*NO* StarCraft 2 'We'll Never Be Angels'

[Liontamer]

Contact Information

Your ReMixer name: jnWake.

Submission Information

Name of game(s) arranged: Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty.

Name of arrangement: "We'll never be Angels"

Name of individual song(s) arranged: "We weren't Angels" (Youtube link here:

).

This was made for the Blizzard Month at DoD, my first entry there. Sadly, the month was a bit boring since only 1 other person competed... At least I won (even if 1st of 2 isn't that much of an accomplishment)!

Anyway, Starcraft music has always been pretty cool, so I tried to make a mix that sort of kept the feeling of the original. Hence, my song is a sort of progressive and sort of rock-ish effort that varies between slow, heavy and fast paced sections, just like most Terran themes. I also tried to mantain the typical Terran instruments: Distortion guitar for rhytm, synth leads, organs and the violin leads that were introduced on SCII. I also gave it my own touch by adding a lot more piano than the typical Starcraft song.

The arrangement is, in my opinion, very straightforward in source usage. The source has a, generally speaking, ABC structure. My mix takes those sections and uses them in a BABCA order. In particular, I like how I used the C section of the source by having the piano the chord progression and then throwing violin and synth solos over it (all of this begins at 2:40 in my song).

K, I'll explain source usage now.

So, the original theme has 3 main sections:

A - from 0:07 to 1:20: Most important things here are the main acoustic guitar melody and the clean guitar melody that begins at 0:52.

B - from 1:21 to 2:12: I use almost everything from this section!

C - from 2:13 to ending: Most important thing from this section is the chord progression and the clean guitar melodies.

And now, my remix!

0:00 - 1:22: Based on section B. Organ does the chord progression from that section. Lead guitars play the melodies from that section too.

1:23 - 1:49: Also based on section B. Now I focus more on the rhytm though. Piano does a variation of the guitar melody too.

1:50 - 2:15: Piano plays A section's acoustic guitar with different base chords.

2:16 - 2:42: Another variation of the B section, now on the style of the remix's intro.

2:43 - 3:09: Piano plays a variation of C section's clean guitar. The transition to this section is also similar to the transition from section B to section C in the original source.

3:10 - 3:40: Synth solo! Still based on section C.

3:41 - 4:11: This one is trickier, but piano is doing a 3/4 variation of section A's acoustic guitar.

4:12 - end: Chord progression is taken from section A. Lead guitar is playing section A's acoustic guitar melody while the piano plays section A's clean guitar melody.

I think that covers it!

I don't really have much else to say, hope you like it!

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Edited December 15, 2013 by Palpable
closed

[Liontamer]

EDIT (11/5): It really took me a while to familiarize myself with the source enough to grasp the arrangement, but I've got my breakdown of what I recognized from the source. Thanks to jn for the thorough breakdown; I didn't agree with it all as far as being overt connections, but there was easily more than enough direct usage of the source:

:39.5-1:44, 1:46-1:56, 1:59.75-2:13, 2:39.5-3:30, 4:09-5:00 = 189.25 seconds or 60.46%

Onto the production side, this open up interestingly with organ followed by some pretty thin, fake stuff guitar at :13. The drumming and backing guitar work at :26 sounded pretty flimsy and lacking energy at first blush, but I think it ended up sounding OK. The lead at :40 sounded pretty nice, and I liked the dual layered leads at :52 a lot; good escalation and dynamic contrast there. Good transition at 1:19 along with solid layering of the proggy synth with the piano at 1:33. Another swank dynamic shift at 1:46; the piano and pads filled out the soundscape well. At 2:12, the piano was more exposed again, followed by the thin synth guitar at 2:26. The piano and string writing at 2:39 & 2:44 were well-written as well; again, the piano sample could have used more richness, though what was there was serviceable.

The soundscape was somewhat muddy from 3:05-3:37, and I wasn't a fan of the tone of the drums; not a huge deal.

Drastic changeup at 3:37 to some extremely fakey piano that sounded even more fakey than the other fakey piano. Pretty unrealistic string sequencing too. The production from 3:37 until the end at 5:13 was easily what really dragged this piece down to a NO vote. The drum tone arguably didn't fit the 4:09-4:35 section, though that wasn't a huge deal.

Overall, this is a solid composition, but when the samples strain for credibility or the light rock textures sound too thin, it makes this piece sound in places like a WIP/sketch that hasn't been fully fleshed out yet. That was particularly a big deal from 3:37 until the end, where the fakeness of the samples was exposed much more during the 3/4 sections. Something happened there where pretty much nothing was done on the production side to mask or otherwise mitigate the unrealistic sound of the piano or string sequencing. The scrawny piano from 4:35-5:00 was probably the worst offender and was exposed during the final section when things should have finished strong.

I really love how smart and creative the arrangement was, and how thoroughly the source tune ended up being used here. And while there were some notable issues with realism and production quality, I could have went with this as a YES with the arrangement carrying it. However, the lack of realism and serviceable articulations for the entire last third of the piece was too much of a pervasive issue to ignore and was a distinct quality disparity from the rest of the arrangement. If you can improve the realism of the 3/4 sections, this would be an easy pass. Don't give up on this one.

