prophetik music   Judges ⚖️

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

something like 6db headroom if you let one spot clip a touch. just so consistently a problem. the orchestration is lush and rich as expected. agree with chimps that the clarinet countermelody is just so beautifully woven in. i found the original bridges to be fine - both attempt to at least keep the feeling of the original work, and the first at least uses the same chord structure. i agree that there's minimal arrangement done in the notes here, but i felt that the timbral variations for what carried the melody, harmony, and supporting parts all mixed up enough to feel ok. i do think the ending is not great and the manual fade on the flute sustain really stands out in a bad way after such a transparent and clear arrangement. from a mastering perspective, besides the issue with the headroom, this is a pretty clear and open arrangement so there's little issue with the soundscape or EQ. as a whole she did a nice job avoiding the potential problem points with high winds too. i think there's definitely enough here for a positive vote. YES

oh man, the initial hit is so good. real plini/arch echo sound right off the bat, i love it. echoing others - there's zero real arrangement here. the adaptations are real nice and i'd love to hear them all by themselves, honestly - but here at OCR we need a lot more than just a bunch of covers strung together by key and theme. which is unfortunate, because i love the sound! you've got a real fun tone throughout and i like the performance a lot. sorry mang. if you did half the tracks and wove them together, i'd be all over this. as it is right now, i can't say that it meets submission guidelines. NO

fun source. i agree that it's present throughout, and also agree that there's a lot more which could have been done with it for most of this track. it's essentially a lot of recap of the original with some more creative sections near the end (which are much needed by that point). i'll echo nuts and say that most of the sound design is either a bit vanilla or just plain sounds not great in the mix. some examples are: that saw pad at 1:31, which is so loud it crushes everything else while simultaneously not sounding like anything the distorted clap at 2:02, which sounds really dull and then persists for the next several minutes the distorted strings at 2:27, which are a cool idea but just are too grating to be real leads without being distracting (the hard panning for a melodic line is a 100% no-no as well) the left-ear nails-on-chalkboard at 3:23 is...nails on a chalkboard. just so unpleasant. there's more but that's a good representative sampling of at least the first few major sections. tyson's inclusion is a fun break for sure. i liked the funky feel of this section too (although still just couldn't stand those highly-distorted melodic synths), and it was a nice way to build for the melodic recap at 4:05. as a whole, the track feels really low/mid heavy, and near the end continues to just get louder and less balanced until 5:13 or so. some extra attention to mastering throughout would balanced the volume so that so much of the track isn't much quieter than the ending. some additional attention to the synth choices would also do wonders. NO

this has some really nice touches. i really liked the initial presentation of the theme, followed immediately by a nice dropoff at 1:04. i definitely agree that there's some robotic performances here (particularly in the marcato vins and trumpets throughout) but as a whole it's fun to listen to. i also really like the constant attention to dynamics. i would have liked it a bit more if you'd used dynamics within the instrument groupings rather than just layering instruments for an orchestral crescendo, but like i said before, it's fun and works. additionally, the solo voice part is a nice touch and does a good job adding contrast to the ensemble scoring throughout. the build into 2:55 and subsequent section of higher-energy music is a real payoff. i really enjoyed the superhero-movie vibe i got there. the really slow attack of your horns comes out a bit there, but you do a nice job hiding it by sitting on sustains as much as possible. as a whole, i really found the arrangement to be a solid reinterpretation without going too different from the source. no issues there. easy vote! YES

hey, this is a fun take! i like the idea for sure. i need to agree with the other judges however that the track just simply doesn't sound realistic at all. spacing and balance aside, the brass is velocitized strangely and written in a very unrealistic manner. there's no room for breathing, and the lead trumpet often goes too high and stays there for too long. essentially the entire section from 1:21 through 1:26 and 1:33 through 1:44 is just not possible by most lead trumpet players. maybe one of those riffs total, but that extended section is too much. the bass also sounds really, really fake since it's so repetitive and there's no variance there in the rhythm or articulation. overall, though, the track's got a ton of energy, which is fun. something that'd turn it up another notch, besides what i've mentioned so far, would be to give the drums some more love to mix it up a bit. beyond that, cleaning up the mastering would help a lot. the "Falcon Punch" line also clips to hell and back and needs to be scaled back quite a bit before it'd fit. you've got a great idea here! i think some additional attention to the realism of the entire package would do wonders to what comes out on the other side. NO

just rubber-stamping this one. it's a sound upgrade with essentially no arrangement. it really does sounds great! but it doesn't meet our criteria unfortunately. NO

