Rexy Posted November 28, 2019 Share Posted November 28, 2019 (edited) ReMixer Name: COEURLAMARI Real Name: Sarah Arsenault Website: https://coeurlamari.bandcamp.com Userid: 34683 Name of game arranged: They Bleed Pixels Name of arrangement: CLAWSHANK REDEMPTION Name of song arranged: SCOURGE Additional information about the game: Developed and published by Spooky Squid Games Soundtrack composed by Shaun Hatton (aka megashaun or DJ FINISH HIM) Released on Steam for PC, Mac and Linux on August 29, 2012 OST in full is on Mr. Hatton's Bandcamp Comments: This is the first time in the ten years I've been making my own music that I've felt ready enough to submit something to OCR's evaluation process, but even if it doesn't make the cut, I'll be more than happy to take on critique so I can grow as an artist and do better next time. They Bleed Pixels is one of my favorite indie games, and has one of my favorite game soundtracks. I waited for years after playing the game before trying to remix my favorite track, SCOURGE-- I wanted to do it justice if I was going to tackle it, and hopefully I managed that much! Imagine for a second that you're a particularly discerning shambling horror-thing hitting the R'lyeh party scene on a Friday night; this is probably what you hear thudding out of the hottest discotheque in town when you roll up. Place is packed. Yog-Sothoth probably bought everyone a round of drinks in there. It's a pretty good time. That in a nutshell was the kind of vibe I was going for. I differentiated my track from the source material mostly by trying to abridge the longer-haul, more ambient arrangement of the original and give it a more dynamic dance tune kind of sound with clearer, brighter instruments and different, varying drum patterns and some quicker movement through the melodic sections it has, since SCOURGE kind of has that grungy, bitcrushed, dark 80's dance hall aesthetic to it that reflects in the whole OST. There's a background synth pad I used to kind of apply a flanging, panning "growl" tone to try and give it a bit of a dark undercurrent, a little Lovecraftian madness under all the fun. I made this remix in an iPad app called Auxy, using some of both the free and paid-for instrument packs it comes with - it's super useful for super impoverished musicians like me. Since it's designed to be very loop-based and drum-machiney, I did my best to bend the app's limitations, give my remix a lot of variety and avoid any lazy outs to keep it from becoming too repetitive. Source link Edited December 31, 2019 by MindWanderer Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
prophetik music Posted December 2, 2019 Share Posted December 2, 2019 ok, i love your concept. super creative idea and i like the touches of how it influenced your remixing (like the sweeper wave you've got throughout). i also like that you just went for some interesting ways to keep it different, like bringing in the dance piano and going HAM on it in the second half (especially from 3:39 onward). i think that you ran into some limitations of the synth in that section in the piano since there's some machine-gun effect going on there, but it's still fun. i found the drum fills notably to be pretty similar throughout, which was offputting when there wasn't consistently a cymbal crash or some other beat-1 terminator at the end (like 3:25). that emphasized the drum-machine aspect of your sound software. working around that somehow would have been a positive. from the mastering side, the track was cranked pretty hard (i saw it clipping by nearly 1.5db in some places). i did like the meaty kick throughout. there was definitely some weird balance however. the keys really dominated when they came in in stacked chords at 3:40, for example, and through most of the middle of the track, the middle synths are louder than the melodic content. this is, honestly, a pretty good job considering the software limitations. if it's possible to export stems of this, having someone on a real machine (or even yourself!) mastering this in a DAW that allows for more flexibility would be a huge win. there's a few times i really wasn't into the arrangement here or there, but really the main thing influencing my vote is the mastering. i'd say that this is pretty close as-is, and a bit of attention to the details in the arrangement and mastering will really make for a great, fun, front-page track. NO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sir_NutS Posted December 5, 2019 Share Posted December 5, 2019 I'm hearing distortion on this one, the track might be clipping. I found it to be a bit static throughout and with some vanilla sounds that could use some spicing up (mostly the supersaw chords sound a bit dry). The drums are a bit loopy as well. Some sections sound pretty barren and I feel like the transitions could use some work... for example towards the end the drums just kinda start and stop, giving this feeling that the section is unfinished or unpolished. The arrangement is ok albeit the grooves can get repetitive. overall I don't think this is ready for the front page, it needs another mastering pass to keep the peaks under control, and the palette needs some love so it doesn't sound as vanilla. Ditto with the arrangement which needs to be less static IMO. NO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MindWanderer Posted December 31, 2019 Share Posted December 31, 2019 I have to concur: it's clipping, it's pumping, the sounds (especially the percussion) are extremely vanilla, the arrangement is repetitive and pretty close to the original, and the soundscape is frequently thin--you have large sections where the bass drops out and isn't replaced by anything. That said, I don't mean to be discouraging. There is some creative addition to the source material here, and I like where your ideas are going. It's hard to tell how much of the issues are with the composition and how much is you being hamstrung by Auxy. There are good, budget-friendly DAW's for computers, and if you must use an iPad, the DAW's for it are pretty cheap. NO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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