Sam Ascher-Weiss

Bitrate aside, there's nothing in this mix that warrants it being twelve minutes long or for that matter being called a concerto. This draaaaaaaaaaaaags. Like Liontamer, I'm not going to go on about my minor gripes because the only hope for this song would come from it being a hell of alot shorter. How about three or four minutes? That way you could bring up the bitrate and then maybe we could talk a little bit more about the arrangement. All I can say is.... think "concerto for piano and ORCHESTRA" it seems to me at the moment you're not that capable of orchestral writing. I suggest you get some more practice in that department before bringing a soloist to the table. nO

3:30 was cool for a second there. I'm glad you said progressive in your e-mail cause that way when I condemn the lack of creativity in this song I can't be accused of genre prejudice. Mellow stuff around 2:00 was nice. Strongest point in this mix according to ME is rhythimcally stuttered notes starting at 2:23 but by then my brian is just SCREAMING for some stimulation so a little goes a long way*. That about sums it on up. Ain't nothin progressive about this whole mess. From your comments though it seems that you're pretty satisfied with your work here, and that's a real accomplishment. Seriously keep that mind set. I know alot of great musicians who hate their work. THEY'VE GOT NOTHING ON YOU MENTALLY! No *I realize I accidentally wrote brian instead of brain so it appears as though I am referring to how my "life partner's" appetite is easily satisfied by my inferior equipment. My bad!

Good for you! You hardly had to use any snare drums yet the groove was tight regardless! Otherwise I'm just gonna echo Larry and Harmony.... it's too repetitive. What's there is great especially the almost no snare drum thing. I gotta try that, it makes everything feel so loose. 2:30 was such a relief when it finally happened as was the new percussion at 2:45. It's so great how you unexpectedly leave certain beats unspoken for in the drums which makes my body want to fill in those holes with movement. I can't keep still. Lovely! Try going for maybe three minutes instead of five next time and come up with at least three distinct musical ideas in those three minutes. If you do that then unless the first two ideas are under thirty seconds long, the song will be incapable of repeating too much. Just a suggestion, there are other ways to keep things from being too repetitive but that one's the easiest. NO

I LOVE THE WAY THIS SOUNDS.... alot of it anyway! The source material is definitely in here and even though it's not here that often, other than the flute solo every thing melodic that happens in this mix is from the source allowing it to play a central role. That is GOOD and BAD! It's good cause it pays homage to the source by making it important and it's bad because your star player is only in a couple scenes! I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that everything from 0:00 to 2:33 works. DON'T CHANGE ANY OF THAT! I don't care about the "fakeness" of the brass. Sure it could sound better but that's not a make-or-brake thing for me. At 2:33 when the string enters and the section repeats all of a sudden it becomes clear: NOTHING IS HAPPENING! If the source melody had re-entered there you could have continued to develop it over that groove. When the source comes back at 2:50 it's played by some incredibly weak brass. By this point you've totally lost me. That melody needs to come to the front and the low level of the brass + the continued string presence make that impossible here. After that, the melody makes its exit again [end of cameo]. See, when this happened in the first 2:30, I felt like you were wetting my appetite but by this point my patience has run out. SOLUTION: Keep everything until 2:30 and then incorporate the melody more strongly into everything that follows with more attention payed to consistency. Up to that point you've been changing the feel every other second, you've got to let it settle down at some point. Either that or this needs much more action to distract me from the constant changes and that's not the direction I see this mix is heading in. There are some great ideas in this thing. You need to unleash it's full potential! NO(Resubmit)

Little variety from start to finish, piano was a nice touch. Lots of delay/reverb/release making things slushy a good portion of the time. This would be okay if it wasn't happening during all 3:20 of the Mix. Cool Original, sounds much better in Eb. You should have left it there! I'm glad you chose such an interesting source-tune. I suggest you start again with a different song and for an excercise try arranging whatever you choose at 75% of the tempo of the source. That will FORCE you to come up with more arrangement ideas otherwise the song will drag. DO IT! NO

Noriko Matsueda Style! Lots and Lots of layers but so well organized that more = more instead of less! Everthing fits together like jigsaw music! It's important to modify the groove every now and again like at 1:26. Nobody outstays their welcome in this here ReMix. 2:22 section's extreme redundancy is rectified by the guest lecturer who shows up there. Absolutely solid production. SOLID YES MARRIAGE IS GOOD!

