Rising Tide (Sonic 1: Green Hill Zone) WIP

[hextupleyoodot]

well... *Shyly* this is my first attempt at a serious mix... soooo I realize that it probably has a lot of problems.

This is the beginnings of what I'm trying to create. I realize that it's obviously not at a high enough level of production quality to even be taken seriously ^^;; and I realize that obviously it doesn't feel finished, but since I'm new at this, I don't really know where to go from here to improve upon what I have. I guess that's what this forum is for, right? ^^;;

So here's the mix:

What I'm aiming for is a modernized, more upbeat and faster interpretation of the song. You'll probably notice that I'm getting a lot of ideas from the Sonic Rush games, of which I'm a big fan of.

If I could point out any problems for myself, I'd say maybe it draws too much from the source material? I really dunno, since again, I'm really new at this ^^;; but along with that, I recognize that the samples aren't really all that sophisticated.

So! Any tips or advice is greatly appreciated (Or if you think I need to make any major changes/approach it from a different angle, that's fine too). Thanks! Hope it doesn't hurt anybody's ears too much. ^^;;

[Rozovian]

Not as bad as I expected (no offense ). Needs better mixing, how well do you know EQ and what to do with it? Your clap/snare sound and your lead should probably be replaced, same with the fake electric guitar, you can do pretty much the same on a jazz or rock organ, or on any of thousands of other sounds or instruments.

I'll be frank, I don't think this has a shot at getting on ocremix... but it is a good piece to practice with, learn while remixing. Figure out EQ, compressor, reverb, and learn to spot sounds that don't work and figure out what would work instead.

Hope that helps. Good luck remixing.

[PROTO·DOME]

It has a nice beat and feel to it actually, but Rozo's right in what he says. ^o^ Bassline is good dude, have it lower down and deeper. More percussion! Lots of stuff panned left and right but not to loud. Thicker fanfares and maybe up the tempo a little? Nice start though, you're gunna kick ass after a couple of months.

On a different note, nice to see someone who uses those faces as much as me! ^___^

[hextupleyoodot]

Not as bad as I expected (no offense ). Needs better mixing, how well do you know EQ and what to do with it? Your clap/snare sound and your lead should probably be replaced, same with the fake electric guitar, you can do pretty much the same on a jazz or rock organ, or on any of thousands of other sounds or instruments.

I'll be frank, I don't think this has a shot at getting on ocremix... but it is a good piece to practice with, learn while remixing. Figure out EQ, compressor, reverb, and learn to spot sounds that don't work and figure out what would work instead.

Hope that helps. Good luck remixing.

=P I wasn't expecting to see my very first remix on OCR. but I do appreciate the tips. I'm not very familiar with how to use EQ effectively. I don't exactly have a very good grasp of all of the ideas in music and sound production. Though I do understand the concepts behind compressors and reverb and subtractive filters and such. just need some guidance as to how to implement it.

Course, this is also accompanied by the fact that I only have garageband at my disposal. I'm hoping to get something better soon, but for the time being, I'm just trying to learn the concepts, and I figure I can still do that with garageband at my level.

As for learning, do you know what I can read up on besides the tutorials here to learn some of these concepts? I'm self taught in image editing, but I find sound a good deal more intimidating ^^;;

[Rozovian]

GarageBand should do fine. There are remixes made with GB that are posted here. Depending of course on the style, GB could have all the tools and sounds you need. I've been meaning to challenge myself to making an ocr-fit remix using only GB and none of the Jam packs or any plugins besides Apple's own.

Sound works much like graphics, actually. You want the tracks to fit together, so you can't use overexposed photos in the same image as soft 3d renders without doing a lot of processing to make them fit. Same with sound, some sounds don't fit together directly, you have to make them fit. Likewise, you want some parts of an image to stand out more, some less, so by blurring parts of the image (with reverb and EQ) and making some layers less opaque (volume, EQ) and evening out contrasts (compression) you can push things out of the spotlight, whereas other things need a bit more light (volume), contrast (EQ), sharpness (EQ: specific and usually some high frequencies) to stand out more.

If you're self taught in image editing you should have no problem learning sound, you just gotta learn how a good song sounds good and how the bad ones sound bad, and then just figure out what to use to make your own music better.

Just listen to ocremix from the past few years and learn from those.