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OCR02920 - Chrono Trigger "Notes from a Small Island"


djpretzel
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It's great to see a new JJT mix come up, a couple of his tracks are some of my fondest from the OCR catalog. I've also really liked what Roof Beam Carpenters I've heard. I'll have to save the new album for later, but I did buy the previous EP right now.

Into the mix at hand. The new chording with the guitar alone is pretty thrilling to hear, and throughout it's an original, yet very fitting way to treat the source material.

As a nod to the intended era and style the piece very successful and fun to listen to. The big crash cymbals section of the beat seemed to squish a lot of the other instrumentation away (I also remember the huge crash cymbal beats from Hydrophone Breakdown, loud there too!). Overall the mix feels a little tiring to the ears, for one there's a lot of distortion in the EP and it's maybe piling up some frequencies, but the acoustic guitar is sounding a little suspect on its own. Other than that the production was very good & the playing really tight.

The bit that I wasn't feeling at all in the arrangement was the chromatically descending bit of the melody at 0:44 and 1:44. It's a high point of the melody in the original but didn't seem to work in this context. I tried noodling around on the guitar and the final chord which seems to clash might be something like Eadd2? It sounds to me that the G in the melody is causing some sort of a major/minor mode collision due to the major E chord on the guitar. Esus4 seemed to maybe be ambiguous enough to not clash like that, but hard to say about just humming above some chords which I might be transcribing wrong in the first place (plus just in case it sounds remotely like I know or pretend to know music theory, I don't really, I'm just using a reverse guitar chord finder and trying to put into words why those spots didn't seem to work to me).

Other than that I thought the arrangement was quite superb, well I generally like the type of arrangement that keeps the melody and rewrites the backing already so this was an easy plus for me. I liked how the melody was transferred from one instrument to the next in each section, and the original melodic bits fit in very cohesively.

timaeus, you should really check out more JJT, like right now! I agree that this sounded pretty pro.

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Yeah, boy! This ReMix skates close to being cluttered and clunky in the middle because of how much was going on, but JJT managed to swoop out and take the ReMix up for air at the last minute, which was nice to hear. Certainly a nice arrangement. My only complaint is the distortion at the intro and outro seemed a little loud or sharp, but once things got underway, it didn't really bug me because it seemed to even out enough. Minor points aside, awesome work, man.

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I used to download the remixes posted here very frequently, but now that the mixes are posted to YouTube I admit that I listen to many, appreciate the work, but rarely download. My listening habits have changed, I've already accumulated years' worth of mixes, and while I admire many of the mixes posted, I figure that they'll just sit on my drive and not receive more listens in the future. So when I saw DJ Pretzel's statement of "file under must download" I smiled and thought to myself, "probably not, Pretzel."

Well, I posted to say that Pretzel was right and the mirror servers took another hit from me, because this song is amazing and it's going to receive many more listens. Well done, JJT!

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  • 6 months later...

This one is really growing on me with each successive listen, like most of Jon's stuff tends to do. It's mixed with just the right amount of distortion to achieve the desired effect without being rough on the ears. Granted, I don't really hear any of the post-rock djp is referring to in the writeup, but this mix does a great job seamlessly fussing multiple styles and aesthetics together.

Excellent track!

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  • 1 year later...
  • 3 months later...

This is absolutely brilliant, I love the "britpopness" of it from the first note! I would not hesitate to name this as an example of the genre that has everything quintessential to it, while avoiding the dreadful "here's Wonderwall" cliche!

 

(....I am no musical expert though. :/ But I know what I like when I hear it! )

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Nice idea for this theme, which honestly has been done to death (I've had a few ideas of one myself) but this is pretty unique. Has more of a pop feel to it, to the point where you WANT it to have vocals. With that melody.

As far as engineering, it's hard for me to gauge all of that as a first time poster here. Personally it's a bit compressed, however for what has been said above (brit-pop) that actually fits and it sounds great with the Rhodes and guitar. There are parts where you hear artifacts as a result though. At 2:45 it gets a bit harsh.

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  • Liontamer changed the title to OCR02920 - Chrono Trigger "Notes from a Small Island"

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