique for sure - i expected the strings to come back - but it showcased some fun writing (despite the parallel fourths which sounded funky). overall the arrangement is fun when the band is all there, and the mastering is clean enough to be able to hear what's going on throughout. i didn't hear a problem with 3:04 or 4:05 - those both actually sound very rhythmic and are clearly supposed to be starting off the downbeat. i don't think this mix is perfect by any means, but it's a fun ride throughout. i think this does enough to get over the bar. nice work to get a complex mix like this through on try number 2 =) YES

i figured it out =) you're getting one on mondayish and one in late dec/early jan thanks to amazon shipping. but if you average it it'll be near christmas! or something =)

sent mine out! it's arriving on monday and also early january, lol...sometimes amazon shipping is remarkably weird.

underappreciated track on the ost here. looking forward to seeing how it's handled. really interesting opening that goes to a very meaty presentation of the full band sound. i agree with emunator that the lead guitar sounds just not good. a lead synth would indeed have sounded a lot better. that said, the band sound is big, and i particularly like the presence and tone of the bass guitar throughout. there's an interesting not-prog feel to the band at 0:41 for example that i really liked. the lead break at 1:17 was well-timed and felt good. i do like the addition of orchestral and choral elements to fill it out, especially seeing as how those elements are used on the entire original's soundtrack. the subsequent harpsichord break is nice too. that wraps us to an ending presentation of the theme and a pretty intense ending. overall i like the band sound and i think the arrangement is fun without being too repetitive. i don't like the lead, but i don't think that is bad enough to prevent a post with this one. nice work. YES

oh, i love this. great initial presentation, great feel at 0:35ish when the faster synth gets in there and starts noodling. the tempo and space you are demonstrating in the bass and drums have a great feel and really give some weight to the melodic content, which has always felt like such a great fit for amarant and his warrior-like personality. keeping the soundscape fairly simple without a ton of random things blurping their way into the mix is also great, since it lets the listener really focus on the great synth work you've got going on here. the change at 2:26 was perfectly timed and is a great shift to give the track a different feel - kind of a nu-jazz/fusion feel for a moment - then shifts back to the original feel around 3:00. another big shift at 3:45 gives way to the first real significant bass movement of the track, which is a great way to wrap it in a meaningful and fresh way. the last few seconds are kind of a let-down since the ending is abrupt, but overall that's the only mild complaint i have about this. great work. YES

super-quiet master outside of one spot. this is comically quiet for at least 50% of the track. i can't see this being acceptable for any digital media source without compression being applied. this issue manifests right away with how much louder the ocarina is from everything else. ocarina's naturally such a quiet instrument that it sounds strange being so much louder than all these other instruments with a bigger timbre. ocarina playing is superbly handled. excellent work. the tight ensemble voicing is really nice for that. volumization aside, the setting and spare nature of the soundscape is great as expected. the hard panning of the piano around 0:55 is a little disconcerting (i didn't notice it before that), but that may just be a headphone thing. i like the cluster pads in the background around 1:20, and the continued use of sparkling little blurbs in the backing instruments at seemingly random times is really nice from an arrangement perspective. the song is essentially done at 3:30, if not before, and the subsequent material doesn't really seem to serve a specific purpose within the scope of the arrangement. to be honest, i found separating the (interesting!) part at 3:00 from the main body of the arrangement to be suboptimal if not counterintuitive to the soundscape you were creating, so i'm really not a fan of the entire ending from about 2:55 onward. i don't consider it a dealbreaker by itself, but coupled with what sounds like a bad recording punch-in at 0:26 and the really striking lack of compression, i'm pretty torn about it as well. it's probably over the bar as-is but leaves so much on the table. a yes from me would require a volumization either way, though, so i'll call this a conditional on fixing the pop and applying compression, and hope that the ending gets a shrink gun pointed at it before it's posted. CONDITIONAL (on compression add / fixing pop on re-render)

i'm not familiar with this game or the ost. the original track has a fun feel to it. intro is interesting. i like the guitar tone. once everything comes in, though, the drums are way, way, way too loud. i can't hear hardly anything over them. that's a shame because what's going on seems kinda cool! but there's just no way to hear anything consistently. i agree with jive that overall everything's very low-heavy, and that's bogging down the sections that aren't getting dominated by the drums. this might be a mixing issue - do you use headphones? if so you may want to try several different models, and maybe some live speakers, to get a better feel for what the actual mixdown feels like. from an arrangement perspective, rexy's right that this is really straightforward to the detriment of the overall package. it's essentially two times through and an outro. OCR requires transformative arrangement for a posted mix - which, in this case, i think you could easily get with some flexibility on the chord progression in the second half, or maybe some more arrangement from a melodic perspective. a bit of original content could easily bring this across that line. overall this is essentially me agreeing with the previous judges. the drums are too loud, the lows are way too hot, and the arrangement is not as extensive as i'd need to accommodate for those other two things. some more attention and this will easily get posted. NO

looking forward to it! thanks for coordinating this, rexy =)

