big giant circles

I just took it. Are we allowed to post our answers? I actually enjoyed the survey actually. Even though all the "What/Who's your favorite ___________?" questions were hard to answer, it was still fun.

I'll give this one a listen in a bit, but just to remind y'all, that he did this using the demo of FL, meaning that conditional YES votes and NO resubmits are going to be like, a total kick in the balls Either hot or cold on this one, y'all. And yeah, man, you gotta save up and buy the program man. 'taint nuttin' else to say...

I like the eeriness of the remix, real mood-setter music. Staying minimal is cool, but I felt like there was probably too much so, considering the tempo, there's a lot of dead space. Not saying you have to throw too much in there to jazz it up or anything, but it's a little bit on the dull side. BTW, just to clarify, I don't mean to say that minimal = dull. Minimal music done right can still be really engaging. I sped the remix up about 3x and it gives a good idea of what I'm talking about. There's just... not much there. The terminal flaw though, is the production coupled with the encoding. You should have rendered at 192kbps, and you DEFINITELY should have normalized. As it is now, I normalized your track, and I'm stuck with all this audio noise from the compression since it's at such a low bitrate. Not a bad submission, I recommend expanding it a little more, then asking someone in the WIP forum or something to clean it up and normalize it to a decent level. NO

You know, on another day I might vote RESUB on this one, but I'll just say that I just sort of let it play, and I found that I enjoyed it well enough. On the technical side, the arrangement and adaptation to 4/4 are pretty decent. I could sit and pick out little quirks that I felt could have been done better, but all in all, I don't suppose they're really enough to make me feel like a definite NO would be appropriate. I will say that while the vocals are aight, they don't really fit, IMO. But whatever, they're not bad either, they're just, unexpected. At any rate, I love the effects, and especially the phased pad. Nice work! YEAH

I want to smash my face into the keyboard. This is awesome. That being said, I think the mixing is really muddy. The guitars especially, it sounds like that loud thumping when your neighbors are listening to metal in an adjoining apartment or something. Parametric EQ2 is telling me that the frequencies between 50k and 200k are being viscously raped. The *booms* from 4:39 - end with all the reverb made my ears go This definitely just needs a bit of a production polish. I'll agree with Vig in that the vox section he mentioned didn't sound right despite the style. Mainly, though, I'd be fine with it if not for all the mud. Otherwise, this is a really solid track. Haven't heard Sixto's but if Andy will vouch for it so strongly, it probably addresses a lot of the concerns I have. [guttural scream]RE-SUB-MIIIIIIT[/guttural scream]

No, I don't.

Cheap Pads

ask him to post a screenshot or video of his project file then. or perhaps make a quick video of yours. *edit* PM'd Wade on the matter.

Arm yourselves, OCRAPS! To the Flame-mobile! But seriously, though. This is a 21-year old dude, blatantly ripping people off. It's one thing if it's just a retarded 14 year old. 21, c'mon, he should know better.

Except for Ice Cap. We'll probably kill you if you submit 10 different remixes of Ice Cap. And by kill you I mean laugh at you.

And (hopefully) you're always getting better too, so sometimes you'll listen to something you did a month ago and be like "Hmm, I thought this sounded pretty good back then but, meh, I dunno now..." That's why you should only keep your very best ideas.

Hey, good luck man!

Well, the natural tendency is to be your own biggest fan. Be willing to distance yourself from your work, and ESPECIALLY be willing to accept that not every single thing you do is golden. If you feel like you have several scattered ideas that are all good, then cherry pick them and put them in the same bowl, but only use your VERY best ideas. Be willing and mature enough to realize that sometimes, you just can't squeeze everything into one track. Typically when people try to do that (squeeze too much in that is), it ends up being detrimental to the track's overall quality; the pace/consistency falters, the flow looses effectiveness, the length plods, etc. That's why it's so important to seek outside opinions. People who are honest, and not going to automatically like your work or give you false/obligatory praise just because it's your work and you like it. Obviously, in the end, everyone's opinion is subjective to their own personal tastes, but at the very least they'll be able to tell you if they think your track works. Spend my $0.02 wisely.

Well the thing is, apparently no one knows who the author was, and likewise, no one is really sure how it was created. And I highly doubt there's any kind of digital watermark for someone to pop up and say "HEY! WE'RE GONNA SUE YOU FOR USING OUR SAMPLE-BASED SOUNDFONT!" I personally wouldn't worry about using it. It's advertised EVERYWHERE as being a free soundfont, so I'd say you should be fine.

C'mon man, quit being a tease.

Star Wars - The Force Unleashed

content doesn't really matter as long as the lyrics are not lame. Lame includes but is not limited to: -Cheesy/stupid (in most cases) -Poorly thought out -Awkward -Vulgur/obscene/profane just for the sake of it -Insulting If you choose to reference the game, that's cool. Doing so or not doing so won't really help your chances of getting the mix accepted. I've personally heard vocal mixes that cover ground anywhere from referencing game plot, to silly nonsense, to repeatedly screaming the f-bomb over and over. Execution is probably more important than knowing exactly what the lyrics are saying. Is the singing in tune? Do the vocals fit? Are they clear, or are they cluttered in the mix? A good rule of thumb is to ask another person you don't know that well in the *real* world what they think of the tune. Just ask them for a general impression. They'll probably be honest with you.

