Liontamer Posted February 23, 2008 Share Posted February 23, 2008 Dear Submissions: I've been a fan of OC ReMix for years, but have never sent anything . . . mainly because I'm always working on my own compositions and such. But I decided to take a break and work on a Zelda cover. Here it is. My OC ReMix name is Bastian which is also my music pseudonym for my enyaesque style music (which this cover falls under). This is a cover of Koji Kondo's "Title Theme" from The Legend of Zelda and "Zelda's Lullabye" from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, inspired by the structure and instrumentation of Enya's "Book of Days" myspace.com/bastian Have a great day! Bastian -------------------------------------------------------------- Pretty lofty shooting for the style of "Book of Days". pixietricks will enjoy the concept on this one if she gets to it. http://www.zophar.net/nsf/zelda.zip - Track 1 ("Title") http://snesmusic.org/v2/download.php?spcNow=loz3 - "Princess Zelda's Rescue" (loz3-22.spc) The piano sounded pretty thin and mechanically sequenced to start. Some voices kicked in at :18, with the melody at :26. The voices were too quiet, IMO and occupied the same frequency range as the low strings; gotta better separate those sounds with some EQ work. The harmony going on at 1:18, 2:22 & 3:44 seemed to end up as a wrong note in terms of following the source melody. There was some almost residual noise coming off from the vox from 2:12-2:14 that didn't work with the song, and seemed accidental; not a huge deal. But yeah, all the parts just mucked together, where you ended up with the vox too quiet, the low strings bleeding into the vox, and the piano totally obscured. There was use of the stereo field here, but it wasn't very thorough. When the sets of voices traded off, there was some difference in the stereo positioning, but the voices weren't adequately occupying their own space, IMO. The 2:34 segue to "Princess Zelda's Rescue" mimicked the dropoff in "Book of Days", albeit not as effectively, since there was nothing done to raise the intensity of the previous section moving into the transition. In terms of apeing the Enya style, I thought you would have gone for something like ambient vox over "The Goddess Appears" instead of the more melodic Zelda lullaby as the dropoff. Went back into the same old stuff from 3:07-3:50. I'm not saying you need to copy Enya's structure entirely, but if you're inspired by that song, take note that it's got a lot more effective dynamics than this. Despite your efforts, this arrangement was basically stuck in one gear most of the time and felt repetitive and overlong. Your dropoff wasn't that pronounced because you didn't build to it, and the final section wasn't significantly more intense than the first section, feeling more like a retread than a dramatic finish. If anything, the poor sound balance meant that the rise in the intensity of the instruments only drowned down the vox, thus messing up the intended power of the finish in the "Book of Days" style. It's actually cool evaluating this not only regarding the Zelda tunes, but how well you pulled off the Enya formula. The concept was cool, but the execution left a lot to be desired. There's a lot of room for improvement, so you should keep working on this. Do what you can to make the Zelda melody less repetitive/droning the whole time, and use the ReMixing forums here to work on your production chops so that your compositional ideas come across more clearly and effectively. NO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vig Posted March 1, 2008 Share Posted March 1, 2008 piano is definitely dry and quiet. Gotta bring it out. Vocals are cool. wasn't expecting that. they sound good. syllables sometimes sound silly/inappropriate, too many "ts" sounds. Okay, they get really tiresome really quick. You need some new syllables, and a more creative interpretation of the original. It's pretty much the original with "tsu"s all over the place. Need a bit more color, a little more instrumental variety. NO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Palpable Posted March 7, 2008 Share Posted March 7, 2008 I love "Book of Days" (for underwear!), but this was really missing the dynamics of that song. That's not necessarily a bad thing - a lot of my ideas come from trying to recreate songs, then changing key elements around - but this felt too flat. I didn't feel you made good use of the sound spectrum, as a lot of the elements tended towards the low frequencies. Brighter, percussive elements would help liven this up. The piano does part of this task in "Book of Days", but in your song it's thin and not that bright; it could use a stronger sample and more fluidity. Perhaps the vocals could also be produced differently to emphasize the higher end. If this doesn't do enough for the song, consider moving some of your instruments up an octave for more contrast. Lastly, Larry mentioned some off-notes in the harmony that I also found distracting. In general, I liked what you were going for but the production just doesn't sell it. It will take a lot of work on that end to make this one happen. Listen to "Book of Days" some more and get a sense of what those upper frequencies should sound like. NO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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