prophetik music

i didn't realize it'd been this long since i've posted here about this, but i'm still doing this. so if you need a new machine to work from home with, or you want to use your upcoming stimulus/ubi check to play some phat games, let me know and i'll get you hooked up. i have more time than what used to be normal thanks to working from home, so i still am actively doing this.

what an interesting take on it. it actually sounds pretty good right off the bat too. it's definitely immediately recognizable and the synthesis done shows a ton of patience and care taken to simulate traditional dynamics. the section breaks between the throbbing bass and the smoother orchestral parts are great as well and really mix it up. the ending - simulating open strings on a cello - is a real cool stylistic adaptation and does a good job as punctuation at the end. i can hear some of the white noise that MW is not digging, but i actually don't mind it at all - it gives it a body that i think it wouldn't have if there wasn't anything in that range. i also didn't think the leads were too covered up - they're pretty noticeable every time they're going. there's one or two points where you could say they're quieter than they could be but as a whole i thought it sounded real nice. if there's a complaint here at all, it's that the arrangement is really conservative, but i think there's enough to make it by. i fully expected you to blow the doors off with some huge chorus at the end but it just stayed as this intense, brooding, driving feel, which is real fun considering how kratos is in this game compared to past games in the series. i feel like this is a pretty evocative synthesized version of the original. i like it. YES

this is a pretty spare original, but you've done quite a bit with less before so i'm interested to see where this goes. the intro seemed long, but i liked the additive nature of approaching such a simple source 'tune'. the first lush chord at about 0:35 was really a fun change, and the continued use of chromaticism in the background was a nice approach to a melody that featured tritones. the rhythmic section from 1:24 through maybe 1:34 was a little odd at first, but it really fleshed into the best part of the track, which is the flute flourish into solo over the top. as a whole i liked the realization that you did. from an arrangement perspective, there's not a ton of changes made to the original (if at all), but the additive stuff you brought in did a nice job keeping it interesting. from a technical perspective, the track is pretty muddy (there's a lot of fast low runs in the bass) and the track needs compression to help some of the quieter parts stand up to the eventual louder sections of additive arrangement. it also has ~15s of silence at the end. as a whole i do think this is over the bar. i'd love a better-mastered version but i think i say that about all of your tracks. the arrangement is organic and approachable and there aren't glaring mastering issues holding it back. trim the silence at the end and this one's ready to rock. YES (conditional on removing silence) edit: silence removed, this is a YES

the first 24s are a straight copy of the original. after that, the real track actually starts, and it's a pretty simple but competent realization of the track in a bigbeat/chill style, and then it alternates between those a few more times for the rest of the track. i'm not going to address straight rips, but they're less than 50% so it's not officially against the rules. the bigbeat sections are very simple in that they do adapt the melodic and harmonic content into a stylistically consistent feel, but there really isn't any adaptation or movement in the piece other than that. so i'd say that the arrangement isn't enough - there's no progression or direction other than making the backing strings into a stutter synth and a bit more. the lack of an ending is also a negative mark here - there's no adaptation to making it a track that ends as opposed to being a looping track. in terms of the mastering, i thought it was a little bass-heavy, but that might be a personal thought. as a whole i thought it was good enough. it pumps a little when the kick isn't playing, but it's competent enough to pass muster without being overly tiresome or heavy-feeling. if you spend more time making the arrangement yours and not just transcribing the original, this would be a lot more solid of a track. right now there isn't enough arrangement to call it a remix. NO

up front - the mastering on this one is not great. there's a desperate need for compression across the board. so this is a no right off the bat. i don't know quinn well enough to be able to say if they'd be able to hack a conditional for this level of mastering work, so i can't go that route. throughout the first minute or two, there's overall a pretty interesting old-school feeling to the background, which is cool. i liked the brass chirps and the attention paid to volumizing them into having some semblance of performance in them, and chill beat was nice. i wasn't a fan of the bird-chirping synth that came in at 2:08ish at all - it was really jarring and hard to listen to. overall i found the track to be pretty meandering without as much connection to the source's melody as i expected. the mastering as well is really, really poor throughout...it sounds like this was mastered on a set of headphones that doesn't have any highs and boosts lows naturally, because there's essentially no bottom and 100x more highs than anyone wants. some compression and a volumization pass is desperately needed as well as it's not really something that i can listen to again right now. NO

