*NO* Populous 'The Battle Between Good and Evil' *RESUB*

[Gario]

Previous Decision

Hi OC Remix!

I am emailing you to re-submit a remix of the title music from Populous (1989).

My ReMixer Name: Tonal Bliss

My Real Name: Christopher Schmenk

My Email Addresses: 

My Website: http://www.tonalbliss.com/

My Forum User ID: I can't find my forum member ID number. However, my username is SegaMon and I joined back in June of 2003.

Name of Game Arranged: Populous

Name of Arrangement: The Battle Between Good and Evil

Name of Individual Song Arranged: Title Screen Theme

Original Composer: Rob Hubbard

Systems Game was Released On: Amiga, Genesis, Super Nintendo, Master System, DOS, Atari ST, PC-Engine, and others

Link to the Remix: 

Link to Original Song (for the Amiga): https://youtu.be/xBSRXweG7E8

Comments About the Remix: "I spent so many hours playing the Genesis (Mega Drive) version of Populous. Although the gameplay music was only a heartbeat sound, I kept on remembering the theme song from the title screen. Composed originally by Rob Hubbard with the original version being for the Amiga, the Populous main theme is an iconic piece of video game music. It is a very fitting song for this unique and revolutionary video game. For this remix, I orchestrated and re-arranged his original music. Included in the piece are strings, organ, choir, brass, woodwinds, and a prominent percussion. The whole song feels like it is building and that is what I intended."

Reason for Re-Submission: Comments made on my original submission of this piece mostly hinged on the poor quality of instrument sounds, especially of the trumpet. I found free-to-use sounds (such as old Sound Fonts) to create the last version. Now that I have acquired Komplete 11 Ultimate which comes with many orchestral instruments it was time to improve this remix. I hope that this remix has now met the posting criteria of one of my favorite websites: OCRemix.org! Thank for you for your time and consideration.


Sincerely,

Christopher Schmenk

[MindWanderer]

Unfortunately, despite the general better quality of the samples used here, Gario's criticisms from the last submission still hold.  If you'll take another look at that, you'll see that while he did criticize the quality of the trumpet sample, but felt like the other samples were adequate, just not humanized well.  So now the trumpet (and the snare) are done with better samples, but are still articulated in an extremely artificial way, as are the other instruments.  The swells in particular sound like they're just having the gain raised and lowered, in patterns a human wouldn't be able to perform, rather than being played louder and softer.

I think you'll have to iterate over this one a few times before you get the humanization down.  I see you already have it up in the WIP forum, so hopefully folks will give you some more ongoing feedback as you continue to work on it.  It's usually quicker to flag a post as "ready for review" and get feedback from a workshop mod than to wait for the whole judging process, and workshop mods will catch most of what the judges will, and you can keep revising and changing the prefix as many times as you like.

NO

[Gario]

I will say, first and foremost, that this is quite an improvement from the version you had prior. The sample quality has improved quite a bit, and there is definitely some attention paid to the phrasing in this (moreso than the last version of this). The snare pops out better, and that trumpet is FAR more impressive this time around.

MindWanderer does have a point on how the dynamics are applied, though. At many points in the track it does sound like the overall gain is being turned up in order to produce dynamics (1:09 - 1:10 is a great example of this, but it occurs throughout the arrangement). In order to get around this issue, rather than using gain to create dynamics for the whole track (or section), utilize the volume envelop of the specific instruments that you want to swell. Many of the instruments really CAN swell in that fashion (strings, brass, woodwinds, etc.), but it's very strange sounding when all the instruments swell in exactly the same way at the same time - orchestras would never be able to so something like that as precisely as this track often does.

I would argue that most of the articulations are at a decent place in this (though the choir sample at 1:36 - 2:13 still has an attack that swells into every note). The articulations aren't perfect, but I don't think they quite sink the arrangement. The snare is still pretty dry in comparison to the rest of the instruments, though - a little bit of reverb would go a long way in making it sound like it's a part of the ensemble.

It's not quite there yet, but it's much closer than it was. The sample issue was definitely solved (congrats on getting Kontact 11, by the way!), and the articulations and phrasing has been improved, but the use of mixing gain for dynamics at many points is very distracting. That's the big reason for rejection on my end, but if you could give the snare some reverb in order to match the wetness levels of the rest of the orchestra and fine tune some of the articulations so they don't have such a high attack envelope needlessly (the choir sample, some of the brass) that would put this in range of a solid pass for me.

Thanks for revisiting it, and I hope more people will pay attention on the WIP boards next time, since it seems they didn't give this any love the last time it was posted there.

NO

[DragonAvenger]

Not too much to add here that hasn't been mentioned. Having listened to only this version, I felt like a lot of the instruments still need some work to sound more humanized, and I might suggest changing the velocities of the attacks in areas to help add some more realistic articulations as well. I do think this needs some more work, but I'm glad you're sticking with it; everything you improve here can be applied to future mixes!

NO