As everyone else stated this needs more interpretation. The muddyness you were talking about like at 0:45 comes from having chords overlap that don't go well together A / G# / G... all major triads, all half steps apart and all bleeding into eachother, YIKES! In the "cover" portions you certianly brought up the energy level from the original which is what you wanted to do so *high five*. Like Gray said the emptier section toward the end was nice and had a different texture from the rest of the piece. This could have started at around 2:00 and maybe developed into something else. NO

There are no significant flaws in this song and it accomplishes everything it sets out to. I'm with Zyko on the Bass drop thing... good stuff! Otherwise sleepy time music for me. YeS

JAFFA CREE!

Some good ideas here. 1:21 the partial melody with the slow moving upward portamento sound in the background followed by the four kick drums is a perfect set up! What follows is a by the book rendition of the melody [with the chords Bb and F replaced by Bb- and F- somewhat inappropriately] played by a plain lead with a simple bass line and some slippery-dippery wet string type pads. The texture remains unchanged until 3:00. During the intermittent period there's a whole bunch of original material, first with another plain lead and then just the damp string stuff playing some boring chords accompanied by barely audible brass-ish instruments arpeggiating Bb minor triads. All this stuff is like dead air with only one mention of half of the source thus far. Everything is far too cloudy for the repitition to pass as adherence to a genre. I can't tell if 3:00 is supposed to be humorous. There are analog drums playing a cliché hip hop beat with the second half of the source melody in a harspichord.... SAY WHAT?? It sounds like a joke and if that's what you intended then bravo on your success. It does create a nice opening for the section from 1:21 to break in at 3:40 so I'll give you that! Now the original ensemble reunites to play their version of the part of the source you just hip-hop-ified. After that the drenched strings finish us off with a bunch of bland chords. HURRAY! This is way too long for what it is. The switch to the hip hop feel at 3:00 came late and it could have lasted longer before returning to the earlier feel. Your best bet for improving this song is to aim for more genre authentic stuff like at 1:21. Either that or go the opposite route and add more stuff like 3:00 all over the place to add some more flavor making the song into a quirkfest! N0

Pulsewidth Modulation is I don't like here! Triplet Eb,F,Eb first at 0:50 is out of sync and sloppy with. 1:20 Pwithmod + pitchbend = OUCH when all by itself. Repitition too much and not genre excuse. Things call too much attention for claim to be dance club genre. Repitition in that setting for hypnotic effect hence "trance" moniker but here repitition is for annoyance. 2:14 sixteenth notes chords high point in song especially Eb major triad but before long triplets from 0:50 return for crowded too much. More things like 2:14 to help hide overwhelmingly abrasive sounding pwidthmod. If choose to stay with repetitive then more to keep things flowing needs. Right now not quite! NO

The interaction between the instruments in this piece is $priceless$. Sudden key changes/transitions like at 0:42, 0:54, 2:23, 2:59, 3:07 are absolutely beautifull. I can understand why some people might think they sound lazy, but I can assure you that there's a whole world of well respected music where transitions are far more abrubt than they are here. I love this kind of stuff. There are so many wonderfull things in this song. I can't stop listening to it and each time I do I gain a deeper apreciation for the subtlety and detail. Some of the harmonies like the Gb at 2:18 sound deliberate to me and I have to objection to them. They remind me of Shostakovich in that, each instrument has a very specific logic unto itself so even when they ocassionally clash, the order is so firmly established that it doesn't feel like a mistake. I think I've made it clear that sound quality takes a back seat to creativity in my book and despite the relatively poor quality of the samples here, the choice of instruments is excellent. The texture is unique and it works so well, with the panning used to perfection, that I don't give a HOOT about the lack of realism. Finally the sudden ending works in a piece like this because there was no promise earlier of developement that wasn't fulfilled. The whole song was like a series of sketches so when the final one came to a conclusion there was no need for any sort of climactic ending. YES

YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SO GOOOOOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I LOVE IT!