yeah, i don't think this worked as well as you'd hoped. it feels pretty sparse in a bad way - like a backing track for initial recording that'll get fleshed out later after some live stuff gets layered in. the synths are generic in a bad way and the mastering feels pretty flat. this feels like a step back from the attention and care taken with a lot of your previous arrangements. you've shown an ear for unique sound design in the past, which is great, and could absolutely be applied here to flesh this out more. there's just very little body to this track as it is, and not much to recommend it on subsequent listens. give it some more character and fill in the track more, and this will be on the right track. NO

hey, there's a lot of nuance here. i really appreciate the attention paid to the blurbs that come in and out (the slide guitar, wind chimes, etc), and to the marimba lead's variance of rolls. the countermelodies are nice and there is a ton of little things that come together to make this nice. i didn't mind the background being pretty static considering that it's short. i wouldn't have minded a bit less seabirds but that's more personal than anything. i agree that it can't be posted in this state - it's really more than 5db headroom, that's exclusively due to the bump at 2:30 due to resonance, it really should be more like 7 or 8db boost. the ending's fadeout in the lead is weird as well. boost it and maybe adjust the ending and we're there. YES (conditional) edit 3/26/2020: these fixes are good by me. updating my vote to YES.

more musique concrete? yes please! yet another great concept here. this is definitely an interesting and niche application but i think it actually turned out being something really interesting. i love the chopped tail effects being used, and the layering of sliced piano chords on top of organic piano sustain is really a great contrast. i didn't mind the pink noise being used at all, although my wife found it grating (we have very different listening profiles in terms of genre). from an arrangement perspective, there's definitely enough going on here to make it clear (once i knew the source) what the melodic content was. i'd argue that the original melody is at most four repetitions of the initial chord cluster, and this track has that in spades, so from a content perspective it's enough. the arrangement comes from all the ways that hudak glitches and goofs with time and pitch. again, more than enough. as someone who didn't mind the high freqs, i'd argue that this is a superb realization of a very simple original track in a style we don't do enough of. if anything, i'd love to have seen more weirdness - more pitch shifts, more temporal shifts, more clicky stuff - as similar tracks in classical music often have way, way more experimentation. this is very tame as a result, but still very accessible. a definite yes from me. YES

the mastering on this one's pretty not-close overall. even for the style everything is super mashed - it's so over-compressed that the instrument pumping is almost painful. this is a shame because i actually think it's a pretty fun take. i am usually not a huge fan of SFX in remixes but they work in here. i also like the grit overall, but there's just so much mulch being made of most of the synths (especially at ~3:00) that it's hard to really hear what's going on. i like this arrangement a lot and i like the concept a lot. the mastering is not good and needs a significant rework. if you do that this is an easy vote. NO

surprise, i love this original track. right off the bat i love the synths you're using. the pad is great, the bass blurps are very evocative, and the electro pizz string is on point. it really got me into the mood. your choice of synths throughout is varied and enjoyable. the arrangement is solid and consistently transformational, so that's easy enough. from a technical perspective, this is overall really solid. my only complaint there is that the descending synth that's used heavily in the last minute or so gets pretty loud compared to the rest of the background (notably at around 3:28), and it takes over the soundscape to the detriment of the melodic content there. overall this is a great representation of letting the source influence the style and arrangement. the driving bassline and synth drums really clearly are derived from the militaristic vibe you get from the Black Waltz and also tie into the overarching theme of synthetic self-identity that vivi struggles with. it's an informed choice to tie these together - great work. YES

i really liked the intro to this. it's a real fun setup to that first hit at 0:42. similarly i really enjoyed the deconstructed drop into 1:35, which really set up the super-digital 90s-esque melody presentation at 1:35. the delayed section at 2:20 was pretty hip too, although i admit i was feeling that the bass was getting a little tired by that point with how present and repetitious it was. bringing the pain back in at 3:05 was a great way to get back into it. i enjoyed the overall use of padding and instrumentation to allow some sections to be huge and others to be still impactful but less so. i thought the ending was fine and i didn't think any part of the arrangement was over-repeated too much (which when you use an aggressive synth to play a repeated arpeggio throughout is a pretty difficult thing to accomplish). my complaint is that it just doesn't sound big, or loud, or powerful. there's little bass response throughout and the mids sound really, really overlayered to the point that nothing sounds big. if you turned everything down by a few dB and then fixed your limiter settings, i think you'd get a much punchier and more powerful-sounding piece. right now it is such a fun concept, and i love the synths you're using, but the mastering makes it all sound really bleh. if you make another mastering pass on this and can make it be punchy without the squashed mids, this is an easy pass. right now it's not there yet. NO

