Chimpazilla Posted October 8, 2014 Share Posted October 8, 2014 (edited) In the event this makes it onto OCR, please don't post it until the Seiken Densetsu 3: Songs of Light and Darkness ReMix Project is complete. Thank you. Contact Info Your ReMixer name: Abadoss Your real name: Kenneth Edward Keyn Your email address: Your website: http://www.abadoss.net/ Your userid (number, not name) on our forums: 1901 ReMix Info Name of game(s) ReMixed: Seiken Densetsu 3 Name of arrangement: Across the Frozen Expanse Name of individual song(s) ReMixed: Another Winter Link: (WAV available at ) Additional information: Imagine if you will... A vast sea of white. The skies grey and the only light diffused through the clouds. Stillness and quiet. A stone here. A piece of wood there. The only clues that calmness has not been all this land has ever known. Yet all is white and clean as if Time herself had been the patient, but thorough, attendant to a messy lord. Beneath the surface, the wheels of ill-brought chariots and the remains of horsemen that ever did leap from foe to foe, amassing their entourage into the grave they now occupy. The snowy surface, glowing with the soft, pale light of the heavens, a burial shroud for their arrogance. Swords forged and walls risen to some great purpose now forgotten in the ice. Their pride now the soil of the earth. Time is the only victor. --- Across the Frozen Expanse is actually one of my earliest ReMixes. I started and initially finished the piece back in 2006. For context, my first posted ReMix, At the End of All Things, was added to OCR on February 2, 2006. I began by transcribing the original Another Winter in painstaking detail into sheet music. At that time, the track was only available in the raw chiptune and had not yet been converted to MIDI (an oversight I made sure to correct). With the prep work done, it was time to arrange. I isolated the dominant themes and centered everything around the marimba ostinato. I had the most fun combining the harp riff and marimba ostinato at the end of the piece into one phrase since they never appear together in the original. Over the years, I've come back to it to update the sounds and add new elements that made it stand out just a little more than it had before. I'd say this piece is probably one of my most conservative in terms of arranging, but I really like the atmosphere I was able to achieve with it. I'd characterize the quality of this piece as meditative and contemplative, a tone poem in many ways, and exposed. It's not a "save the world" type piece, but that tends to be true of a lot of my music. This is just a small slice of some part of human experience that is often overlooked. Sometimes we have to come into contact with the bareness of the small things to really understand ourselves and our place in everything. On the technical end, the current version greatly benefitted from a brand new computer that could actually handle all the different samples at once, particuliarly during the climax, and the purchase of Garritan World Instruments. Finally, FINALLY, I got a piece in with Uilleann Pipes! My Celtic heritage has been sorely lacking that addition to my works. This was, of course, arranged in Finale (version 2003 and versions 2006-2013). The samples used were Garritan Personal Orchestra 4 and the aforementioned Garritan World Instruments. -------------------- Edited November 4, 2014 by Liontamer closed decision Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chimpazilla Posted October 20, 2014 Author Share Posted October 20, 2014 (edited) Very nice mood and soundscape established here. The mix is super conservative compared to the source, the writing and instrumentation are very similar (mallets, flute, harp). Unfortunately this is one of those tracks that is sparse enough that it can't hide the mechanical nature of the sequencing, this is the type of track where very careful attention to velocity and/or note-timing variation are important. The mallet arp has been recycled over and over again, as has the harp melody pattern (there is one off-timed note that appears again and again whenever the harp plays melody, at 1:04 and again at 3:44). The Uilleann pipes sound super mechanical, and at 1:48 and 2:05 it sounds like they are playing just at the lowest border of their capacity. The flute never takes a breathing break. The strings sound very quantized and mechanical. Mixing-wise, I think things could stand to be cleaned up a little, the sounds could use a little frequency optimization with eq. Sometimes the track gets surprisingly loud (like at 2:28 ), I'm not sure what that's about but I find it uncomfortable. I feel like the arrangement is very conservative, I'd love some additional melody or background variation, but mainly it is the quantized mechanical nature of this arrangement that is pushing me toward wanting to request a resub. NO (resubmit) Edited November 4, 2014 by Chimpazilla Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jivemaster Posted November 4, 2014 Share Posted November 4, 2014 (edited) I'm quite a fan of the sound of this mix initially. Straight away it feels like a modern take on the original. My initial feelings after hearing this mix for the first time is that there isn't enough of you in this mix. The arrangement is very similar to the original. There isn't really any original sections that the track breaks into, which is a shame because you certainly have the skills to pull it off. The sound quality is decent enough for me, mostly. I do feel the sequencing is a little too stiff for a track relying on acoustic instruments exclusively. These could do with some humanisation across the entire track to make things feel a bit more believable. Please consider this if doing a resub. To me the mix feels like it's at a stage where it's ready for all the original content to be added. I'd love to hear your own interpretation of the source tune more on this one. NO (please resub) Edited November 4, 2014 by Jivemaster Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OceansAndrew Posted November 4, 2014 Share Posted November 4, 2014 I'll echo the other judges in saying that there is a good, conservative foundation here, but between the mechanical sequencing and the minimal amount of your own personalization, it's not quite ready as a fully developed arrangement for OCR. I know you have the chops to make some spectacular arrangements, so get to it! No, please resubmit Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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