djpretzel Posted February 11, 2006 Share Posted February 11, 2006 LT Edit - Original Decision: http://www.ocremix.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=36189 Hi everyone who will end up reading this, This is a re-submission of my miserable failure I submitted two years ago. It's a remix of FF6's Decisive Battle for piano and drums. I've been very hesitant to resubmit this one because I'm afraid I'll just make it worse by revising it any further. At the very least, I promise the production quality is enormously better than the overly reverb'd, poorly eq'd, and dynamic disaster I submitted last time. When it didn't get in last time I was shocked and devastated (I imagine I felt like William Hung, as I can't imagine why you'd have accepted it as I listen to it now), so I ran out and bought a book on mixing and I've taken a few classes since. I was pretty surprised when Little Painter Girl got in, so I figure at this point even though I'm doubting myself, it might be good enough. It definitely has a few issues here and there, and there's always been about a 50/50 argument over whether or not the drums should stay in it in the WIP forums, but I opted to keep them in since I like them. It feels overly quantized in some areas, and the dissonance may bother some people (but this is something I love), but aside from all of that stuff I think it's in pretty good shape. I tried my best to keep the energy of the original while adding some new parts to it (I stole the opening from a soundtrack I worked on, for example, and a short phrase from an anime that I'm pretty sure one judge on the panel will be able to pick out). I've spent a lot of time with this, on and off, so I hope it's at a point now where it's good enough for the site. When I submitted Little Painter Girl I'd assured my self it wouldn't be accepted so I didn't write anything about it, which I feel bad about now because that probably didn't make writing about it very easy. I don't know what you're going to think of this, but I figure I should write about it in case things go well. I don't really have a whole lot to say, but it was always my favorite song from FF6 (or any game, really). My uncle gave me a copy of Finale when I was really young and I printed out a midi file of it. I was a terrible piano student, and didn't last long (I've never been any good at reading music), so my piano teacher told me to bring in something I wanted to play. I brought in the print out of the decisive battle and she just got really annoyed with me because I'd printed out ten different parts. I didn't really understand how MIDI worked back then. I learned how to play the entire melody on my own, because my teacher refused to teach me, and when I stumbled upon OCR a few years ago I decided that I had to give it a shot. While the people on the WIP boards keep telling me this is my style, it's really not, but it was a lot of fun anyway. For me, it's not really the soundtrack to a battle anymore, but just a lot of energy being thrown around in many different directions. I always play this in my tiny apartment when I want to move around and can't. There's no real way to dance or move to it, but when I want to let out a lot of energy and just make a complete fool of myself, this track is my best friend. Anyway, that should make up for the lack of text last time. Thanks for listening and I hope you find this version to be a significant improvement. The file is available here: Thanks! - Adam Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zircon Posted February 12, 2006 Share Posted February 12, 2006 Overall, I gotta say that the arrangement here is really quite good. Lots of variation and cool stuff going on. The percussive sequencing is also solid - very nice fills and subtle changes! However, unfortunately, I don't think I can pass this. I just don't think piano and drums really 'works' here. It feels like there should be more to fill out the soundfield. If this was piano only I think it would have worked pretty well, but adding the drums makes it feel incomplete. On the production end, the drums are a little bland, and the piano sometimes spikes in volume unrealistically. But more importantly, there seems to be some weird stereo thing going on.. as if most of the sounds are a little panned to the right. It's disconcerting given the sparse soundfield. I would say either drop the drums and tune the arrangement a little more around that, or add some other stuff as well. Also take a look at some of the production issues I mentioned. I like this a lot - please resubmit! NO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liontamer Posted February 13, 2006 Share Posted February 13, 2006 http://snesmusic.org/spcsets/ff6.rsn - "The Decisive Battle" (ff6-124.spc) Just to point out, Adam did mention on VGDJ #3 that the "bad notes" in Little Painter Girl were indeed a flub. So eat it, Dave. Eat it. I'm pretty much echoing zircon's issues. The stuff he mentioned about spikes in the piano volume, as well as the slight panning issues were notable and I agree with them, but were ultimately not critical. Arrangement wise, things were seeming good. My main thing here was that I actually felt the drums didn't fit here at all. I hear the attempt at trying to create fills and changes like zircon mentioned, but the texture here wasn't working at all, which was also in part to the very bland production choices of the percussion. The texture here just wasn't clicking, and needs to be reworked. You may want to go for a softer feel for the percussion and scrap the snare (and its boring patterns) in favor of something else, but that's just me. Get further feedback from others on where to go from here and send it on back. You won't regret subbing this if you get it sounding stronger later on. Say hi to Wing for me. NO (resubmit) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vig Posted February 13, 2006 Share Posted February 13, 2006 The drums dont sound strong enough, given the fact that it's just drums and piano. Sounds to me like the whole track could use more low-end. aside from that, the piano occasionally plays parts that are quite ridiculous...perhaps impossible. Not bad, but i think it needs more than piano and drums. NO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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