the opening is simple but pretty. there's some clearly non-idiomatic usage of instruments in a few places (the choir synth at 0:45 for example, repeats a few times). another example is the piano at 1:19 that just keeps hammering the same chords without varying velocity. keeping the melody in the flute for over a minute at the beginning is kind of tiring after a while too. the men's choir at 1:55 and 1:56 has some false attacks that sound like mistakes rather than intentional fuzz, as well, and it didn't sound great to begin with. in general, the flute lead's vibrato is exactly the same as the tempo of the piece, which for me at least is really distracting and emphasizes how robotic it was 'performed'. this may be personal though so i'm not counting it against the track. this is a weird one. i agree with MW that it's definitely different from the original while simultaneously being really similar. the realization execution of it is fairly straightforward and won't blow anyone away with the humanization (if anything, it's under-humanized in the leads and keys). i found the arrangement to be quite conservative in that the piece is driven by the same rhythmic concepts and that it really doesn't introduce anything new. the mechanical execution is fairly lacking in that the only dynamics come from adding layers vs. via scoring, and the work's levels reflect this by staying at about -5db until the big swell from 1:15 through 1:40ish, and then dropping down to there again for most of the rest of the piece. a better job of compression would add a lot more verve to the sections that didn't have many instruments playing simultaneously without sacrificing the nice texture that those elements present with right now. one of my standard ways to measure a track is if it's saying something different than the original. it doesn't necessarily need to be 'better', but it has to say something. i don't feel like this track is saying anything new. it's a restatement, but i'd argue the work is less as a result of that restatement rather than more. this needs...anything, really, to make it be it's own track and not the original with some glock and a new lead. a personalized look at the melodic content, some chording alterations to say it in a new way, a significant change to the original's scoring, time or tempo alterations...anything to make it something new, to demonstrate some compositional technique being applied. if this was flawless from a mechanical and realization standpoint, i'd consider it as a borderline, because there are changes here, technically speaking, and the track is a nice listen. i don't think that this is near that yet though. NO

yeah, there's essentially no arrangement here. it's a nice realization but there's nothing really that's real unique or new about this track unfortunately. the performance is great and i liked the unexpected bitcrushing and bloops when they showed up. for using cheap drums, cheap mics, cheap everything, this sounds decent, too, but it's really lacking in highs as MW said. it's real punchy in the lower mids and then not much else anywhere else. the oodles of verb on everything make it hard to discern everything too. ultimately i am gonna need to see more arrangement before i can call it enough there, and i'd also like to see more attention paid to mastering. an ending would help too. NO edit for posterity: so i listened to this one again, and i'm still on the side of it not having enough arrangement. i approached the arrangement more from the structure and content side and not from the performance perspective, so that may be a failing on my side of not encapsulating the whole thing. but i don't feel that the combination of the mastering and what i still think is a conservative arrangement at best makes it over the bar. it's closer than i may have made it look like, but i'm going to leave this vote as-is.

i also really like the idea of this mashup. they definitely fit together nicely. there's some interesting soundscape design here too - some of the backing samples (the high strings at 1:49 are sublime in how subtle they are) are real nice too. the initial presentation of the background was interesting too - instantly recognizable. and then nothing happened for over three minutes. it's a loop of that initial D#m -> E pattern for the entire track with a fadeout at the end. there's a few specific moments that are particularly good, like the moving cello at 2:47, but as a whole it's so static. there's a number of technical issues - most of the time your leads are too slow to attack and are behind the beat, for example - but also there's just not really much actual arrangement going on. i'd argue there's less than a minute of arrangement here. this track desperately needs meat to it - the initial loop is fine to get it moving, but change and stress and resolution is what draws people into music. there's just not any of that here. NO