really fun original. it feels so alive. 5.1db headroom =( boy, the first statement of the melody is real fun. i love the lightness of the arrangement, and i love your continued attention to orchestral percussion (which no one uses enough!). the string swell under the flute at :30 or so is just a delightful transition. the harp (i believe? it's pretty metallic) is brighter and lacking room sound which is weird, but it is better later when it goes farther down the instrument. things get a little questionable around 1:20. there's something in the background (i can't tell if it's an oboe or a soprano sax) that has some crazy vibrato on it, causing it to have some really weird pitch tendencies. the men's choir is silly as MW said - it's not close to sounding real, and the significant jumps in volume that randomly occur just make it more obvious. the chord walk at 1:57 isn't wrong per se, but it sounds so strange (due to emphasizing the 1 and 5 vs. the 3/7, i think?) that it may as well have been. the part at 2:05 is also silly in that it's creative and fun and interesting writing! and it's stuck being 'sung' by a robo-choir voice instead of something that i actually wanted to hear. it completely eclipses the interesting counterpoint going on around it. things get back to normal after that around 2:15ish, and it's a pretty clear recap of the first section without being the same. i liked the handoff between picc, flute, and clarinet, but still didn't care for the clumsy men's choir doing the chords. the change to using the marimba and bass clarinet to carry the melodic content and harmony was real nice, but it definitely gets muddy here as there's a lot going on in the same range. 2:57 definitely sounded wrong until i realized it's a borrowed chord that's just voiced real poorly so you can't hear what's what in the middle of the mush. after that clears up real nice however, and it goes back to the more nuanced body of the beginning. the overall writing here is really nice, but the bass clarinet kinda honks over it and took me out of the mood almost immediately. that's a timbral issue, not a volume one. the rest of the ending was solid here. overall, i really loved the concept of the piece, but there was a few parts like the male choir and some of the live performances that just totally stuck out. correcting those missteps from an arrangement perspective and applying a bit of light compression to make the track more consistent from a volume standpoint will really improve the overall product. as it is, though, this doesn't meet the bar. NO

i heard the inspiration of the two songs you mentioned right away. i think you did a nice job adapting the original to this kinda-newagey jazz style. i really appreciated the attention paid to dynamics in each instrument, and additionally in how you let each instrument have their own place in the track. i do feel that it's a bit loud at times (the bass and drums are well-done but sometimes seem too loud compared to other instruments or parts), but overall i thought that you really nailed the vibe of the track well. this is an easy vote. YES

what a great original track. never heard it before. the background you gave as well is real nice. as for source: 0:00-1:08 or so: arpeggiated form of the chords in the opening, say around 0:16 or so of the youtube 1:08 synth stabs: EP at about 0:23 EP at 1:14: sounds like the original arpeggio reversed 1:34: the changes to the arpeggio appear to follow the actual chord progression slowly represented from 1:26-2:35ish (this isn't a formal analysis of it) i'd also note that you don't really have content until 0:05 (before that's too quiet for normal speakers), and it's essentially done at 2:52. so, out of 2:47 worth of content, roughly 1:08 is a clear depiction of harmonic content, and another 1:39 is a much less clear depiction of similar harmonic content. it's arguable if the last 60% can be considered actual melodic material, so i'd say that from a source perspective, there's not enough here. this is a unique case though in that you mentioned that this is a reduction of a much longer work. personally - i'd love to hear the entire 8m thing, along with a breakdown of what's where to make sure i'm not missing anything! i think that'd be a much better listening experience. this is frankly too short for what you're trying to accomplish. now, from a musical perspective, this is a fascinating evocation of the harshness of a winter landscape, represented by what i feel is the first part as an allegory for the blinding light that permeates such snowscapes and the second part as a reference to the shifting deepness of glaciers and ice floes (which resound with low, arresting cracks and grinding sounds constantly). recital notes aside, i think this is a fascinating work that'd be real fun to have in full in the community. i think it'd be divisive and generate a lot of discussion, and i think anyone that's heard anything by reich would find it fascinating as well. there's a ton of recognized examples of like music out there by really big-name composers and i feel that this absolutely has enough material to classify as similar. for our purposes, though, there's just not enough here of the source to make it fit. give me my 50% and i'll happily bang the drum for this having a place on this site. NO

