Super Mario 64 - File Select (Ethnic/Synthpop)

[Emunator]

Mix: https://soundcloud.com/emunator/super-mario-64-file-select-wip

Source:

This is something I was briefly throwing together for the Super Mario 64 project before Argle snatched up the source... I'm sure he's got something far better cooking up for the album, but I wanted to share this anyway since I got a decent amount of progress on it.

Structure is pretty rough, more focus on sound design and riffs here. Any thoughts are welcome!

[jnWake]

I like how this sounds, keeps the feeling of the original nicely.

The pad thing you're using bothers me, since it feels like it's off-tempo (I guess it has a slow attack). This is very noticeable at 0:31 where the pad takes a little bit to change to the new chord and it sounds bad. This actually happens for most of the song, but is less noticeable when you have more instruments (1:13 sounds a bit bad because of this too).

It may also be a bit conservative, but I think it's fine! Nice work

[Theory of N]

I bless the RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAINS DOWN IN AAAAAAAAAAAAAFRICAAAAAAAAAAA!

This is really nice, dude. I'm loving the vibe here. I think my biggest crit is from an arrangemental/compositional standpoint. There's a lot of layering and whatnot so things are happening...but the majority of the track is the same chord progression and it gets pretty stagnant. Unfortunately, the source doesn't really have much more to it so it makes sense why that is. 2:35 is nice and fresh but it's soooooo far into the tune.

Other than that, 0:30 feels texturally thin. It's like all the neat overtone-y things you had going on went unison right there and it feels like something dropped out. Once the perc comes in though, there's enough going on to overlook it.

All that aside, you said this was mostly geared toward sound and I think you pretty much nailed that. So good job there!