*NO* Sonic the Hedgehog 'Surely This is a Dream'

[djpretzel]

This ia a remix of the Special Stage in Sonic The Hedgehog.

Thank you!

[Malcos]

The arrangement is interesting in terms of some of the sound design, and the fact that the melodic parts are similar but not quite, a lot of original bits here and there.

The thing that really stands out badly are the string patches, which have a very slow attack, odd dynamics and sound rather cheap compared to the rest of the instruments.

I can hear artifacts in some of the drum parts, as if they've been downsampled twice (mp3 of an mp3?)

At 2.25 the rhytm of the drums seems out of place with the brass, as if it was going out of sync or the brass was coming in slightly too soon.

Nice idea, but needs reworking.

NO

[Harmony]

I think this mix gets better as it nears the end but the first two minutes are really not working. The music box in the intro is slightly out of tune, which is cool in some respects as it fits with the dreamy strangeness of the Special Stage. I would have preferred a gradual introduction of the reverb rather than abruptly stepping it up (and down at the end). Also in the intro we’ve got some light pops and glitches, most notably at 0:26 and 0:30.

When the main strings and background pads come in at 0:30 everything goes to mush. The choir pads are low quality and indistinct and simply need to be removed or changed. Similar problem with the bass which has way too much reverb on it. The lead strings are at least bright so that we get some contrast from the other elements but their consistent very slow attack gets bothersome after a while, as Malcos mentioned. The chromatic percussion that remains from the intro doesn’t sound out of tune anymore but it does hit some bad notes (e.g. 0:33).

The jazzy vibe that you were going for is a cool idea but the drums aren’t living up to your creativity. They sound as if they’ve been around the resampling block more than a few times. Very low quality with a lot of high frequency distortion. I’m sure that it supposed to be a ride from 1:00-1:22 but it’s completely garbled. The crashes at 1:01 and 1:32 are too loud and bright and their contrast with the other percussion makes for a tough listen.

Arrangement was conservative but I think passable given how brief the mix is. The symmetric composition is interesting but I don’t think that it works well with this brief of material. For the last minute we have essentially the same material as we had for the first minute. It’s difficult to effectively repeat an entire minute of a 3 minute track.

Lots of work needs to be done to get this into shape. The sample quality needs to be greatly improved and the composition needs to be expanded. Improving is the joy of music though so don’t hesitate to keep working on this one. In addition to the feedback you’ve gotten at VGMix, there’s great help available at OCR’s Remixing and WIP forums.

NO

[Liontamer]

http://www.zophar.net/gym/sonic.rar - 07 "Special Stage"

The opening chimes sounded a bit too synthetic, but the slight delay at :10 along with more effects at :14 really thickened things up and made them sound more realistic. The strings joining in at :30 were way too thin in texture which made their synthetic sound a detriment. The cymbal shot at 1:01 as a transition was very poorly used also.

The muffled drums used at from 1:22-1:31 left me scratching my head, but their return from 2:03-2:13 was even more awkward and disjointed. The bassline was nearly completely buried by mud and reverb, so while I like the ambiance, some elements could be a bit more clearly positioned.

The arrangement had some rhythmical alterations to the source mostly, but had some potential. Could have developed the ideas a bit further, so keep working on this one, I'd say. Cool effort, bro. Wouldn't mind hearing analoq's opinions on this.

NO

[GrayLightning]

Yeah the music box is definitely off and funky. I actually really like the style and some of the arrangement concepts, but this track is just messy conceptually and in execution. I liked the choir pad and strings sections but the writing of these instruments is just compositionally very sparse, the result is this thin sound throughout. You put too much reverb on the mix, the drums are plagued with wierd reverb/delay feedbacks, they just don't sound at all good, but worse of all mess up the track. Suddenly changing dry to wet, then at the end wet to dry music box is a concept that just doesn't work in how it was executed. If you want to do something like this use layering with two tracks with different reverb sends, or different layers, one dry and one wet, or even use reverb automation.

Needs a lot of work. NO