Final Fantasy VII - "Victory Fanfare" Guitar Cover

[ngc2440nucleus]

Go ahead and check the "Too Conservative" box if you're not into exact replicas. I enjoy learning and playing these video game tunes as an instrumentalist for the purpose of developing my melodic repertoire, as well as developing as a sound engineer (yes, I know I suck). Lastly, I just enjoy hearing the songs get an "update", as it were.

[0x000000FF]

It may be conservative, but I really enjoy these kinds of "remastered" tracks. Sounds nice on the guitar. Great work!

I look forward to hearing the reworked intro (as suggested by the video description). I think the intro sounds good as is, but agree that it may sound nicer with the arpeggio in a different register.

[ngc2440nucleus]

Thanks a lot for the support. It's good to know that there are people who enjoy these kinds of covers as much as I do.

I'll probably go back to this as soon as I finish the others that I'd like to do: Contra Stage 1, Shadow Man from MM3, Password Screen from River City Ransom and Stage Clear from Xexyz.

I toyed with the arpeggio being played on bass, and I think a baritone guitar would be the happy medium there.

[Andrak3]

awsome work the bass in the background sounds a bit buzzing but its not that big of a deal, it makes it fill up more when it is like that i think.

Edited March 11, 2014 by Andrak3

[ngc2440nucleus]

Agh, you're right about the bass---I actually hadn't even noticed it. Thanks for the heads-up. It's probably that the guitar and kick Parametric EQ's' bandwidths are wide in some of the same areas. That, and the transient controller on the bass is set to like 2X-mode to give it more punch. I'll put that on the checklist.

[Michael_Lochlann]

i think the bass lacks punch still and what you need is maybe a good compressor dialed in to the right settings instead of a transient designer.

i don't like how it just stops. maybe a fade out or something as i don't see a held out note working nor a stab ending

the guitar playing and tone sounds great to me. i am very envious having been practicing guitar for like EVER trying to get that good. haha.

maybe the guitar could be a tad bit brighter. 3k maybe. but it sounds awesome.

the drums could be compressed a little tighter I think to make them punchier and the tom I think gets in the way too much, sounds too middly and covering up everything, maybe the reverb on it or the ring on it is too much, but i also suggest notching at 300 which is the nasty mud frequency.

i don't hear a kick, just the tom, i suggest adding either an electronic, orchestral or metal type kick. if you already have one i can't hear it under the tom so add some 60 cycles to it and some top end in the 4k-8k range so we can hear it.

your song sounds better than mine though so don't listen to me. haha.

[ngc2440nucleus]

Thanks for the thorough critique. I'll have to respond on a point-by-point basis:

i think the bass lacks punch still and what you need is maybe a good compressor dialed in to the right settings instead of a transient designer.

You're right---despite the transient controller, there's still no velocity on the initial attacks. I think what I need to do is tighten up the bottom and compress it more, like you suggested (I just don't want it to be too "fat" due to compression). The bass is using the Soundgoodizer preset in Maximus, but tweaked a bit. I'll go into the low-end portion of Maximus and see what I can see.

i don't like how it just stops. maybe a fade out or something as i don't see a held out note working nor a stab ending

Yeah, the fourth repetition is there specifically for the purpose of the fade-out. I didn't fade it out yet because I wanted to give critics another rep to find more things to hate.

the guitar playing and tone sounds great to me. i am very envious having been practicing guitar for like EVER trying to get that good. haha.

maybe the guitar could be a tad bit brighter. 3k maybe. but it sounds awesome.

Wow. Thanks for the compliment---I've been playing for a while, and I always feel like I suck, so thanks for the validation. If you want, I can show you the approach I took to the trickier parts of this track---I'm not sure if you were specifically interested in learning to play this particular song on the guitar, though. (the secret to playing it cleanly is a very low gain/overdrive, and a combination of picking/legato. I made a couple of exercises out of the main riff, and they kind of serve as "etudes" of a sort).

I agree about the guitar tone needing a little more brightness. I was trying to find ways of doing that without losing smoothness, but every time I brightened it up, I ran into problems with formants from the distortion. I just found this "Colouring Tool" that lets you apply tube-style saturation to keep bright stuff sounding warm, so maybe I'll try that when I finish recording the other stuff I'm doing.

the drums could be compressed a little tighter I think to make them punchier and the tom I think gets in the way too much, sounds too middly and covering up everything, maybe the reverb on it or the ring on it is too much, but i also suggest notching at 300 which is the nasty mud frequency.

i don't hear a kick, just the tom, i suggest adding either an electronic, orchestral or metal type kick. if you already have one i can't hear it under the tom so add some 60 cycles to it and some top end in the 4k-8k range so we can hear it.

Yep, the drums do need to be a little "fatter". I actually just learned this "NY-Style Parallel Compression" approach, so I'm going to try that. I got frustrated with the mix because I felt like I couldn't contain everything the way I wanted to.

I'm not sure what tom you're talking about, because there's only a kick. Are you really saying that the kick sounds like a tom? Lol. It's actually a kick from the Drumkit From Hell samples. I guess I need to take out some of the ring-out from that kick, because it's apparently making it sound like another instrument!

What do you mean by "60 cycles"? I'm not sure I understand what that means.

your song sounds better than mine though so don't listen to me. haha.

You obviously know what you're talking about, and we're on the same page about most of this, so your critique is definitely appreciated.

When you say, "better than my song", are you stating that you have a version of this track, too?

[Michael_Lochlann]

by 60 cycles i mean 60 hz. sorry, too many youtube mixing videos.

60 hz seems to be the good spot for adding thud to your kick drum. 4k-8k is a good range to boost the attack so i can tell it's a kick drum. haha.

i have been mixing for years now and getting stuff to really glue together is tough, so just keep working on it. compression is the hardest thing to get right because it's not as linear as most stuff is. "Want more bass? Eq more bass." but if you want to compress something, you will mess it up unless you know exactly what you are doing. a good trick to getting punchiness would be to set the attack time to 0, ratio to like 20 or something stupid high, threshold to where it's compressing a lot. then slowly turn up the attack time until your attack of the instrument you like comes through, and just that. then set the ratio back to something more normal like 3-6 and the threshold to whatever fits, and you will have the attack sound you want being emphasized by the compressor... the ny parallel compression gives you more of an in your face sound, but without the right attack setting on it, it still won't give you punchiness I think, as the punchiness comes from the difference between the uncompressed attack and the compressed rest of the signal.