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*NO* Banjo-Kazooie "Fur & Feather Rag"


Rexy
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Edited by Emunator
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  • 2 weeks later...

there's some really fun ideas in the execution of this one. there's a lot of attention paid to glissandi, fills, the articulation and length of individual notes in the lead lines, and other performance nuances that i really appreciate. this is particularly cool because the samples in question aren't very good but the extra love on them really raises the overall bar in spite of those lower-quality samples.

the arrangement is pretty solid. you do a nice job bringing in each of your sources and you don't sit on any for too long. the one part that i really didn't care for was the >30s fadeout at the end. there's a ton of great standard endings for dixeland tracks - shave and a haircut comes to mind! - and i'd encourage you to look there. a fun ending to an upbeat track is the tail on the donkey to a lot of people, so sending it out with a bang is preferable to ending with a whimper.

overall the samples aren't near good enough though to call this one postable. notably, the brass are very blatty when they're in the background. the off-beat trumpet stabs, the sustained trombone in the supporting parts, and a few times when the trumpet's the melody, the velocies used are just too strong and it results in a very blatty, obnoxious tone as a result. adjusting channel volume vs. instrument velocity should help correct that a lot, along with adding tiny spaces between some of the notes to imitate jazz articulation would make a big difference.

i think this one is real fun to listen to! some improvements in the sample quality would make this an easy vote for me.

 

 

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  • 1 month later...

This arrangement plays pretty close to each of the sources, but the way you merged them together in a fairly seamless way really helps differentiate this from the original. I also appreciated how you came back to Click Clock Woods multiple times as a sort of "chorus" in the arrangement.  I think from an arrangement perspective, you've got something great going here.

However, prophetik is right on the money that the sample and production quality is not up to par in its current form. I respect how difficult brass/wind instruments can be to work with in sampled form, and you did your best with the tools you had to make this sound humanized, the samples themselves are extremely thin and don't amount to a full-sounding overall mix. I'm honestly not sure what more you could do with this set of samples to make this work - the samples just lack the expressiveness to convey anything close to a realistic band sound. The instruments are all so exposed in the mix that every unrealistic articulation and sequencing choice remains front-and-center. 

I hate to leave it at that, but I don't feel like the sample pack you're using is doing proper justice to your arrangement. Sorry :(

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  • Emunator changed the title to 2019/08/03 - (2N) Banjo-Kazooie "Fur & Feather Rag"
  • 4 weeks later...

This is a REALLY fun arrangement.  Sadly I have to agree with my fellow Js that the samples just aren't strong enough to carry it off.  All the brass, the piano, and the banjo just sound thin, stiff, and unhumanized.  As Emunator said, I can totally appreciate how hard it is to get a humanized performance from VSTs, most especially brass which has such attitude and sass to it when played live.  You did a pretty amazing job with what you're working with, but ultimately these samples sound too stiff and thin because they are 100% exposed.  I'd love to hear this again with better samples, but dang, I love the arrangement!

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  • Emunator changed the title to *NO* Banjo-Kazooie "Fur & Feather Rag"
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