Gario Posted July 7, 2018 Share Posted July 7, 2018 (edited) Contact Information Yusou Deandre Lamar Pope https://soundcloud.com/yusou 28345 Submission Information Beetle Adventure Racing Funk Town Breeze Mount Mayhem n64, composed by Phil Western, Scott Blackwood, Brenden Tennant https://play.soundsgood.co/playlist/beetle-adventure-racing-soundtrack Nothin' much to say about this one except this game made me hate beetles because of all the cheat codes the ai used against the player which hindered you blasting past everyone to reach 1st place lol, but what I didn't hate was this very catchy tune on mount mayhem I've been humming it since I was a kid... I always felt like this was a more obscure game, but I could be totally wrong about that..this is what compelled me to do a remix from it because I don't think too many others are going too, but in this track I went for a quicker pace and added powerful strings because original song's strings were kinda omitted in the background a bit..I used a nice synth bass to replicate the funk guitar patterns and also I played a little solo near the end to keep the listener entertained...hopefully you all enjoy this as much as I enjoyed creating it. Edited January 21, 2019 by Liontamer closed decision Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MindWanderer Posted July 13, 2018 Share Posted July 13, 2018 This certainly is an obscure game, at least I've never heard of it. This is quite a conservative arrangement. It's reinstrumented and has entirely new drum and bass parts, so it's not too conservative, but the melody and pacing sound, to me, largely unchanged. What makes it hard to tell is how static the arrangement is. The drum and bass in particular are basically the same throughout most of the mix. 2:25-3:10 breaks things up a little, but the pacing is unchanged, the drums are still basically the same, and much of the accompaniment carries over as well. And then it fades out, without even an ending for punctuation. As a reinterpretation of the source, or otherwise as a part of a game's score, I think this is serviceable. But as a standalone piece of music, it drags. There need to be more changes to hold the listener's attention, and more deviations from the source would be highly welcome. NO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liontamer Posted October 3, 2018 Share Posted October 3, 2018 Pretty cool opening. The gating was a little extreme from :06-:11, but it was brief and I'm moving past it. The arrangement was melodically conservative, but distinguished itself from the original primarily with the more upbeat percussion. Good funky sound upgrade to this. I thought the balance among the parts was odd; the leads are very loud, and the portamento(?) synth first used at :39 felt shrill. 1:19-1:34 had a brief but good original section while keeping the source tune involved on the bassline. I'm really not sure why so many of the instrumentation lines were so shrill and piercing, but this was a pervasive issue throughout the track. Hopefully a musician judge can hone in on how to address that. Agreed with MindWanderer that the drums got repetitive over the long haul; the core pattern & breaks were cool, and you had a lot of dropoff to vary up the textures, but the overuse of the same patterns during the fuller sections did make this unnecessarily drag. After the brief dropout of the pattern, 2:13 would have been a good spot to bring back that same intensity level but vary up the core pattern; same with 2:32 and 3:11 after other brief drops. Usually I don't harp on fadeouts, but this was definitely a case at 3:36 where it felt like a cop-out; I think that's it part because the sections felt repetitive, so the fadeout felt tacked on as a result. The big issue with your writing/arrangement overall, it did feel repetitive in the sense that you were having different textures, but the part-writing was just cut-and-pasted in and out, e.g. when you've heard the string line doing the source melody once, you just hear it that way copied in time and time again; same with the gliding synth, and drum patterns; the track tends to coast on repeating the core lines. Do what you can to vary up the presentation even further; more variations on the core part-writing that were instead copy-pasta'ed might be enough to do the trick. Good base here though, Deandre, and nice energy here. It's well in the right direction of what we're looking for with an interpretive arrangement; you've personalized the sound, and you have some good dynamic contrast with some of the percussion dropoffs; now let's not let the track feel like the main ideas are just being recycled without enough variation. NO (resubmit) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sir_NutS Posted January 8, 2019 Share Posted January 8, 2019 I'm going to disagree with the other Js here and say that I think this is good enough for the front page, albeit barely. The repetitive nature of the drums didn't bother me as there was some variation here and there, and they served their purpose which was to bring energy and a sense of speed to the arrangement. I do think the artist tried quite a few things to break the monotony, with fills, breaks, glitch/panning effects, etc. Some of the parts feel like they're copy-pasted throughout the mix however there is re-arrangement found in most of the lead instruments, and even some harmonies come with interesting variations. There's some call-and-response going on as well which I don't find in the original (1:35) Plus, this re-arrangement comes with extra layers of harmonies and depth compared to the source. The production is clean and every instrument seems to have its own space. There's modulation and detailing going on with the textures and leads. Nothing jumps out to me as egregious. I honestly wasn't expecting much after I listened to the source which is pretty bland in my opinion, but this mix was very fun to listen to and I feel it has its merits. The fadeout ending though, not cool. But that's rarely if ever ground for rejection to me. YES Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nutritious Posted January 8, 2019 Share Posted January 8, 2019 Really like the instrumentation here. Really love that bass sound, which evokes old-school drum 'n' bass music. Wasn't a big fan of the stark gating at the start and end, but they were pretty brief in both instances. Clear connections to original (with very similar structure), but with some rewriting of parts and much more interesting presentation. Good production overall, though the part balancing could be a bit better. I was really on board with this for about 2/3 of the track, but then the repetitive nature of the arrangement really started to show as it really spends a lot of time treading the same ground we've already heard. I'm rarely a fan of fade-outs and this one is no exception. The arrangement with way it's structured and fadeout sounds more like a remade song from OST for a new game in the series, rather than its own standalone song. Really cool ideas, sounds, and for the most part execution, but I think there's some room to cut down on repetition and real ending (please!). Personally, I really like this song and if it doesn't pass, would love to hear it come back. NO (borderline) resubmit, please Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DarkeSword Posted January 21, 2019 Share Posted January 21, 2019 This is a killer track. I'm really not feeling the complaints about the repetition. The percussion stays fresh, the syncopation rocks, and I dig the whole texture with the strings and synths. I will co-sign one complaint though: that fadeout is no good. I use fadeouts all the time and I will go on the record in saying that this is the wrong way to do a fadeout. Let's break it down: The fadeout is only 4-bars long. This is really bad in a song that relies a lot on groove. It's just too short of a fadeout. The volume drops significantly, right on the downbeat. It sounds like it's just a single-curve with no adjustment to the tension (i.e. it's just...linear). Despite the song fading out, you can still hear when it ends. Why fadeout at all? Here's how I'd fix it: a song like this needs a fadeout of at least 8 bars. I would do 12. Use a double-curve with the tension adjusted so that the fadeout is VERY gradual when it starts, then drops out faster, and then returns to a gradual fade into silence. In FLStudio it looks like this: And while the fadeout is happening, just solo/doodle in your lead over your vamping rhythm section. This gives the impression that the song is continuing, but ALSO that it's not REALLY important to hear the rest. I wanna vote YES on this but I'm gonna say NO. That fadeout is really jarring. Let's fix it up and get this resubbed, fast-tracked, and posted. Eino Keskitalo 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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