rubber-stamping this one. the soundscape's pretty thin and just doesn't have any body. i agree that it's all over the place in terms of mastering. this style desperately needs some serious compression to make sense. the sample quality is overall really not great either. i liked the builds overall but agree they weren't high enough nor was the drop low enough to make them work. i did like the vox effects and thought they were fun. this probably could have gotten posted in 2002, but it's nowhere near where it needs to be for where the bar is now. NO

yeah. i'm going to agree with MW here. there's some really nice quality-of-life arrangement changes here. for example, in the beginning, the harp's nice, shifting some of the shifting chords to flute is good scoring, and some of the interspersed little added bars are nice at breaking up what's honestly a fairly tedious (in a creepy way) source. but there's so much wasted potential. 1:12 is your opportunity to totally go off the rails arrangement-wise and do something totally inspired and different from the (essentially) cover you've done to this point, and it features the most compelling part of the entire song - a biting half-step suspension that essentially defines the entire track's linear movement and is the one thing that listeners walk away from the original remembering - and you...just sorta do the same thing you do on every track, which is to continue to add flute, harp, and glock. there's no originality here, it's a formula being dropped on it without attention to the game track. the second half starting at 1:45 tries to get outside of the box some more, but there's still not really anything new going on. the solo arpeggios over sustained string chords have a bit of schindler's list / fiddler on the roof to them, but they're there and gone again too quick to really clarify a connection. 2:46 has a nice orchestral crescendo into a pretty charming little moment at 3:07, but it's just too little too late for this one, i think. i probably sound like i hate it, and i don't. the sustains have nice dynamic contrast, there's some really beautiful moments of orchestration, and the overall arc of the work isn't bad. there's just not enough attention here to the actual original. this feels like something that got churned out quickly because you wanted to do a track for this original. i feel like you could change the melody on this one to any of a dozen other FF tracks and get the same effect, and that's a cardinal sin in my book. especially for a soundtrack with as much character and heart as this one has. if you choose to revisit this one, get into the song more and find ways to weave your work into it. don't just paint on a layer of decent samples on top and drizzle on some glock and harp and call it done. between the low headroom and the lack of care of the arrangement, this is just not exhibiting a finished, polished vibe. NO

this is ~90 seconds of music scraped over 3:30 of bread. the other judges nailed it in that it's too static and doesn't go anywhere throughout. there's a lot of potential to get creative here, but slowing down the tempo and then essentially playing through the track in a straight line makes for a pretty generic-sounding track. if you're not going to go with more synth design - which is fine, i liked the lofi style actually! - you need to generate and hold interest exclusively with what those simple sounds are playing. i don't think there's enough of that here. from the production side of the house, it desperately needs a compressor (feels like the balance is done exclusively through levels that are set at the beginning and never change). beyond that, the snare's way too loud throughout, and the melody's never loud enough. everything could be playing really interesting parts but it gets kinda mashed together since there's not much stereo separation that i noticed and everything's kinda in the same register. ultimately this is fun in that it's got a good groove to it. it needs some more work to clean it up - the best funky tracks are the ones that sound busy but really aren't. cut out a bit of the extra, tone back the snare, and find ways to emphasize the lead, and this is in a good place. NO

i agree that it's way too quiet. there's a ton of headroom that needs to get corrected before it goes out. a limiter on some of the tiny peaks would help a lot. i definitely think that the levels are kinda out of whack. the accordion is real loud when it comes in, and at 1:25ish when the picc is added and the accordion is just doing oom-pas, it's way louder than anything. i can't even hear the guitar anymore at that point. it's pretty clear that everything was put in with volume and not adjusted for balance in each section. from an arrangement perspective, i thought it was fairly straightforward. there's enough to call it an arrangement, but i'd say that it isn't gaining any points in my mind for how creative it was. performance-wise, i wasn't a fan of the bass, which felt too marcato for the style. there was just too much space between the notes. i enjoyed the flute and picc tones, so that was nice. the guitar felt a little out of tune on a few chords in the beginning and at the end as well. i have a lot of nitpicks on this one, and i'd say that it does add up to being not quite there yet. the mastering needs another pass both from a limiter/compressor standpoint and from a volumization standpoint. the arrangement is fine, but i feel that the bass and out-of-tune guitar really dragged the overall performance down too. this one's pretty close but i'm leaning on the side of not there yet. NO