NO (resubmit)

Edited November 5, 2013 by Liontamer

[DragonAvenger]

I like what you did with the arrangement here. There's a lot of personalization, and I liked the idea of the instrumentation you used. As Larry mentioned, a lot of the instruments just aren't cutting it here. Overall your track has a super subdued feeling as well, which I don't think was totally intentional on your part, so I'd love you to look at that as well and see if you can bring up the volume a touch and maybe adjust the volumes to get more intensity out of your track (like the chugs at the beginning, for example). I'd love to hear this one again.

NO (resubmit)

[OceansAndrew]

Pretty solid arrangement, and the piano section was really nice, but I agree that the rhythm guitars aren't cutting it as far as intensity. I think increasing the bass a touch on them to give a bit more body and bringing up the volume a very small amount would help too, and possibly bringing the organ down a touch to compensate would help. Drums are sounding pretty fakey as well, you should humanize them a bit to get a more natural hit pattern going on, with accents and some extra life.

Overall this has the making of a great track, and congrats on the DoD win; just some polish and i'd be happy passing this.

No, please resubmit

[Palpable]

Loved the arrangement. There's some beautiful passages in here, and great dynamic shifts (though the one at 3:40-ish was a little medley like). I don't think there's much to pick at on the arrangement end at all.

Production is up and down. You have parts that don't work, like the competing guitar lines and the exposed piano, and then stuff like the backing guitars and organ which are really solid. Drum sequencing is nicely done in some places and fake-sounding at others. This kind of sums it up for me:

Overall, this is a solid composition, but when the samples strain for credibility or the light rock textures sound too thin, it makes this piece sound in places like a WIP/sketch that hasn't been fully fleshed out yet.

Take that to heart, and try to tighten up the sections that aren't as strong. This is very close to passing.

NO (resubmit)

Edited November 5, 2013 by Palpable

[Flexstyle]

Oh man, this source. I really love the Starcraft II soundtrack, so I’m excited to hear what you’ve done with it.

Couple things off the bat here: 3:15 or so, the ride cymbal is a wee bit harsh. The strings at 3:55 or thereabouts are a bit slow on the attack, and obviously sampled. They work just fine as background, but not so much as a lead instrument. I’m also starting to sense just a bit of overcompression at about 4:25 or so in the main mix, as the midrange is starting to just get a little crowded.

Overall I love the flow of the song and dig most of the sound choices. I’m hearing a ton of source in here, too, so I really can’t complain about that at all.

I do have a couple things I want to dig into, though. First off, while I feel like the piano works pretty well in the mix, it does stand out as being a bit mechanical whenever it’s exposed. With a bit of velocity tweaking to make it a bit more human, I think that can be mitigated easily.

Also, I gotta note that whenever the instrumentation gets any kind of dense, there’s a good bit of crowding in the midrange. This is making the limiter work pretty hard in those areas, and as a result the song sounds squished and almost a bit distorted at times.

I absolutely love this arrangement, and my heart really wants to put it on the front page of OCR. The Starcraft II soundtrack—as mentioned—is one of my favorite OSTs of all time. However, I think fixing the mixing and piano issues would bring this to new heights, and make this mix truly worthy of being posted. PLEASE COME BACK I WANT TO SEE THIS SOON!

NO (Resubmit)

[Chimpazilla]

This is a tough call. There is so much to like about this track. I really like the mellow, pensive and moody atmosphere you've created here. The writing and arrangement are really very nice, mixing is solid and the source usage is good. Yeah the guitars are fake, but I think they are used well enough. I'm happy enough with the drums.

The biggest issue for me is the piano and string samples. The piano playing sounds quite mechanical. This confuses me because I believe you actually played it, so it must be that your sample isn't velocity sensitive. I could make all kinds of suggestions but I think it comes down to getting a more realistic and velocity-sensitive piano sample. The piano sounds the most fake at the 6/8 section, where it is exposed and alone, and you've high-passed it for "old radio" effect there too, and I love this idea but unfortunately it makes the piano flaws even more noticeable.

The strings are another issue. Often in this mix, the strings and piano are together, exposed as a pair. The strings sound very noticeably fake to me, not so much due to a bad sample, but because they haven't been humanized. The strings have a very slow attack which drags down the sections where they appear. Also, real strings play in "swells" and not straight volume all the way through. Humanizing strings properly is quite a job, if you want to do it right. If it's going to be this exposed, it has to be given more attention.

This arrangement is unique because it is so mellow. There seem to be buildups that lead to more mellow sections rather than more exciting sections. I think this could work better if somehow some more excitement were introduced at some of the transition points, but this may just be my opinion. The 6/8 section could be transitioned better, it feels a little tacked on as-is, but it's ok. Regardless, the arrangement works and I like it.

I think this track is close, but really needs those piano and string issues fixed. I hope you'll fix this up and resub it, it is lovely.

NO (resubmit)