Funny Intro! [THIS IS THE BEGINNING!] Let me start by saying what I did like. You start the melody by playing different variations on the first motif. This is always a great thing to do when dealing with a short source and you did a great job with that. Then at 1:18 you have your own melody that outlines the chords and begins with a motif from the original. I think that also works very well. The drums and bass line are simple but they are there pretty much to help push things along. At 1:34 you repeat your custom melody this time with a choral sample on top. This also works great! The notes you chose don't get in the way of the melody and they help fill things out. At this point you could have brought another motif from later in the song and started developing that one like you did the first, but instead you have a delayed lead play the full original melody. You have the drums drop out as if to announce its presents but after all that it only plays once before getting totally buried in everything else. From here on things start to go down hill. At 2:24 your modified version of the first motif returns but only briefly. At 2:36 the guitar plays the original melody which spells out A7 while your other instruments form A-7b5 [half diminished]. This is a very ugly sound and it happens several other times. It is my belief that this was not intentional and happened as a result of you putting the original melody over an accompinament part more suited for your variation of the melody. I love the effects on the vocals at 2:43 but they are seriously out of tune.... if you can't hear that though there's nothing I could say that would help you with it other than advising you not to use any vocals. From 3:30 on Liontamer was correct in his assertion that everything became too cluttered. It feels like a bunch of ideas from earlier in the song have just been layered on top of eachother and that A7 plus A half diminished thing keeps happening. At 4:20 things start to clear up and when the vocals are layered here they actually don't sound that off until they sing the high G, F#. The brass sample was a good choice as any textural change by this point was more than welcome. The ending works well enough but not before one of those A7 plus A half diminished things happens again. That type of stuff REALLY bothers me but maybe other people won't be as irked by it so it might not matter. We'll see what the other judges say about that. TIME FO' SOME SUGGESTIONS From Larry's comments about you going to Japan, I would guess that you're probably having a much more succesfull career than I am and therefore you're probably not interested in my advice.... but just incase you are, here goes! Up to 2:00 everything was going great. Things weren't too crowded and the simple walking octave pattern in the bass along with the repetitive drums helped keep things moving. At that point, rather than getting BIGGER you could have just changed things. The bass could have held notes while the drum pattern became more complex and at that point the brass from 4:20 could have come in. You could have half-timed the drums and had the bass play more intricate patterns here. I'm just saying that your solution to things starting to feel boring was to just add more on top of everything. There are other options. If you are hell bent on layering then make sure that your instruments don't step on eachother toes. In your sequencer solo two tracks at a time. Do this with every possible pair and make sure that they all sound good together. That might seem like alot but eventually it becomes more and more intuitive and it won't require that you do that every time. ONLY FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS IF YOU AGREE WITH MY COMPLAINTS ABOUT YOUR REMIX!!! If you like it fine the way it is now then I'm not going to try to persuade you to change your tastes. Anyway my vote is NO

This was waaaaaaaay too similar to the original and using quiet slow attack strings to the play the melody at 0:45 makes it very difficult to hear. The snare drum on 2 and 4 is so aggressive and constant that it starts to really get on my nerves, but I think that's probably more of a personal preference. Obviously this needs more arrangement of the source and no quiet slow attack strings playing the melody. NO

THOU SHALT NOT PASTE!!! Far too much repitition especially when the section at the beggining and the end are almost identical with subtle percusive differences and the melody being doubled an octave above. That piano is ugly and Liontamer was quite apt in saying it should never under any circumstances be left exposed like it was from 0:12-0:33 and 1:59-2:10. The piano also plays the EXACT SAME FIGURE over and over. Add this to the fact that the drums almost never change and you get an incredibly mechanical and tiresome arrangement given the fact that by the end we have probably heard that piano parts upward of 50 times. I'd like to state for the record that I loved the section from 1:48 to 2:00 but it's almost as if the music suspected that I was enjoying myself and decided "I must put an end to his fun" so right after my favorite section.... the bare-naked piano returns. More fullness like from 1:48 would be a good place to start interms of trying to fix this AND COVER UP THAT PIANO BUDDY! NO

Wah Wah stuff at 3:00 and 3:49 doubling melody is precious. I had no problems with the mixing in that last section. All the instruments were playing a different interpretation of the same melody so I think they were meant to sort of blend into eachother and it works! Bass and percussion hold down the air tight groove which allow other things to float on top like the pan flutes and melodic guitar parts. Sections flow seamlessly into one another. A good example is at 1:57 when the pan flute is the star player. At 2:05 the guitar shows up to comment and then assumes control at 2:12 but before we have a chance to miss the momentum created by the pan flute, the drums come in at 2:16 to compensate. That's how transitions are done!!!! This type of stuff is all over the place. I have no objections so I got's to say YES

