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Shovel Knight: Knights of the ReMix 2014


DarkeSword
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Quick reviews:

Neblix vs. DusK

My choice was due to the arrangement's transformation of the source tunes and liberal vs. conservative, and one entry was more apparent in these than the other.

Hakstock vs. Alexanderandom

This one was close for me. I almost voted for Alex, but I ended up thinking that Ivan's good production outweighed his arrangement simplicity, whereas Alex's good arrangement outweighed his textural sparseness.

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I agree with everyone voting for Hakstok over me haha, when I listened to everyone's mixes they all sounded really great! I love arranging and writing crazy stuff but I usually go too complicated, and just can't master as good as people on this thread. Apparently my synth sounds from Reason just aren't strong enough because I tried FM8 recently and it made old mixes sound much better with barely any tweaking. I'm gonna redo it probably and I'll post it here when I'm done.

Good luck to everyone else because I'm most likely out :-P

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I agree with everyone voting for Hakstok over me haha, when I listened to everyone's mixes they all sounded really great! I love arranging and writing crazy stuff but I usually go too complicated, and just can't master as good as people on this thread. Apparently my synth sounds from Reason just aren't strong enough because I tried FM8 recently and it made old mixes sound much better with barely any tweaking. I'm gonna redo it probably and I'll post it here when I'm done.

Good luck to everyone else because I'm most likely out :-P

I wouldn't bash your track so hard - I actually really enjoyed it. It's just that Ivan's was really, really good.

If I understand the rules correctly, you can still participate even after being knocked out by challenging another remixer. (AND the vote isn't even over yet)

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I agree with everyone voting for Hakstok over me haha, when I listened to everyone's mixes they all sounded really great! I love arranging and writing crazy stuff but I usually go too complicated, and just can't master as good as people on this thread. Apparently my synth sounds from Reason just aren't strong enough because I tried FM8 recently and it made old mixes sound much better with barely any tweaking. I'm gonna redo it probably and I'll post it here when I'm done.

Good luck to everyone else because I'm most likely out :-P

I think you made the sources work together better than I did, and with slightly better production and perhaps a few changes to the synth sounds you'd be winning right now. But let's not be quick and jump to conclusions based on just 4 votes.

More votes/reviews please! I'll try to write some tomorrow.

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Quick reviews:

Neblix vs. DusK

My choice was due to the arrangement's transformation of the source tunes and liberal vs. conservative, and one entry was more apparent in these than the other.

Hakstock vs. Alexanderandom

This one was close for me. I almost voted for Alex, but I ended up thinking that Ivan's good production outweighed his arrangement simplicity, whereas Alex's good arrangement outweighed his textural sparseness.

These aren't reviews. This is just why you chose to vote for who you did. :tomatoface: Now watch while I be a hypocrite.

Quick voting choices:

I vote for myself for a very specific reason. Harmony is the foundation of most music and DusK had harmonic mistakes in how he handled the Spectre Knight melody (every time he hit the sharp 4, or G natural, in the melody, he didn't accompany it with the chord it needed) especially in the introduction. Since the voting encouragement is for handling and incorporation of both themes, I feel this is a justification for not giving him the vote. Whether I handled the note better is up to the public, but I handled it in a different couple ways including the way virt did in the source that I personally think are both functional (as a blues scale tone and as a major II chord, by major II i am in the key of Bb minor and use a C major chord there).

I vote for Hakstock because while both of these guys incorporated both tunes, Hakstock did it in a way that wasn't exhausting. Alex's track seemed to go on for eternity. Not in necessarily the bad way, but it didn't feel like there was any variety of progression, especially using the same synth lead over the whole track. Also, I am disappointed neither of you guys used Shield Knight's picardy third. It's when a song in the minor key uses the major tonic chord instead of the minor. The campfire scene does this at the end of its melody and hits an F# maj instead of F# min. It's part of the character of the track, because a major chord instead of the normal minor chord indicates something like an unnatural feeling of hope and directly correlates to Shovel Knight's struggle to want to save Shield Knight (as shown in his campfire dreams to catch her after every boss). I guess it's artistic license to use the Minor one from the catch her scenes, but I personally feel it would've added some color to the tracks.

