Good Morning, Remilia | Touhou 6 - Septette For the Dead Princess ReMix

[Palas]

Hello! This is the first remix I'm posting here, and the relative lack of Touhou remixes on OCR does bewilder me a bit. Now, this is a somewhat old project I decided to bring up again in order to improve my skills and, of course, contribute to OCR. I took the final boss theme from Touhou 6 (Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil) and tried to give it a dreamy, chill interpretation. As if Remilia — a vampire — was ready to get a good morning's sleep after a hard day's night.

Original Theme

Remix — 1st Version

While lurking, I noticed many remixers don't usually preserve the iterations of their works on their wip threads. So while I could more or less understand how their progress went, I couldn't quite listen to it, and that kinda sucks. So I want to catalog my improvements in this thread so maybe this helps someone else in the future.

Now, I would really appreciate feedback on this piece. From reading and learning here, I could more or less self-diagnose some potential problems:

• The arrangement doesn't feel as perky or as rich as it could. The strings, in particular, are kinda dull.
• The song doesn't flow all too well, I guess. Which would be fine — the original isn't exactly smooth either — but the vibe I'm going for needs the song to be butter so that the long repetition at the end feels satisfying and ~trance-like~ rather than just, well, repetitive.
• The mixing is bad, feels weak and thin. The usage of stereo is poor, so it all sound muddy and not as rich as a interpretation like that requires. The percussion needs a lot more weight, but then again so does everything else.

So this is what I got. Just because I think I can see problems doesn't mean I have the slightest clue as to how to solve them. But even after all this, I hope you enjoy it!

 

[Palas]

I had never received such detailed and constructive feedback before! Thank you so, so much!

Right, I might as well talk about what I personally like about this remix (otherwise I might as well not have posted at all) and what I want to do with it:

• I want to make something that builds up and carries the listener to some sort of apotheosis, then stays there until the song ends, repeating the same melody more or less forever. The best reference I can bring up is this song (trying my best to remember VGM that does that, and I'm sure there's plenty, but I'm bad at remembering things when I need something specific). Introduces a melody, builds it up, then restarts but with more elements, introduces the third part and then reintroduces elements from the two previous sections as counterpoints, finally letting them go in favor of a mantra-like melody that repeats itself for a long time, as if the song is "melting" on top of itself.
  
  I believe this brings a very dreamlike quality to a song, and it's what I'm trying to replicate.
• I personally love the original's intro, but every remix out there (and there are a lot of them) neglects it for reasons I don't really understand. So I'm glad that I gave it some attention, twice.
• There's a lot going on in the original, and I wanted to soften it in ambience and harmony. So I did use the source material in 1:09-1:20, as the melody that precedes the section with all instruments (2:14-2:37). There's no chord change though, exactly because I didn't want the music to jump. Maybe I should have, but in general what I want to achieve is something that feels soft and fluffy. So that was my line of thinking.

So that's it. I'll consider every suggestion very carefully, work on it and return with an update. I'm using FL Studio 11 (FL seems to be popular around here, and  while browsing I've already picked up a lot of information about workflow that I had never used before, so that'll help), though I mostly use free and/or demanding VST that my poor old laptop can't handle.

I might need another flute for the vibrato, and I've already EQ'd the stock FL strings to hell and back to make them sound somewhat acceptable. Instrumentation does need work and investment. I'm 1000% open to suggestions regarding VST you think is good, or at least reliable.