Super Mario Bros 3 - Ending

[JohnStacy]

So I recently submitted a track to multiple places, one competition, an OCR album, and then to the site.

I had to finish the track on a tight deadline.  I worked hard on it, and was very proud of the end result.  I got feedback from the community around the competition and it was overwhelmingly positive and very well received.  Thinking it was a nice track I was proud of, I submitted it to OCR.  It went through the panel fairly fast. Here is the thread in Judges' Decisions

Originally the track was written in Ab major, but then it went a little high in the trumpet part, so I wrote it down in the key of Gb, which was a bad idea, since it made recording quite difficult, but the performances of the brass were not the problem here.

The rhythm section parts (piano, bass, drums, and there is a guitar in there but you can't hear it) were generated in band in a box, then edited to fit the track.  The piano and bass worked really well, and for all anybody knows so did the guitar.  The drums were one of the things that kept getting shot at, which now is something I can't unhear.  The other thing was the arrangement, which went on a little while without changes in energy.

Here is the track, the version I submitted to all these places.

I'm putting this in Workshop as a work in progress to get more feedback on what I can do differently with the arrangement, and what I can do to not have to record everything again.  I might just program the drums myself or record them in manually with a midi keyboard, since I now have better drum sounds. 

[Glejs]

Perhaps if you try and shorten it? The middle section made it a bit long.. since this middle section it's more or less a repetition of the first part. When I jumped straight from 1:50 to 3:17 it felt fresh, love the stuff from 3:17 and onwards. 

You could also try to have the more gentle opening part come back again, after 5:17.. instead of fading it out. Try and add the part starting at 0:33 straight after 5:17. It makes a nice subtle change in "pace". And then fade it out from there.

The double kick drum every other beat, do something about that. Makes it a bit too predictable.

Regarding songs which are 5+ minutes, I think all my coming game music remixes will be around 5 and up to 10-12 minutes long.. Not looking forward to reviews, if there will be any