*NO* Legend of Zelda 3 'A Mountain Most Evil'

[djpretzel]

Title: "A Mountain Most Evil"

Remixer name: Arglebargle

Game: Zelda: LTTP (SNES)

I've had this tune for a while, but kinda forgot about submitting it to OCR. It's a metal/orchestral hybrid of the Death Mountain theme from Zelda: LTTP. Can't say I have any confidence at all in it making the grade, but I'd interested in knowing how badly I fall short. I do think it's better than either of my previous arrangements submitted here.

Link:

Hope that works; Web1000 is very... unreliable.

Cheers!

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[Liontamer]

http://snesmusic.org/spcsets/loz3.rsn - "Dark Mountain" (loz3-13.spc)

If you're interested in knowing how much you fall short, I'm willing to oblige. Oh wait, that sounds really mean. No, we <3 here.

First thing that struck me immediately was how lossy this sounded for some reason. There's a lot of fuzz and lo-fi residue here that shouldn't be; it's not nearly that bad, but it sounds like when you're listening to a low bitrate webstream; dunno what you call that warbly crud, but that's what it is.

Otherwise though, I liked the intro. The low strings and bells sounded pretty good; the pizz strings were a little too quiet, but were alright. The brass lead though coming in at :21 had no life to it and dragged things down a bit, and the strings first used at :32 sounded a artificial with the bow movements (exposed at :50 when the source usage started, but not a huge negative). On the whole, some fairly solid usage of what you had.

The transition into the rock section at 1:26 didn't quite work to me. Maybe it's just me, but having the rock part sound like it was in a completely different place that the orchestra felt kind of jarring; not a big deal.

Decent stuff with the rock section all things considered. Guitar tone sounded reasonably alright. The power the track was trying to give off was there in spades, and the arrangement was pretty interesting.

The segue back into orchestration at 3:24 brought back that lo-fi warbling, but worked better than the transition at 1:26. Heh, "Overworld" reference at 4:00 that just had to show up sooner or later.

4:14 went for a rock-based close, though there was that one synth on lead that IMO really didn't gel well with the other sounds; I'd say scrap that synth for something else and maybe try not to let the soundscape get quite this cluttered.

After all that grandiose-style building to a climax, the ending at 4:53 was awfully anti-climactic; ALMOST sounded I-give-up-ish, but I'm gambling that you thought it sounded ok. Felt like a poor attempt at a resolution to me, and probably should be reworked.

Pretty close, bro. The arrangement was pretty stylish; good set of arrangement ideas that fit very naturally with your original writing. Some doofus at VGMix didn't like the constant tradeoffs, but he doesn't know a damn thing. Plus most of the instrumentation was good. Definitely refine the production, perhaps look into tinkering with the tone and realism of some of your sounds, and get the ending working, and you'd be all set. Have faith in your abilites, bro; you're doing pretty well so far.

NO (refine/resubmit)

[zircon]

I had to listen to the original a few times to familiarize myself with it. I gotta say it's pretty repetitive in terms of the motifs.. probably no more than 15-20 seconds of material there. I'll be interested to hear what you do with it.

First of all, I think the texture you have going throughout the mix is cool. I'm a sucker for orchestral stuff mixed with guitars and acoustic drums. At the same time, I agree with Larry that the transition into this texture could have been extended so it isn't quite so sudden. In addition, I also thought the last section could have been planned out a little better as it DID seem abrupt. Otherwise I think the level of arrangement and interpretation here is acceptable.

From the production standpoint, the orchestral samples are used fine, though I might suggest layering some of the lead strings with marcato/short bow samples to get more attack. If you can, I would also try to give the acoustic stuff a little more "punch" and perhaps to EQ the snare so it's a higher in the frequency spectrum. As it is, it's sort of in the lower bands mostly which gives it some power, but ultimately makes it muddy with the bassdrum.

Overall I have to agree with Larry that this is not quite there yet.. tweaking some of your arrangement ideas, polishing the production, and working on the structure would help this mix get to the YES point. Until then I encourage a resubmit.

NO

[Vig]

so using a sample of many strings playing a monophonic line sounds bad. this tends to be the prevailing problem through most of the mix. not enough harmony. in the metal section the guitar and bass play the same line. Harmony is your friend.

the arrangement has its moments, even if it's rather tedious at times. that chugging guitar rhythm gets an awful lot of airtime without tons of variation.

NO