Gario Posted February 15, 2018 Share Posted February 15, 2018 (edited) RebeccaETripp Rebecca Tripp http://www.crystalechosound.com/ ID: 48262 Game(s): Final Fantasy 6 Song Title: End of the World Suite Songs Remixed: Dancing Mad (all movements, because apparently I’m a masochist) Comments: Here’s a link to the song on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqrqwtxcdHY Maybe it’s a bit too close to the source, but I figured it still couldn’t hurt to send it. I tried to take it in a more operatic and less rockestra direction, haha! Edited February 26, 2018 by Liontamer closed decision Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gario Posted February 15, 2018 Author Share Posted February 15, 2018 I like Rebecca's work, and I LOVE FF6's Dancing Mad, so I was expecting to get blown away by this one. I hear what this was going for - the more heavy use of operatic soloists in this coupled with the more reverb-heavy setting does make this sound like it's trying to hit something like a live opera performance. I won't hold it against this mix, but opera really does fall flat when the lyrics are taken away. Neither here nor there, though. Concerning this arrangement, I think Rebecca calls one thing out right away correctly - it plays the source too safe. One of her greatest strengths - her orchestration skills - seemed hampered by this as a result, which is a real shame. Many parts share similar instrumentation to the source, with a few parts layered on top (like the aforementioned soloists). The overall mix is too quiet. Stacking it against other orchestral arrangements from OCR (and from Rebecca herself) it sounds far quieter than it should. On a different note, though, I do have to commend the laughing at 6:02 - it sounds absolutely great, and is a suitable replacement to the classic Kefka laugh. These things really add up over a nine minute arrangement of Dancing Mad. As much as it pains me, I don't think I could pass this as it stands - it does need to take some more risks to stand out from our current roster of Dancing Mad arrangements, and the levels do need to be raised. It's a tough source to handle, and I give my praise for this arrangement for tackling it, but I'm going to pass on this. NO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MindWanderer Posted February 16, 2018 Share Posted February 16, 2018 I can't argue with any of what Gario said, but I will break it up into two parts, as the first two-thirds (up to 6:00) are drastically different from the last third. The first part is largely a subtractive approach, removing a lot of the depth and complexity of the source and replacing it with some simple, often thin, vocals. It's not a good trade-off, and while it's a cool idea, it comes off as a downgrade of not only the original, but of Rebecca's usual heavily-orchestrated work. The second part largely reverses the issues in the first part. There are a lot of layers going on, some of them quite complex, but many of them have a lot of reverb and long decays, as well as conflicting frequencies, that blend everything into each other. Both parts are, also as Gario mentioned, overly quiet for a bombastic orchestral arrangement. It's also mostly lacking in the low end that gives arrangements like this a lot of their power. This is less an issue in the second part than the first, but strangely, with all those layers, they mostly all reside in the mid to high range, aside from some brief kettle drums. There's a good foundation here, but the first two-thirds of it need additional content, creativity, and depth, while the last third needs to be less muddy, and nearly all of it needs more low-end and could benefit from more volume. NO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liontamer Posted February 26, 2018 Share Posted February 26, 2018 Well, subtractive is a valid arrangement approach, but it's gotta be clicking. Unlike the others, I actually felt there were enough changes to the instrumentation and overall textures to have this significantly stand apart from the source tune despite the structure being so similar; IMO, they need to be much more open to arrangements like this. That said, I also thought the textures here were extremely thin and didn't really gel together (which had nothing to do with the volume and more with the instrumentation not filling out the soundscape). For example, the vox programming was pretty exposed, as one example, but pretty much every sample sounded uncharacteristically thin and exposed for a piece of Rebecca's. Without percussion more involved, it's hard to see where the textural depth would majorly come from, but obviously there's more than one way to approach it. NO (resubmit) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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