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Donkey Kong Country - Aquatic Ambience (Aquatic Chill)


JamJars
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To be honest I wanted this song to be trip-hop but instead I got chillout and just rolled with it. Now that that's out of the way, I was listening to OCR Radio and felt like doing something so I did, got any tips, feedback, wanna throw a brick at me? go a head!:lol:

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There's dat edit button. ;)

The kick is good for what you're going for. The snare, not so much. Should be closer to a rimshot at the beginning. Maybe it'd fit later on. The saw wave pad at the beginning is generic. I'm not sure it really defines a sound as complex as it needs to be to be a step up from the source.

Sounds like some sort of slight flanger on the piano? It seems a bit grating when it's combined with the water effects. The piano actually sounds a bit low quality, or the flanger made it like that.

The organ-like lead afterwards sounds like something from Toxic Biohazard, which isn't necessarily suited for organs, actually.

The same drums play the whole time, making the arrangement pretty static. Needs more variation!

Good start, but it needs a whole lot more personalization to set it apart from the billion other Aquatic Ambience remixes here.

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There's dat edit button. ;)

The kick is good for what you're going for. The snare, not so much. Should be closer to a rimshot at the beginning. Maybe it'd fit later on. The saw wave pad at the beginning is generic. I'm not sure it really defines a sound as complex as it needs to be to be a step up from the source.

Sounds like some sort of slight flanger on the piano? It seems a bit grating when it's combined with the water effects. The piano actually sounds a bit low quality, or the flanger made it like that.

The organ-like lead afterwards sounds like something from Toxic Biohazard, which isn't necessarily suited for organs, actually.

The same drums play the whole time, making the arrangement pretty static. Needs more variation!

Good start, but it needs a whole lot more personalization to set it apart from the billion other Aquatic Ambience remixes here.

I used Triangle waves mixed with Sine for the pads, however it does sound kind of saw like, and the piano was a vst I got and added some reverb to, it's actually pretty sucky and the preset from live was better but still not good enough. All the other instruments are from me screwing with Sylenth1. Thank you so much for the advice and please if you know somewhere I could get a good sounding piano vst I would be very greatful.

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I used Triangle waves mixed with Sine for the pads, however it does sound kind of saw like, and the piano was a vst I got and added some reverb to, it's actually pretty sucky and the preset from live was better but still not good enough. All the other instruments are from me screwing with Sylenth1. Thank you so much for the advice and please if you know somewhere I could get a good sounding piano vst I would be very greatful.

Yeah, triangle waves do tend to sound like saw waves. Good to know you recognize those details.

I really like TruePianos as a piano VST. It's $190 though. I think some stuff on soundfonts.darkesword.com has some decent pianos in the soundfonts, particularly the one that starts with t and ends with x and possibly a number.

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Right off the bat there are mixing issues, and it's pretty persistent through-out the track. You seem to favor the right side a lot too.

Disagreeing with tim222 this time, I think the snare is fine, and it's the kick that doesn't mesh well with this. Could be a mixing issue though. The kick stands out too much and becomes a central focus. Your hats could also be attenuated a bit. Also change up change up change up, waaay too repetitive of a drumloop.

I find it a little weird how you pan your leads more than you do your drums. It's not necessarily bad but it does cause a sense of imbalance in your mix. If you ping-pong delay it to the other speaker it'd help I reckon.

I don't think there's really any issue with what you're using for lead instruments. They work/can work if you mix them better.

Dedicate some time just tweaking with the mixing in this song. HP filter some of your leads, lower the volume on some instruments, re-adjust the panning, etc.

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Right off the bat there are mixing issues, and it's pretty persistent through-out the track. You seem to favor the right side a lot too.

Disagreeing with tim222 this time, I think the snare is fine, and it's the kick that doesn't mesh well with this. Could be a mixing issue though. The kick stands out too much and becomes a central focus. Your hats could also be attenuated a bit. Also change up change up change up, waaay too repetitive of a drumloop.

I find it a little weird how you pan your leads more than you do your drums. It's not necessarily bad but it does cause a sense of imbalance in your mix. If you ping-pong delay it to the other speaker it'd help I reckon.

I don't think there's really any issue with what you're using for lead instruments. They work/can work if you mix them better.

