Megaman III - Protoman's Whistle Concert

[JohnStacy]

Soundcloud Link

This is a remix that is a little different than normal.  It took me a little while to think of what to call this.  It's somewhat ethereal and surrealist in feel due to the echo, bending, and fading in and out of parts.

This is an arrangement of Protoman's Whistle Concert, or the epilogue from Megaman III.  I arranged the track for 16 french horns, taking advantage of a 4 octave range from G1-G5.  I finished the arrangement fairly quickly and did the recording in about 4 hours, recording all 16 parts in a single session.

I then spent about a week editing it.  The editing was slow for 5/7 of those days due to me being out of town and only able to work while on the road when I wasn't driving (I split the driving with my wife).

The editing was quite a monster task, using many plugins and effects, and extensive automation.  I am satisfied with the result.  Everything in this track is created with live recorded french horn and effects plugins.  Nothing else.

[Starphoenix]

This sounds really good. Reminds me of a heroic theme you would hear in some old school noir film.

Not really familiar with horn playing, so I cannot give much advice in the way of that, but the song feels muddy as times. 2:22-2:33 there are frills or something going on in the background that are being overpowered. 

Really good stuff. Look forward to hearing where you take this!

[JohnStacy]

I did a lot of experimentation with what I could do with foreground/background sounds.  2:22-2:33 is supposed to be background stuff.  Should I make it more distinct?  I could clean up the reverb a bit, possibly spread it out a little with panning.

Thank you for your thought.

[JohnStacy]

Please forgive me, but could you clarify your post?  I'm having difficulty parsing your meaning.

[DarkeSword]

It's spam, John. Sorry about that.

[JohnStacy]

Bump.

I am sorry to bump, but it has been a month with no evaluation, and I'm not sure what do to here.

Please forgive me.

[Gario]

Argh, something I missed in the heat of things. I'll give you a proper eval shortly, so keep an ear out. My apologies.

EDIT: Apologies once again for missing this on the panel - I've been chewing on it on and off, so it's not that I wasn't aware of it. It's just that something always seemed to take time away once I started making an eval for it. Not this time - on with the review!

EVAL

An all French horn arrangement of Protoman's ballade? I'm definitely digging the idea - it has a diverse range, and the timbre is really rich. The performances are actually quite good, but I do feel there is some issue with syncing your trills from time to time. At 2:16, for example, those trill sound like a wash of sound rather than a trill because the two aren't quite lining up right. It's tough, but especially with those clusters throughout they need to be pretty precise if you want the listener to hear them as something more than background clusters as well. It's not always an issue, but your trill syncing is a bit hit-or-miss.

The performance at 0:52 - 0:55 is a little too loose with the tuning, though that's about the only spot where it's problematic, so nice work on the performances in general. At 1:31 - 1:33 the theme has a note that's a step lower. It's not bad, per se, but it IS a bit unexpected - was that intentional? No worries if it was, but I thought I'd point that out anyway.

Some of the effects are excessive in this. In the beginning the delay is too strong; every little slide and detail clashes against everything else. Definitely make the decay of that delay stronger, so that the little details don't clash as hard against your backing instruments. The reverse delay effect at 3:58 sounds strange, especially considering it's not used much prior to that point. I'd suggest either using normal delay or leaving clean at that point; without any other context or preparation, that effect doesn't work well.

It's a great piece, though - despite all the nitpicking I've done here, it would still have a decent chance of passing the panel; if I had to guess, it would probably be a pass. A borderline pass from some (including myself), due to what I mentioned, but a pass nonetheless. Make some tweaks to the timing of the trills, let the delay decay faster and change the effect at 3:58 and it would be a much stronger pass, in my book. Hope that helps!

[JohnStacy]

Thank you for feedback, I'll apply things soon!

The tuning thing at :52 I'm not picking up on, maybe I'm just missing it.

I think some of the issues here are mainly a problem where what I was going for isn't executed well.  The trills for example, are just straight eighth notes put through a delay to sound like a wash of sound.  It was a way to make a cluster, not a trill.  The groups of 5 were actually delayed differently, triplet delay for the top part, dotted eighth for the second, so on like that.  What do you think I can do to make it sound more like a cluster of sound and less like a badly executed trill?

At 1:31, that note was intentionally changed to work with the harmony I was going for there, I tried to make the original note work as an extension, but it sounded wrong.

The delay thing I will definitely fix.  It won't take much work to make that happen.

Reverse delay effect in the end is another problem with execution.  I was going for the same wash of sound that happened earlier, however, I don't have a delay plugin that works with tempo changes.  The tempo change at the end is very slight, but it's enough to make the plugin feedback.  Do you have suggestions of how I can fix this?  I want a delay that can use tempo information so I can stagger it like I did earlier, but also one where it won't feedback so hard.  The reason it cuts off is because the feedback is a very weird 1960s B sci fi movie kind of sound effect, and I'm not digging that, so I automated the volume to drop instantly at the end of the note.  If you can point me in the way of such a plugin, that would probably fix the above problem as well.

Thank you for your feedback!