i appreciate the artist's attention to events surrounding the game. i'd also encourage them to recognize and separate the art that was created from the actions of the creator. i went through this with lostprophets years ago when their lead singer went to jail for some particularly heinous crimes, and ultimately decided that i was willing and able to separate the created from the creator. this might be partially due to my classical background (goodness, wagner's even got a part of his wiki entry devoted to his anti-semitism), but ultimately i am not willing to draw the line from material to actions. i recognize fully that others don't feel like this, but (to borrow a popular phrase) cancelling something because the creator did bad things - or even if the material contained that! - hides that, rather than recognizes that it was something that happened, and that we changed and moved on from it. in an attempt to not get into the crazy amount of drama that surrounds the entire situation, i choose to see holowka as a sad reminder and warning at the importance and seriousness of mental illness and mental abuse, not as someone to be hidden, forgotten, or sanctioned. vilify him if you will, but don't vilify it. bardicknowledge has a lot of good things to say about this (why he still teaches 'cancelled' composers in his game music class, for example). /opinion right off the first minute or two, there's a great ear for tension and release shown in the strings. i really like the integration of the electronic vs. 'acoustic' instrumentation, as well. your writeup really helps me understand what you're going for, and i do feel like you did a great job capturing that. i can't help but wonder what some of this would sound like with the attention of someone with more orchestra part-writing chops - your writing is beautiful but admittedly fairly tutti throughout (sounds like patches of string ensembles vs. unique parts). i appreciate your willingness to get into some funky chords to help convey what you're going for. 5:02 and 5:06 stood out to me as being really well-executed. your combinations of synth and orchestra parts are real fun later on too - like 6:17, which is superb despite essentially being like four lines going on total. i agree that the balance here gets a little out of whack. i'd say that's the only time i really had an issue with that. if i wanted to complain about anything specific - i'd say that overall the song is actually more cheery (to steal your word) than i expected based on the subject matter and what i've heard about the game. i have never played it, but your track really consistently feels very uplifting and forward-focused, which is a real trick to do with an 8+-minute track. overall i think this is superb. and, to inject my earlier opinion again - we need stuff like this in the community. we need music that generates discussion and drives attention to both great, genre-defining, generational composers, and to the people we don't ever want to deify or lift up (or even meet). hiding them only encourages the narrative that broken people deserve to be hidden for being broken, which is likely a part of why what happened happened. i can't accept or encourage that. the composer clearly had serious issues and did stuff that's unconscionable, but it was out of that troubled mind that made some music that inspired and moved people. those can both be true statements, and we don't have to hide from that. as a community, we can do our part in spotlighting both the beautiful music and in turn the truly sad outcome of the situation. we have a voice.

this starts off sounding like the original track was from a mega man game. right off the bat, you can hear the vision you had for this, and it's fun! you did the same thing as a background for nearly two minutes, though. the 7/8 section was really fun from a technical perspective and a welcome break, but it definitely is feeling samey by the 2-minute mark. i dug the solo for sure, but would have loved to hear more flexibility with the articulations (you used some, but there's a lot more room to mix it up so it's not note salad!) and with the envelope filter. live synth solos usually are going nuts on the x/y knob and it adds a lot of character to what's otherwise a fairly static sound. excellent work using extensions around 1:38 - you had a ton of room to keep doing it, too! don't shy away from the crunchy notes, even in the melodic recaps, since that's what this kind of electro fusion sound lives on. the breakdown at 2:00 is welcome and needed, and introducing another theme is a great idea. it's a good contrast, too - it's a very rhythmic and downbeat-oriented option. MW, what you're hearing is just the quintal harmony on the melody line. the chords themselves are fine, and the melody is just paired fifths nearly the whole way through that part. it sounds weird but is consistent with this style (fusion) because those strange-sounding notes are extensions up the chord tree. most of them are ninths, which sounds odd when unsupported by a 7th and also on the top of the chord, but there's nothing technically wrong with them. i think it adds a great quirky sound to the middle section that helps distinguish it. also there's precedence: they used it back at 0:50 as well. i'd argue that the thinner-sounding soundscape works throughout due to the style shift. the original's more this noisy jazz/acoustic rock hybrid, and it relies on that fat piano sound to carry most of the presence since the drums are splats. fusion is notoriously more wide in range, and so the brighter, more treble-heavy instruments carry that sound well i think. i didn't feel it was too empty. if anything it's too busy in a few places (right at 3:35 for example). i do agree that the 3:35 lead is fun, and weird, and works there but doesn't later since it's kind of blatty. when you used it like a synth horn section back at 1:07, you used it more idiomatically, and that was ok. at 4:23ish, it's not as carefully used. i liked the ABA format overall, and i thought that the soloing and humanization that was done was enough to distinguish it enough on the arrangement front. i think it sounds pretty good too. YES

i remember this one from the album. i believe simultaneously that i thought this was a fun listen and that it had some real problems in the mastering department, and MW hit them on the head. even i think it's cluttered, and i think it's way too long as well. that lead at 2:42 is so surprising because there's a lot of pretty interesting sounds that i've heard up to this point, and then you bring in something that sounds like the actual VST didn't load, and double down on it at 3:09. it just is so much louder than everything else, and it demolishes some really fun sound design behind it. i think that this needs to be a few minutes shorter, and it needs to have some of the mid-level noise removed and the rest slotted in better so it doesn't sound so muddled. some simple updates and this will be a much more cohesive and coordinated track. NO