oh, this is a nice one. great soundscape, great adaptation of a sparse source into a more fleshed-out arrangement. notably, i really appreciated how you played with space in your backing instruments - for example, the backing chords at around 1:15 have a lot of space, and then you sustained them more at 1:29 as you go into what i'd call the chorus of this tune. great variation that let you keep a similar instrumentation while feeling fresh. there's a wrong note in the lead at 1:51ish - you're arpegiating an FMaj chord instead the a minor that's there, and the f is functioning as a b6 instead of the root that it'd have been with a different bass note. not a huge deal, just sounded weird. the breakdown at 2:15 was solid, and did a nice job lending some dynamic to the track while feeding into the half-time thing at 2:27. i thought this was also well done, and feeds into the build at 2:58 (which could have been a bit more original, but it was well-handled). 3:12's change-up to the melodic content was a fun callback to the original's chippy sound palate, but it kinda falls off a clif at 1:38 on the melody side, and that was an odd transition. the rest of the outro is fine, though, and it ends abruptly but not uncomfortably. overall this is a track with way more on the positive side than the negative. there's a great soundscape, a fun arrangement, and a few nitpicks if anything. nice work. YES

rexy's right that this doesn't have enough source. which is a shame, a little more source representation would have been enough to easily pass this. beyond that, here's my thoughts. initial presentation of the track is great. i love the triplet/french edm feel, and this is a good representation of it. i felt the first 55s or so were well paced, and didn't mind the progression to the first drop at 1:25. i do feel that it needed melodic content from the original track throughout this opening section - or, to be more precise, i need more thematic content in that early section. 1:37 is a good call out to the original but there needed to be a lot more content earlier on, which is definitely doable without sacrificing your nice opening additive progression. the smooth string synths at 1:25 were nice. the borrowed chords at about 1:40 sounded a bit funky because of their long tail, but it was nice, and moved into the mono synth arpeggio section. i liked this as a contrast but it was about twice as long as it probably should have been. bringing in the sweep and the backing synths at 2:17 were great, and a great build into 2:41. easily the best part of the mix. if anything i wanted this to bang a little harder, but the nature of this song's odd chord progression worked well with the beat you had. i also appreciated that you stuck with few sustain synths through this section and saved them for the end. that was a nice design choice. 3:17's sustained melody was a nice payoff for the end of the track. the outro isn't unexpected and was well-handled, with a smooth letdown. overall, this is a fun track that i enjoyed. my issue, like i said at the beginning, is that less than half of this is eminently tied to the original. there needs to be more representation of the source. i get that you don't want to get really complex with the chords since it's edm, but there's a ton of room to represent the melody and a countermelody without making the track sound one-dimensional. it'd be nice, for example, to hear some melody in the first minute and a half - even chunks of it, snippets here and there - to get a clearer picture of what track this will be ultimately. don't be disappointed by a 3N vote here. this is on the cusp. fix the lack of source and it's an easy pass for me. great work overall. NO

i am gonna rubber-stamp this one. i agree with rexy that there's not enough content here. the track itself is fun but there needs to be more representation of the original in order to meet our criteria. rexy gave a great breakdown on ideas for that, so i won't go into that here. from a production standpoint, the drums feel pretty thin. the kick doesn't have a lot of presence and doesn't cary anything, the cymbals don't have quite enough highs and aren't crisp enough to highlight the work you're doing with them, and the snare is really snappy and doesn't carry separate from the hats. beyond that, i felt your bass was pretty light as well - it's hard to hear throughout. i'm guessing you had some issues notching it in there next to the kick since they're in similar ranges. more snap on the kick will help make it clearer without requiring it to dominate that frequency range. aside from that, i thought the guitar sounded really great and it was just a touch dull for my tastes. i'd love to hear more highs on that as well to brighten it up. from a synthesis perspective, i like a lot of what you were doing, the arpeggiated line during the guitar solo for example was fun. i think overall i have similar complaints to the drums - they're pretty muddy since they're all in the same freq range. i'd try to notch them out a bit more, and that'll help a lot. as a side note, every time that echoed chippy synth comes in (it's the higher-pitched one at 0:13), i notice that it's not in the same key as everything else. it's ending on a non-chord tone which is distracting and sounds weird, which is disappointing because it's a fun sound. i'd take a look at the arpeggiator there and ensure it's hitting a chord tone so it doesn't sound weird. overall i liked the track but it needs some mastering love for sure. great first try though. NO

this is overall quiet and doesn't appear to have much compression applied. the intro is interesting - not my bag but i like the idea you're going for. once the track really picks up at 0:44, it's definitely nailing the r'n'b vibe you were going for. this is a pretty minimal arrangement up through 1:55, with some flourishes over a very close adaptation of the main track. the lead at 1:57 is fun if a bit loud for the background, and is well-played with some fun flips throughout. i don't mind the heavy emphasis on new content as the track moves on, since the original has so little melodic content. i felt the progression to that was pretty logical. from a timestamp perspective, at least half the song is using original content, so i don't have a problem there. overall, i think this is a fun track that accomplishes what it was going for. i thought the leads throughout were a bit loud but it doesn't detract from the quality of the overall track. we'll need to trim the tail but other than that this one is good by me. YES

hey ponks! i will pm you.