Edited by Neblix
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These aren't reviews. This is just why you chose to vote for who you did. :tomatoface: Now watch while I be a hypocrite.

okfieni'lldosomethingmoar

I felt like DusK's interpretation of the source tunes felt more straightforward and "archetypal". Good soundscape and mixing, but while it was still personalized pretty well, some harmonies felt off like Nabeel mentioned---simply out of key at 0:28 for example (I felt that way earlier too; he just articulated it in a clear way :-P). It did remind me of Castlevania; the church bell, the (fake-y) organ, but even the strings tone and harmonies contributed a little to that.

Neblix, you had a complexity to your harmonies that clearly differentiated from the original, though it might be hard to appreciate. Sometimes it could seem like there were wrong notes (i.e. sort of like blue notes but still a playable pitch---passing tones that were outside the key), but they weren't, at least to my ears. The arrangement was really the deciding factor for me.

Alex, I actually liked the underlying chords you had sometimes, but there was sort of a meandering, stream-of-consciousness feel to the arrangement, and it felt longer than the ideas could have been if they had been condensed down so they could be better expressed. There were some pretty excellent chord progressions, even if directly from the source, i.e. 0:59 - 1:08, 1:10 - 1:21, 1:29 - 1:36, 1:40 - 1:48, etc. Reminded me of PSO. I wish the chords could have been more clearly defined rather than partially implied---you can feel them but not hear them. Some sounds didn't really fit their notes, but it was really the lack of direction that led me to switch votes.

Hakstok, the production was just cleaner. Some lead synth choices were not really fitting because they were a little thin and PWM-y, but at least all the notes were audible, so that's not a big deal. It's got an uplifting atmosphere to it, though the lead guitar was sticking out at 1:35. Maybe the low mids could have been automated down a little to accommodate for those lower notes. Overall, pretty solid.

Edited by timaeus222
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Neblix, you had a complexity to your harmonies that clearly differentiated from the original, though it might be hard to appreciate. Sometimes it could seem like there were wrong notes (i.e. sort of like blue notes but still a playable pitch---passing tones that were outside the key), but they weren't, at least to my ears. The arrangement was really the deciding factor for me.

diatonic scales are for the weak

But yes, my solo tones were random at times. There are more notes out of the key in this song than there are in the key.

Edited by Neblix
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k, I'm basically done with the track right now. Ended up using both Treasure sources and one Spectre source. xD

EDIT: I'll add a source breakdown later. I think I might have made a mistake in that I actually used only 3. I can't remember at the moment. I drew from some of the subtler portions of a source sometimes (EX: the MidEast arp in Spectre).

Edited by timaeus222
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Submitted! The sources we chose were "The Starlit Wilds" for Shield Knight and "The Schemer" for Tinker Knight.

Source breakdown

0:00 - 0:23 Tinker

0:23 - 0:38 Shield (strings)

0:58 - 1:05 Shield (strings) + Tinker (guitar)

1:05 - 1:38 Tinker (guitar)

1:38 - 1:47 Shield + Tinker

1:47 - 2:00 Tinker

2:00 - 2:03 Shield + Tinker

2:03 - 2:25 Tinker

Edited by Jonathan!
Followed timasus's lead by adding a source breakdown
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Okay, a source breakdown since I used 3 sources:

0:00 - 0:16 = Treasure Src 1 (0:00 - 0:19.2)

0:16 - 0:17 = Treasure Src 2 (0:09.1 - 0:11.8]

0:17.4 - 0:21.3, 0:25.2 - 0:29 = Spectre Src 1 with some fills on second half of each iteration (0:09.6 - 0:14)

0:32.8 - 0:48.4 = Treasure Src 1 (0:33.6 - 0:36)

0:50.4 - 0:52.2, 0:54.3 - 0:56, 0:58.2 - 1:00, 1:02 - 1:03.6 = Spectre Src 1 (0:45.9 - 0:48.1)

1:03.6 - 1:19 = Spectre Src 1 with some modal variations (1:00.6 - 1:17.9)

1:27 - 1:34.8, 1:42.6 - 1:50.4 = Spectre Src 1 (0:09.6 - 0:14)

1:50.4 - 2:01.9, 2:05.8 - 2:17.4 = Treasure Src 2 slowed down; listen to the bells (0:11.8 - 0:21.4)

Sidenote: turn on dat subwoofer ;-)

Edited by timaeus222
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