I like that square too and the staccatto is extra hot since the 4th note in the sequence is held down which makes the other stacatto notes stand out even mo'. Let it be known that I despise the piano. When it doubles another instrument, like at 2:26, it has this magical ability to make anything it's playing with sound like a little girly-man. It covers up any rough edges and hides all of the uniquity and flavor since it has so many clearly audible overtones. This also goes for piano by itself over drums, like at 1:00 when you left it alone with nothing but a quiet bass to baby-sit. This could definitely, along with dynamics, help to explain the lack of "punchiness". Where's the Punch? I NEED PUNCH!! Finally the groove box percussion! It's true this stuff can work I suppose.... but with rhythms like from 0:00 to 0:55, and 1:53 to the end this requires that at least a couple of other instruments honor the "groove" being layed down. This only happens when the "staccato" square comes in which is why that section really stands out. All of a sudden the drums feel they're like part of the unit which strengthens everything else that's happening on top of them. Personally I prefer to have the drums constantly changing and interacting with all the other parts, but the groove box percussion would work much better if you just get your other instruments to help spell out the groove more often instead of just the square. The arrangement has a bell curve feel. The beggining and end are pretty much the same with a middle whose biggest contrast from the rest of the piece is it's simpler drum part. This needs more developement, more varied percussion or other instruments paying more attention to the percussion as it is, and finally either less piano or more grating sounds to counteract it when it's most present. NO

Thanks!!

Substituting I for vi in Frog's theme was an admirable attempt at reharmonization since I'm guessing it's something you've not had that much experience with though it's hard to tell if this was intentional when for the most part during your version of Frog's theme there are nothing but instruments playing/doubling the melody and then the bass. So it's possible that rather than reharmonizing you just felt like putting a D in the bass instead of a B but I'll give you the benefit of the out. The orchestration was incredibly linear from start to finish rarely featuring more than two parts. By parts I don't mean instruments, but rather groups of instruments that are either all doubling eachother or playing 100% parellel harmonies. The orchestral samples are weak which means that leaving the strings exposed from 1:30 to 1:45 is unacceptable. You've gotta keep those bad boys covered up when they're moving around so quickly because you can hear the attack on each note while real strings would sort of glide. The best way to cover that is up to double the strings an octave above with a flute or something while having another string part play a harmony part in the same register that moves half as fast. Right now the orchestration is far to flimsy for me to pass this so that means NO

HELL YEAH!!! I happen to know the source for this very very well and I can tell you that there is plenty of coverage of it in this mix. The original only had two melodies both of which were very short and both of which appear here and have been brilliantly adjusted to fit this HOT 6/4 groove. The cool thing about that is Hamauzu loves this type of 6/4 stuff... the kind that doesn't rely on that West Side story hemiola bull excrement. The vocals are mixed low making the lyrics less understandable but also allowing them to play a more ambient role as Zyko suggested they should. I have no problems with this mix and I have to reiterate that I love the hell out of that 6/4 groove. More people need to use that!! YES

WHAT?????????????????????????????? I'm too much of a rookie to NO OVERRIDE something but I think someone better get on it! The source tune doesn't come in at all until 4:35 and when it does it has little to no interpretation! NO Someone with more seniority please No Override this!

When I heard solid gold I thought the terribly mixed sounds, like the bass being 10 times louder than everything else, were an intentional choice to acomidate the circus-like feel of the melody for that song. I have learned now that this is how you write. Take some really plain analog sounds... have one with some delay play a small portion of the melody for a while over some decent sounding yet very over the top drum loopish stuff After some time has passed, double the melody 4 octaves below with another simple analog sound but make that one way too loud. Layer some corny hip-hop pitch-shifted vocals and you're good to go! Just like with solid gold, any simple melodic figure throughout would have sounded just as good making the source tunes irrelevant. This is not what ReMixing is meant to be. It seems that what you do is just take a song and stick it on your drum and bass assembly line which shows very little respect for the music you choose to remix. Listen to some more ReMixes on this site and learn the true meaning of the word interpretation. NO

That makes me a saaaad panda

Hey Buddy! What on earth is with that A Major Chord?? There's no way that was an intentional dissonance judging from the simplicty of the rest of the piece. The melody over your A Major Chord is "C,B,A,E,D,C,B,A".... There is no good reason for this and right now it sounds pretty awfull since this clearly spells out A Minor [the D and B make it clear that it's not altered or H.W. Diminished]. Your arrangement consists of you playing basically the same strumming pattern over and over through your simplified version of the original chord progression with a totally uninterpreted reproduction of the melody on top. Here is the original progression in green with yours in red: Dminor-Dminor, Aminor/C-Amajor, Bbmaj7-Bbmajor, Gmin7-Gminor taking note that you did nothing to the melody to accomindate switching Aminor/C to Amajor. Notice the difference in complexity? Where there were 7ths you removed them and where the root was not on the bottom you moved it back. There is some incredibly simple melodic improvisation from 2:00 to 2:38 that doesn't even come close to making up for the rest of the arrangement. NO