Sonic 3 - Boss Theme (Act 2) Orchestral Cover

[OC/DC]

Hello everyone!

Here is a short orchestral remix I did, using the Sonic 3 Boss theme.

I hope you enjoy it!

 

[Rozovian]

This is marked mod review, and nothing's happened in the past months? Our bad. Unless it was only recently tagged. I only noticed it because of your username, when this thread appeared among others marked for mod rev. We should look into how we do things so stuff doesn't fall between the cracks like this.

 

High sustained strings, and the choir when exposed feel rather sample-y, but the rest of the instrumentation is convincing enough for me. If orchestras weren't rather expensive to hire for realz, and judging only by the sound and not the game music remix context, I might believe this was a real orchestra. What samples and reverb are you using?

 

No source link, but I looked it up anyway. I think cover is a good description for it. Good orchestral covers are a bit more elaborate than guitar or electronic covers generally are, in that there's more arrangement that goes into it, but it feels a lot like a cover rather than a brand new arrangement. I don't think it's too conservative for ocr, but I can't say for sure. It's rather short, but I think there's plenty of expanding on the source in there.

 

It depends on whether the conservative structure of the remix is too cover-y for ocr, but I can't think of anything else that would warrant a NO for this. Possibly too short or too conservative, but I leaning towards this getting accepted if submitted. Really nice track.

[timaeus222]

The realism on this is not too bad, actually. There's some proper velocity variation. The problem I keep hearing here in the orchestration is that the strings are pulsing in and out in an unrealistic way whenever they are playing legato (such as the cello(?) at 0:38 - 0:51). From 0:51 to 1:02 it's easier to be OK with it since the cello is not as exposed. It shows throughout that you did do some volume or CC11 automation somewhere, but it has room for improvement. The piano isn't particularly realistic on the chords either, but that's probably a problem with the velocity curve and stiff sequencing of the chords, and the samples sound like they're lacking round robins. It's a bit better on the arpeggios, but on the chords, you should add a bit of timing slop/humanization to the chords so it's not 100% quantized. Even a few ms helps.

 

Looking at the structure, it starts off sort of medium energy, building it up with the choir a bit, and then breaks it down for that cello leading. Later on the textures do change, such as the introduction of the piano. The dynamics continue to build towards the ending as the textures get denser, so you do have some good dynamics going on. The mixing also isn't lacking that much, so you're on the right track there. Pretty good cohesion on the reverb.

 

In terms of literal length, it feels short, and technically, in terms of relative length, it doesn't feel short, but I believe the judges would want some more literal length to this arrangement somewhere in the middle to increase the dynamic range a bit more and allow more substantial interpretation.

 

This is getting there, but I think you should keep working on this. It's not an easy pass. Work on reducing the amount of hardness and stiffness in the piano chords, and making the strings less pulsed and more phrased, and perhaps extend the arrangement to around 2.5 to 3 minutes if you can (it's not necessary IMO, as the arrangement still feels complete to me).