Dedicate some time just tweaking with the mixing in this song. HP filter some of your leads, lower the volume on some instruments, re-adjust the panning, etc.

Ironically, when I came home, I did all the things you listed (besides the panning which I spent another hour and a half on).

Plus I spent yesterday and a little bit of today sweetening the mix and even took some risks with software I just downloaded that day and had no idea what I was doing, though it did come out nicely 8).

Anyway here's the final version of this mix mainly because I've spent more time on this song than I had anticipated and have had no time to play Metroid Prime, and I have really really really been wanting to spend some time doing that.

So enjoy or something http://tindeck.com/listen/osvw

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Pretty obscure source you're tackling here, eh? ;-)

Write an intro instead of just tossing us to the waves! An introduction to your song can be a very powerful thing. I REALLY liked the contrast of the drop at 0:29. I think the sound effect of the bubbling is nice, but you really need to expand on that atmosphere with some reverb. Not just on the sound effect, but on your instruments, which are about as dry as a potato chip straight out of the oven. You should also fade out the bubbling sound effect when the drums and the song re-enters. At 1:56, the panning on your lead is insane! My rule is typically to leave the leads anywhere between 25L and 25R - that's plenty of space for a lead instrument. In some situations it's fine to go outside of that range, but I've found that for a majority of songs, that range is perfect for lead instruments. The same left-panned lead at 1:17 is an issue!

You've got too much sub bass on the kick drum. Maybe you did this because you had no intentions of writing a bass part? Or maybe there is a bass part here and I just can't hear it. Seems like a weird choice to me, and at any rate, the kick is too loud. ;-) The kick is also really generic, like it's one of the load-up kicks in FL Studio or something. Very plain sounding. The snare also got on my nerves after a few listens with that constant hit on 2 & 4 with no type of variation. It's a really harsh type of hit for this style of song. It's almost like you are trying to make heavy drums for a song that just isn't heavy. If you wanted it to be a heavy sounding song, there are ways you can do that outside of just putting in pumped up drums.

So yes! I think adding in processing on your instruments will help, fixing the levels and panning, write an intro AND the rest of the song since it just cuts out and doesn't end. Perhaps the single MOST important thing I haven't mentioned yet is that you need to write some of your own parts for the ReMix. That drum loop alone just isn't cutting it. You've got some cool sounds going around in the background but this is more or less a cover without some good, substantial original writing. Harmonization, a solo section, etc. Anything you can think of to break it up from just being a repetition of the original source. There is a lot of work to be done here, but do not be discouraged! Good luck.

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Honestly, I think most of your instruments are panned too hard to one side (leads, snare, hihat, strings).

It's probably not the best idea to pan the kick and bass. They should be in the center IMO.

Piano sounds better now. I also noticed that the drums have more variation which is nice.

Brandon left a very good chunk of advice. As for the panning, I totally agree. Usually I'll will keep the main kick and snare without any pan. Unless its a complimenting melody to the main, I won't pan it to one side only. Maybe experiment with a stereo imager to bring a surrounding feel. I do like the direction you took it, but replacing some of the sine synths or whatever what previously mentioned would make this sound a lot better. The piano sounds great in there, though!

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Two things

1. I tried opening the song in my com and the song is killing it in the most brutal and painful way possible, so I'm forced to start from the ground up and that's always fun (luckily I was able to save the piano and bubble effect).

2. If anyone could point me to some samples of drums that have a softer sound, because all my drum samples are too harsh for the ReMix I have in mind

Please and Thank you. (If I sounded like a dick in anyway I'd like to apologize)

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  • 2 weeks later...
So enjoy or something http://tindeck.com/listen/osvw

The balance on this song is still atrocious. Everything sounds extremely panned, and everything else seems dead centered. It's hard to really focus on anything when you have half your head playing one thing and the other half playing something else.

I'm not going to talk about the arrangement or song writing untill the above problem is resolved.

2. If anyone could point me to some samples of drums that have a softer sound, because all my drum samples are too harsh for the ReMix I have in mind

Someone (I think it was Malcos) posted a while back The Machine, which consisted of pretty much every drum machine and their sample in a handy downloadable .zip file or something. I can't seem to locate the topic, but you can try googling 'the machine drum samples' and see if there's a link still working somewhere.

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  • 1 month later...

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