Heh, don't mean to speak for him either, but I had Andy listen to this one at his folks pad when I went up for the Comp Expo, and he did agree with me that the lead violin is super mechanical with the slow attack. East West has keyswitch patches. Use them, my friend.

ditto Well, this is a cool concept, shooting for the live-but-not-live orchestra. I thought the tuning section was pretty nifty, but the dead silence kind of kills the intended effect. Only way that could be pulled off was if there was a gate, and unless I'm mistaken, you typically don't gate an orchestra. Perhaps some steady (very soft) room noises might have helped the *dead* space. Interesting adaptation otherwise. I realize you must have been going for a humanized effect here, and honestly, I've never used Finale, so I'm not familiar with its functionality as a DAW, but from my understanding it's much easier to write music in Finale that is going to be played live later. There's lots of things that could have been automated better. The overall level of reverb is really muddying things up. It also sounds like there's little/no stereo separation between instruments, and since it's all coming form the middle, that doesn't help the muddiness at all. I realize that keeping orchestrations uncluttered is hard to do, but you gotta do it, one way or the other. The partwriting shows promise, there's lots of reliance on counter-melodies etc, but there's also a lot of dissonance, and it feels out of place. Not sure if that was intended or not, but it's not really fitting of the piece, IMHO. Also, the ending is extremely abrupt. Definitely not a bad first submission; you show some promise as a composer, hope you keep at it! Practice makes perfect, hope to hear future submissions, looking forward to seeing what you can do down the road! NO

My bad, I must have misinterpreted the part about fiddling with the guitars to fill out the soundscape. It's coo. Or wait a second, are you trying to find a cheap way to say that this remix needs "another soundscape"?

I don't believe I heard the original submission, so I suppose I'm giving this one a fresh listen. LOVE the glitchy pad right off the bat. Somehow I feel compelled to say something about Omnisphere now, but I wont. Crap, I just did, didn't I? Second impulse is this reminds me a lot of Ziwtra's Blue Shooting Star mix. The drum groove, and all the shimmering, sparkling textures throughout. It's a very lovely piece to tap one's toes to, and it's full of warm fuzziness. I really dig the reverse delay effects, and I actually really enjoyed the chime outro. I agree that the levels are a bit harsh at times, and I'm going to concur that ideally they should be brought down a couple dB before this gets posted. Without opening it up in Soundforge, I think the pad at 2:40 is actually clipping. On the arrangement end, I really like the jazzy, yet laid back vibe that this piece has. This is a really enjoyable track. I can't really think of a better word for it. Fix da volume/clipping. Welcome to the site! YEP

Also, I think this is honestly a bit much to ask for in a "conditional" vote. Rewriting/recording additional guitar work is more of a "NO, resubmit" kind of thing, IMHO. Plus, regarding that section, I'm pretty sure the dropout of instrumentation was intentional to give the track a bit of dynamic contrast. The rest of the soundscape was pretty full, I'd say. I personally don't see the need to require them to have a full soundscape there as well. Just my opinion anyway.

There's no *glitch* in the tempo at 3:06, if you tap the tempo alongside it, you'll hear that it's fine. However, after slowing the tempo down a ton, I think there's a particular snare hit that's about 1/32nd of a beat too late, and it's causing that anomaly that we're all hearing. Not a big deal to me, personally. The production on this one is spot on. It'd be great to get a version without those pops at the very beginning, they're pretty exposed with just the piano. The arrangement is going to be the tricky spot here. I guess I'll need to do a play-by-play here. 0:00 - 1:31 is entirely a cover. It's in a different key, and there's a couple extra measures thrown in for good, well, measure. But otherwise, The melody is practically verbatim. 1:31 - 1:51 brings in some original work. 1:51-2:01 references the intro of the source. 2:01-2:43 continue with the source, but but with a bit more improvisation in the melody. The progression is still identical, though. 2:43-3:06 is very verbatim again, however there is some counter-melodic stuff going on behind the lead synth with the backing lead guitar. 3:06-3:29 is original stuff. 3:29-3:50 tempo slows down, and minus the one reference to the source intro riff again, is all original stuff. All in all, without breaking out the stop watch, I'd say that at least half of the track is just about verbatim melodically. I really think if the progression had been varied up a bit more then the issue probably wouldn't have been brought up. However, despite the melody and the general song progression being as close as they are, there's obviously been some additional compositions done by Andrew and Simon. The drum programming is really solid, and the guitar performances are strong too. I think there was a bit of portamento/mono-lead abuse here, and I'm personally not big on leaving mono on for an entire song, but that's just personal preference. Also, the ending didn't bother me at all. I've passed songs that seem coverish before (and even have one such posted on the site myself) and as long as the supporting instrumentation and partwriting justifies the closeness to the melody, then I'm ok with it. This has some solid backing guitar work, some great drums, and the organ, synth, and guitar playing off each other are IMO the (barely) redeeming qualities as far as OCR guidelines go. Great sounding track, guys! YES (borderline)

I hear that from my wife all the time