what a great track this is. i don't think it'll ever be anyone's favorite remix, but it's absolutely solid in that it accomplishes what it set out to do in a really interesting and unique way. one of the things that musique concrete like this can struggle with is connecting with the listener. it's easy to just be totally noise and not truly make something that's listenable and able to be related to. this does a great job of using a motif (the opening rhythmic pattern) to give the listener something to hold onto throughout the track while still going a bunch of different places and exploring a bunch of different ideas. really creative work here. i love it! YES

radical dreamers is one of my favorite tunes in all of gaming music. there's a few arrangement missteps like MW mentioned, notably at 2:03 (that chord should be major in both the original and in standard theory due to what precedes it). the section that follows is complex enough that some stuff gets messy - 2:24, 2:38, 2:45 jumped out at me. but the arrangement is dope and the great synth work and especially the percussion is just so great that i don't even care. so many great little things - the fake key change, the dynamic arc of the track, and the way you take such a timeless/sacred-goat melody amd totally chop it up in a great way with new themes are all fantastic. from a mastering side i thought it sounds great. there's one or two times where i felt that it was too complex and everything lost clarity due to how much was going on, but i'd rather have that than it being super empty honestly. this is a fantastic track. great work timaeus! YES

this is a pretty easy vote. i would have liked to hear a bit more arrangement throughout as there isn't much humanization on the use of the themes, but there's a really clear and stark picture painted clearly by this arrangement. MW nailed it when he said that it's a great balance between the ambiance of the BotW source combined with the melodic content of the SS track. the light use of synths really makes this work. nice job using them so subtly without allowing them to take over. YES

the music for that opening section is really interesting. i love how they're combining themes and the "estuans interius" lyrics with such a different style than you usually hear it.

knowing that this is Factory makes me like it even more. the arrangement is superb. you do a great job of creating a swinging, lilting feel that constantly rolls towards the downbeat of the next measure - a critical aspect of waltzes that is surprisingly difficult to do in practice when you get into the weeds. i particularly liked the timbral changes at 2:00 - going from winds to sustains to a brass band was great. the samples are nowhere near where we'd normally expect this kind of thing to be, but it's honestly not bad at all as a whole. yeah, we sorta expect robson to make everything sound like a real orchestra, but he did a bang-up job with what he used. the nuance in articulation and making the chromatic runs in the melody work on such a variety of instruments both are great examples of this. i could get real nitpicky with your instrumentation in places and some of the choices of notation, but it doesn't really change my opinion on the piece. this definitely is good enough to be on the front page. YES

the other guys said what i think about this already. it's way heavy in the right ear, which nuts already pointed out, and that's enough for a reject right there unfortunately. beyond that, while i liked the tone and attention to the lead synth, it was definitely way too heavy throughout. the background synths are monstly the same throughout and also pretty blah, the bass is real generic and sounds like it's in a tin can, and the drums have zero body. the mastering is very mid-heavy as well. i really actually liked the lead synth's humanization and what it was saying, and i didn't mind the arrangement. it needs so much more work in terms of improving overall sound quality though. there's just not enough there to consider this passable. NO

nearly 5db headroom. there's some fun instrumentation in this one. i found that most of the performances by instruments that weren't live were pretty robotic - the marimba was the main culprit here, there's just no variation on attacks, but the sustained cello (?) was also pretty bland. beyond that, i also thought it had some nice interplay in the parts until around 3:35, like MW thought. at that point the harpsichord was really starting to bother me as well, but the change in the context was welcome and really a great contrast to the first several minutes. as a whole, though, the arrangement was actually real solid i thought. it doesn't ever actually repeat the same thing from what i heard, and i'm comfortable saying that the variations are enough to get it over the bar. from a mastering perspective, aside from the headroom, i thought it was fairly nuanced in the volumization across the board, and i liked the soundscape. the chuff pad could have easily blown everything away with all that white noise but it never was too much. i think this one does enough. i'll agree that it's not perfect and it's probably too long for the amount of content it has, but overall i think it definitely clears the bar. YES