Nines

Hmm. This is a pretty simple little peice. It doesn't very too much from the original, even in the arrangement of the music. The drums are mushy sounding, and are just a little too basic. Some nice snare fills would fit in nicely, or some hats that weren't just straight 16th notes. Most of the synths are flat and tinny, and lack the movement (automation is your friend. Use it) that is typical with this style. The tempo-change in the middle is a neat idea, but it comes in at entirely the wrong time. Just as the music is starting to pick up, everything sloooows down. This technique can sound good and add a lot of tension/interest to a peice, but it just doesn't work here. I like the accompanying(?) synth line at the beginning, it's got a great texture, and fits into the peice (not too loud, not too high/mid/low freq.). I felt I had to find at least one thing I liked about this peice, so I wasn't completely bashing on it. Frankly, I don't see how this made it past the judges. I just find this mix fairly amaturish and hastily/lazily put together. This peice has plenty of potential, but it sounds very underdeveloped at the moment.

This reminds me a lot of Delerium, at least for the first part (it seems like a lot of you guys' music is reminding me of Bill Leebs work...I guess that's a good thing though). I love the layering of the strings and pads, how they build up on each other and break apart. The drums are subtly varied, and are interesting and well-used, and set a great groove for the peice to ride on. The drums could have been toned down a little, and the panned kick drum kind of got to me (but I have this thing against panned kick drums). The synth that starts up at around 1:40 sounds a little..off, like it has just a little too much attack; but it quickly gets blended into the rest of the music and is hardly noticable after long. The jittery fill on the synth starting at 3:14 seems a little forced, and goes against the grain of the rest of the music. When I first heard it I thought it was an encoding error. It's very nice to listen to, although I kept wanting to hear more things going on in the song, little background ambience things. Nice job overall though. Thumbs up.

I really like the percussion and bass in this one. It reminds me a lot of Front Line Assembly, especially with all the sharp gating effects. The rest of the peice though, seemed a little dull and "blippy" to me. It could have used more depth and dynamics, like the percussion has.

This is probably the most moving peice I've heard come out of OCR (although I can't say I've heard even a fraction of the songs here). I loved the minimalist approach; it seems like too many people try to cram too much sound into their music. Not every song needs drums. Not every song needs a bassline. This is a definate must-hear remix. I greatly anticipate any future contributions by Tamimi. Good job.

Great song! I agree though, this could truely sound great if more work was put into building the instruments; the presets used here just don't cut it. The composition and all that is all great though. And amen to DJP about the whole Fruity thing. It's not that FL is a bad program, or is inferior to other similar programs. You don't have to be a studio production guru to use Fruity, so you get a lot of people making stuff that's...amature, simply because it's user-friendly enough to allow people without a whole lot of skill to create music. That's mostly where Fruity's bad name comes from.

Yeah, that is the Plucked! synth you hear for the harpy bits (not the default settings though). I was originally just using that as a placeholder until I got ahold of a good sample or something to replace it, but that sound blended just right with the rest of the music, I thought, so I kept it.