right off the bat, i noticed that there's quite a bit of headroom on this track. the glitches and electronics are fun, but they're much louder than everything else and cause the overall track's balance to be thrown off. a compression pass would really help this without requiring significant changes to the silly synths you're experimenting with. from a scoring and implementation perspective, there's a lot of really interesting instrument choices - purposefully, i think - and they make for some interesting soundscapes throughout. i'd say that i think your samples are really holding you back here - you've got a really cool cinematic harpsichord (it's almost a cimbalom sound which is really a clever choice here), and the cinematic toms, some fun phased electronics, and a ton of orchestral pad samples that seem to be from an orchestral hits pack. the pad strings have such a long swell that they really preclude use in any upbeat track like this, and while the pizz are fun and sound good, the constantly-repeated horn rips and the really not-great trumpet lead pull down what could be pretty fun. some simple humanization on the trumpet - adding in some spaces where a player'd breath, for example - really would help a lot. from an arrangement perspective, this is a pretty safe arrangement. you're essentially restating the original tracks a few times with different instrumentation. i would want to see a lot more creativity applied to the melody - maybe passing it around, some variation to the notes or rhythms, something to make it yours! - before i'd say that it's enough. beyond that, the synths that are fun early on are just constantly reused without volumization, in dramatically different dynamic situations, until they're irritating. lastly, the drum kit never changes, and doesn't sound great to begin with, so it also becomes something i'm not a fan of. from an execution standpoint, your arpeggiating synth keeps going after the last horn rip, which seems like an oversight. you'd want to have some automation to silence that channel at the end to avoid that. overall this is a great first pass! i might sound like i really don't like it, but i think there's some really fun soundscapes here that need some more touchup to make them really solid before i'd want to pass it. NO

what a fun track! i disagree that there's dragging - the variations in the backgrounds (1:01 where it widens, and the various dropouts) do more than enough to carry the very well-done soloing over the top. i'd argue that if this was a rock track with a guitar lead and no electronics, or a jazz track with a straightforward accompaniment, we'd not really comment on the background more than "eh, it's a bit bland". like larry said, the lead is just so fun and does a great job of exploring the melody via polyphony and riffs that it more than handles a straightforward background. i agree that there's not much going on aside from the melody, but the mid-range bloops that are in there either filling in the melody's gaps or appearing in pad form are more than enough for me given the consistency of polyphony in the lead. it's definitely bright mastering, but the bass has quite a bit of beef on it. i agree that it's overcompressed but it doesn't get in the way, and it's not ugly. i think this is a good pass. YES

the addition of classic battle mode allayed the one real fear i had about this release. i'm not preordering it, but i'm certainly willing to pay full price after it's out if the reviews aren't a mess.

oh man, i played this game so many times! the entire soundtrack is dope. and the game came with a limited edition card in it! that meowth was great for scraping clean an opponent's bench of injured pokes. the book on this one is pretty straightforward. the mastering is really clean (i wouldn't have minded a touch more compression, but that's me). the recording is really well-done, and is very clean and light - almost too much so, the lack of a pad or something in the middle to maintain the chords makes it feel pretty hollow throughout. the performance is note for note solid - but, that's the rub, in that there' essentially no arrangement here. it's a cover. the guitar parts are recorded to be exactly as the melody was in the original (even the harmony parts), and there's no altered chords, rhythms, or anything that could be called arrangement in there. the blues riffs were nice, and the vox parts at the end were cute, but realistically this is a cover, nothing more. i expected a lot more arrangement from the high-flying description. i love the track, but it doesn't fit the arrangement criteria even a little unfortunately. this is a great cover, but we can't accept covers at OCR. playing with some altered chords, mixing up the rhythms to make the melody more your own, or adding some new moving voices behind the melody would really transform this a lot and add a ton of interest. right now, though, this can't pass. NO

for context for other judges, this is when yuna reaches the calm lands and sees where her father defeated sin before. she lays down and takes in the scene, and steels her resolve to continue on, having made her decision to sacrifice herself when the time came. this is a beautiful rendition. i found your choice to use the tritone harmonies in the intro and outro intriguing, reinforcing the eerieness/wrongness that pervades a lot of FFX's plot once you know what's going on. your initial presentation of the melody is simple yet effective, and the consistent arpeggios remind me of a breeze flowing over the calm lands in this section. the harmonized melody at about 0:53 was real nice. 1:17 was a nice contrast to the initial melodic content, and the flourish at 1:35 was beautifully done. 1:54's reprise of the melody was nice, albeit a bit off in that you rushed some through this section. 2:29's ending is really nicely handled, with beautiful dynamics and a nice recapitulation of the intro. from a mastering perspective, i heard some pumping at 0:59, 1:10, and the section at 1:29, but it was minimal. beyond that, i really liked the warmth of the piano tone. this one's pretty easy. there's some rushing in the presentation, but as a whole it's a short-yet-sweet journey back to a really memorable part of the game. YES