Sonic the Hedgehog (SMS) 'Scrap Brain remix'

[VDZ]

I made a rearrangement of the Scrap Brain Zone music from Sonic the Hedgehog (Sega Master System version, not the Genesis/Mega Drive one).

The original song can be listened to here: http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=SjEx9h1wwwQ

Link to the rearrangement: http://www.tindeck.com/audio/my/aswr/Scrap-Brain-Remix-5

Feedback would be much appreciated.

[Rozovian]

Instrument choices aren't the greatest, and the mixing is newbtastic. The arrangement is interesting tho, so it's not all bad.

About the arrangement... there's a number of places where notes are clashing I recommend listening it through looking key conflicts and tweaking the writing for those parts. Most of those times I think the organ is involved.

It also doesn't sound like a performance, it's just notes. This is something you should deal with once you've used some better samples on it. This sounds like general midi, which is bad. See what free samples you can find and use those, there's free resources all over the net, and I recall the ReMixing subforum here having some links.

As for the actual mixing, it's a later concern. I recommend that you look up some tracks that have a similar arrangement and/or instrumentation to get the feel for how it should sound. Mixing is a wide topic, but the basics are "don't expose your instruments too much", "if it's not interesting, turn down its volume", "separate stuff", and "make sure you have both width and balance". The tools to use are, respectively, reverb, volume, EQ, and pan, several of which serve more than one function.

Anyway, the arrangement is far from the midi rips that occasionally appear here, so your track is certainly worth developing. Good luck with it.