Rexy Posted March 23, 2020 Share Posted March 23, 2020 (edited) Contact Information ReMixer name - Reuben Spiers Real Name: Reuben Spiers Submission Information Game: JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Heritage for the Future Name of Arrangement: The Fool's Dog Name of Original Song: Iggy's Theme Featuring GameroftheWinds and SubversiveAsset on sax. How much cowbell is enough? Trick question. Enough doesn't exist. Edited June 26, 2020 by Emunator Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
prophetik music Posted March 27, 2020 Share Posted March 27, 2020 almost 2db of headroom. right off the bat, there's some real weird EQing on everything, notably the drums. it sounds really, really clogged up, like i'm hearing it through a pillow. there's no highs in it at all, even in the cymbals. beyond that, from a technical perspective, both saxes are pretty out of tune and need to at least be run through some autotune software if not re-recorded entirely. soprano sax is very difficult to play in tune to begin with, more so if it's a straight horn (which this sounds like), more so if it's on an open-chamber mouthpiece (which this sounds like), more so if it's in the lower ranges. neither horn sounds like it has any verb applied either. some room reverb - just a little! - will help them not sound so dry and exposed like they do here. another thing that's a little odd is the guitar - it sounds extra-compressed. are you compressing that significantly and then applying one overall that's also significant? the combination might be why it sounds so pumpy. from an arrangement perspective, i thought that this is a fun concept. there's some variance in the melody and in how you've realized it. i did notice that you play that opening riff with the piano and horns a total of four times essentially the same every time, and there's two sections that follow that opening riff in order without much change at least twice if not three times. while i like the idea of the arrangement, i think that creating a bridge section would help avoid that samey feel, as well as varying up a bit how each section sounds. a common technique in similar songs is to allow one of the lead horns to glam up the sustains with riffs, and that helps with interest during sustained notes (you don't listen to great sax players because their sustains are beautiful!). overall this is a great first run at the track. there's a lot of little things you can do arrangement-wise to really flesh out your ideas and make it more engaging throughout. i'd say also you need another pass with the EQ, compression, and limiter to make sure you're not over-shaping the sound. NO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rexy Posted May 6, 2020 Author Share Posted May 6, 2020 I appreciate the more folky direction with this one. The initial treatment has some pleasant subtractive arranging with the banjo and acoustic guitar rhythm parts providing that country swagger the original didn't have. I find it interesting that prophetik brought up adding a bridge, as that second variation with all the solos technically counts as one. But even then, it's underdeveloped - the accompaniment does the same thing in all three renditions, and the first and third have the same melodies. The amount of copy-paste and underdevelopment here is excessive, so consider going into your second and third variations to shake up the accompaniment writing more. The mixdown also has room for improvement. On the plus side, the performances are tight and free of artifacts, and I don't mind the guitar tone as it fits with the folky setup. Yet, there's 2dB of headroom here with the peaks hardly going above -3, so you have room to keep pushing more out of your master. I also second prophetik's concern with there being minimal high end; it's for this reason that the cymbals don't have a presence at all, and more importantly, neither does your cowbell. With your kick and snare also getting buried underneath other parts, consider going back into the mixing and see if you can make some EQ cuts to get them to stick out. As of right now, it's not a bad tech demo, and I'm surprised especially by how tight the performances are - but the underdeveloped arrangement and rough mixdown are major roadblocks stopping it from going further. It'll be neat if you're able to revise this track, add more to the writing variations, and give it a firm technical cleanup. NO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Emunator Posted June 26, 2020 Share Posted June 26, 2020 Gotta agree with the others that this has a very "demo" quality to it. That's not inherently a bad thing - there's some wonderful ideas here, and even more diverse of an instrument selection than normal for you I listened to the remix before the source, and I was not expecting what I heard at all, which means that you did a pretty good job creating an arrangement that is unexpected I'm not going to rehash the same mixing critiques other than co-sign Bev and Brad, but this suffers from the same lackluster mastering and production as some of your other recent mixes. Thankfully, I don't hear anything majorly wrong with the recording quality, but the production could be so much more punchy and energetic to match the performances you have going on. Practice A/B comparisons between professionally-mastered tracks that you enjoy and I think you'll hear the difference in a way that can be actionable for your future mixes! I noticed prophetik called attention to the opening piano riff and its repetitiveness, and I also wanted to highlight how that part felt pasted on and lacked cohesion with the rest of the mix. The piano riffs elsewhere in the song sound much better integrated, but that particular riff just sounds awkward and dry. This one has great potential and is one of the most energetic, fun arrangements I've heard from you, but now it needs a mixdown that does justice to your performances. I hope this feedback is helpful, I am excited to see how you improve and keep mastering your craft! NO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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