*NO* Super Mario World 'The Cursed Tower'

[Liontamer]

Submission Info.

Game Name: Super Mario World

Arrangement Name: The Cursed Tower

Original song name: Sub Castle BGM
Song Link:

Comments: Highly influenced by noisy instrumental post rock with a touch of hardware synth. The mix, however, is a bit smoother than for example "Not for want of trying" by Maybeshewill. A song which was a big inspiration for the piece.

 

Contact Info.
ReMixer name: AQ64

Real name: Arvid Karlsson

email:

userid: 35896

 

Edited August 4 by Rexy

[Liontamer]

This started off very ear-catching, though I thought the rock instruments were muddy, which matches the style of "Not For Want of Trying" to some extent. This could have been sharper/clearer, but the track isn't broken with the mixing as is.

Quite the volume drop at :39; not sure what the point of that was, but it did provide some dynamic contrast. Love the arrangement style from 1:04-1:19, then the volume raises back up.

At 1:50, the melody came back in, repeats ad nauseum over until 2:38, which was just way too long without something to break up the monotony. There's something else added in at 2:06, but because the mixing was so muddy to begin with, the added part doesn't really register besides adding more clutter to the background.

And then it ended fairly abruptly. Damn, well, I could see the case for approving this as is, but without the last minute of a sub-3-minute arrangement having some further ideas or development, I can't justify that myself. In "Not for Want of Trying," you have the ever-present cynical spoken word stuff providing something changing in the foreground; without something functioning in a similar vein here, those repeating bars drag too much.

Good luck with the rest of the vote. I love the arrangement style, Arvid, but this just needs some more arrangement substance and/or variation for the final minute to put this over the top. Consider also making the track's mixing clearer if possible. I really want to see this track make it in some form, and you have a great base here.

NO (resubmit)

[Sir_NutS]

The mix here is very inconsistent, the intro arpeggio is quite loud, but ducks away the moment the song starts in full, it's a bit of a big contrast here because the arpeggio is bright, loud and high-frequency rich but when the song kicks in everything sounds very muffled.  There's a distortion effect first appearing around 0:29 that sounds like some type of digital distortion applied to a sample, possibly downsampling, and I'm not sure it fits or contributes to the betterment of the mix... but then again this could also be the sound effect of Bowser's fireballs too.  I'm not sure but either way I don't think it's very good.

The arrangement is very repetitive and outside of the adaptation I'm not hearing a lot of contributions to the interpretation.  There may be some different harmonies involved but they're very hard to make out due to the messy mix.  I get you went for an intentional noisy approach here, but you can have a noisy "clean" mix.  Bands like Tool or The Glitch Mob,  use noise and droning, uncomfortable textures a lot but it's all very cohesive within the mix.  Not asking for uber professional quality mix but I feel this could be brought up to our bar which is much lower than that.  The file we got also has several seconds of silence at the end that should be cut.

Not a bad idea here but needs work on the mix balance and expansion of the original.

NO

[Jivemaster]

Blippy intro leads us into this noisey instrumental rock interpretation. There is some lack of separation between each element, even for this style choice. The lead synth playing the main motif is quiet compared to other elements. The portion at 1:19 gets quite noisey making the each part difficult to hear. The wall of sound approach stylistically fits, but I feel has taken too much precedence over an acceptable level of clarity. Not much in the way of variation across the arrangement, a departure from the main progression would have been appreciated. You’ve hit some of your chosen stylistic requirements, however there is more that could be done here to improve mixing levels and overall clarity.

NO