I've remade the Ice Cap Zone remix and...

[Sawneek]

A few months ago, I've made a Ice Cap Zone remix from Sonic The Hedgehog 3, and I've posted that remix here, but...

THERE ARE A LOT OF ERRORS ON THAT REMIX!!!

So, I've created a new mix and this is so much better, I've learned a loooooot of things in this time

Enjoy

Original track:

 

[germanjazzguy]

it starts to get a little muddy around 0:16... too many high voices in my opinion. what are you doing there?

 

[timaeus222]

Are you sidechaining your kick with your bass? You seem to be doing it with your synth pads.

[Sawneek]

2 hours ago, timaeus222 said:

Are you sidechaining your kick with your bass? You seem to be doing it with your synth pads.

The only thing that I've sidechained is the saw chords.

[timaeus222]

In that case, it would help to do so, because it may be what @germanjazzguy is hearing. It's not exactly obvious, but I hear it too: if you don't sidechain the kick with the bass, since your kick happens to have a long meaty tail, the frequencies at 20~100 Hz can clash with the bass at nearly the same frequency range, creating what can be called muddiness (clashing bass frequencies). If you try EQing the bass down where the kick's bass frequencies are, it sacrifices power for clean bass, which you probably don't want.

Sidechaining the kick with the bass allows the bass to duck as the kick plays, and there should be a bit less muddiness as a result, and you don't have to sacrifice some power for a clean bass frequency blend.

[Sawneek]

30 minutes ago, timaeus222 said:

In that case, it would help to do so, because it may be what @germanjazzguy is hearing. It's not exactly obvious, but I hear it too: if you don't sidechain the kick with the bass, since your kick happens to have a long meaty tail, the frequencies at 20~100 Hz can clash with the bass at nearly the same frequency range, creating what can be called muddiness (clashing bass frequencies). If you try EQing the bass down where the kick's bass frequencies are, it sacrifices power for clean bass, which you probably don't want.

Sidechaining the kick with the bass allows the bass to duck as the kick plays, and there should be a bit less muddiness as a result, and you don't have to sacrifice some power for a clean bass frequency blend.

Thanks!!

[timaeus222]

Oh, also, in terms of having overlapping treble frequencies, it may just appear to be that way because the saw chords are very detuned. Not necessarily a bad thing, as soundcloud encodes in 128 kbps, which can degrade your upper-treble frequencies anyhow. I think it sounds sufficiently well-mixed up there.

What I would examine are the drops at 1:00 and 2:13. To me, they kind of don't live up to the hype you create in your buildups. I'm not sure if a cymbal is just buried in the mix, but an audible cymbal at those transition points should help improve the drops. I also think at 1:43, the lead could be more different in tone from the panning arpeggio. Right now it sounds like the same waveform, which blends together "too well" and decreases the clarity of the mix. What if you added a filter LFO for motion, and some distortion for harmonic strength?

Other than those nitpicks, I think this is pretty close to what you were going for.

[Sawneek]

2 hours ago, timaeus222 said:

Oh, also, in terms of having overlapping treble frequencies, it may just appear to be that way because the saw chords are very detuned. Not necessarily a bad thing, as soundcloud encodes in 128 kbps, which can degrade your upper-treble frequencies anyhow. I think it sounds sufficiently well-mixed up there.

What I would examine are the drops at 1:00 and 2:13. To me, they kind of don't live up to the hype you create in your buildups. I'm not sure if a cymbal is just buried in the mix, but an audible cymbal at those transition points should help improve the drops. I also think at 1:43, the lead could be more different in tone from the panning arpeggio. Right now it sounds like the same waveform, which blends together "too well" and decreases the clarity of the mix. What if you added a filter LFO for motion, and some distortion for harmonic strength?

Other than those nitpicks, I think this is pretty close to what you were going for.

Sorry about that mix errors.

I'm new in this, I started 1 year ago, but I think I've learned a lot of things despite being short time. I've bought a studio monitors (headphones) a month ago and that has help me a lot to notice mix errors and things like that.

Thanks, I will take into account your advice for next time ><

[timaeus222]

No problem; they're not major things, and this actually sounds good already. It's just advice for further improvement.

[Smooth4lyfe1987]

This is not bad actually

My only thing is that YOU NEED TO BRING MORE POW IN THE DROP

At :45 seconds the build up is nice, but when the beat comes at :59 seconds, there is no oomph at all

[Rozovian]

I wouldn't say there's no oomph at all, it works quite well actually. I would expect a louder crash or a bit of a pause just before hitting, but it works fine as-is, imo.

eval:

Yeah, it's got issues with frequency overlap muddying up the track's mids. There's also part of the arpeggio where the middle (the one most repeated) cuts through better than the others, making it stand out a bit too much, so it sounds like that's a set of random off-beat 8th notes.

I'm not a fan of the higher-pitch lead. It's too simple. It's not expressive enough, doesn't do anything interesting with the melody either. Either of those things would help make the track more interesting. At 1:42 I'm distracted from the melody that enters because there are so many other things bleeping around in roughly the same frequency range. You could clean that up with different mixing, different sound design, or different writing. And I think you'll have to do at least one of those. 

There's a lot of panning going on around that part, too. It's a little annoying, but if the panned track was softer, it shouldn't be a problem.

The ending is abrupt. You just stop playing new notes. There are many ways to end a track, but justing stopping like this is not one of them. Rarely, anyway. It often works to end the track on the first chord in the chord sequence. In this case, minor scale, you could end on i, III, or possibly VI (first chord, which is minor, or third of sixth chords, which are major). I would recommend the first.

Other parts of the track similarly end with instruments just dropping out. That's something worth looking into. As is repetition. I don't think this is too repetitive for ocr, but I think it's needlessly repetitive regardless. You can do a lot to vary up a track, like having an alternate set of chords for some of the repetitions, an alternate take on the melody for some of its loops, even just a change in the articulation of the lead can change things up enough.

You've got pretty good drums and nice buildups, and the overall structure of the track works well. You've still got a bit of work left to do on this track before I think it would pass the panel, but you're off to a good start, with all the important elements in place. Nice work. Keep at it.