Liontamer Posted September 20, 2008 Share Posted September 20, 2008 Nutritious Justin Medford NutritiousMultimedia@gmail.com http://NutritiousMultimedia.googlepages.com 16520 Donkey Kong Country 2 Stronghold Showdown This song is part of the Donkey Kong 2 project (yeah, I'm on WAY too many projects... something like 7) As soon as the DKC2 project was announced, I worked quickly to try and get a WIP together to join up. There are some great mixers on the project, so it was a good opportunity. There were only a few remaining available tracks at the time, but I didn't know which to choose. Fishy recommended I give Stronghold Showdown a go. Admittedly, Bahamut and Taucer were a little wary about my initial WIP, but I was able to refine it a bit more and get on the project. At :22 seconds, the source tune is a very short piece to remix, so I tried to utilize as much as possible. For the intro, I was going for a kind of John Williams/Indiana Jones feeling, then followed by some variations on the main melody of the source. In the next section, I used a much more complex version of the repeating pattern that plays in the original to form a bass for the solo trumpet playing the main melody line. For the rest of the song, I tried to get some good contrasts between large/full passages and smaller, lighter sections; eventually leading into a very big ending. Hope you guys enjoy it. EDIT (5/16): Assuming you got my PM that I wanted to put this one on hold for a while to fix some issues. I reworked the section at :51 a lot to bring it more closely in line with the OST. Hopefully this makes the connection more clear. Justin ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ http://snesmusic.org/v2/download.php?spcNow=dkq - "Stronghold Showdown" (dkq-26.spc) Even with the revisions here, the arrangement feels too liberal. Obviously there are parts where the source connection is pretty overt, but there were other times where it went off the rails. The track was needs 263 seconds, so I needed more than 131.5 seconds of overt source usage for the arrangement pass: 32.5-:38, :39-:49, 1:20-1:28, 1:32.75-1:44, 1:48-2:00, 2:11.75-2:33, 2:37-2:53, 3:32.5-3:37.5, 3:57.5-4:06 = about 97.5 seconds That's all I could recognize overtly. There were areas like :00-:29 & 4:06-4:20 that seemed very loosely based on :15-:21 of the source, but sound too liberally interpreted. As far as the strings and mallet percussion at :51 & 3:15 being a more complex pattern of the strings at :00-:04 of the source, I isolated voices 6 & 8 of the SPC just to check the string patterns of the original, and the notes and patterns in this arrangement are too different despite a stylistic similarity. So that just knocks out a bunch of what's supposed to connect this to the source. You may have reworked it to sound more like the source, but it definitely doesn't to me. The track sounds great, and the arrangement sound very sophisticated, but in the effort to add more complexity and variation to the original, I think you've made some choices that make the majority of the track not tied to the source tune. I'm definitely open to more POVs on something I may have missed, but based on where I could actually make overt A-to-B connections, I've gotta go NO. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Palpable Posted June 15, 2009 Share Posted June 15, 2009 Ugh. What's with your hot tracks being just on the edge of too liberal, Justin? I gotta go with Larry's breakdown on this; in fact, I think he gave you more credit than I would. I also didn't hear a connection between 0:00-0:04 of the source and 0:51 in your song; sounds totally different apart from the notes being 16th notes. Very refined and tightly constructed song, and for a project track I think it works because you did hit every part of the source, but just too liberal to put it on the front page. NO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
anosou Posted June 15, 2009 Share Posted June 15, 2009 Not an easy source to remix but you could've made the connections much clearer. Like Palpable pointed out, :51 doesn't sound like source. You could've made it straight source. There are many times you could've used the source more clearly which would make this seem more like an arrangement and less like an original (but very good) track. Sorry Justin, this is just too liberal. NO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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