Rexy Posted January 29, 2021 Share Posted January 29, 2021 (edited) Hello, ReMixer name: Jack Forceman Email address: UserId: 28858 Name of game arranged: Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (SEGA Genesis) Name of arrangement: Azure Trance Name of individual song arranged: Azure Lake Theme Additional comment: Track was arranged way back in 2012, and put away in a "time capsule". Now I decided to put it out for public enjoyment, as I currently spend more time composing music, although still as a hobby. Edited August 30, 2021 by MindWanderer Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Emunator Posted April 10, 2021 Share Posted April 10, 2021 Props to you for pulling something out of the vault and sending it our way! There's always a risk of something sounding dated, but it's also really unfortunate when a great arrangement languishes in the vault, unheard by anyone. I am fond of this throwback style of trance! Your production is pretty good across the board, although there's a few builds/transitions that are noticeably slammed against the limiter and causing some unwanted distortion (for example, :27, 1:23, and 2:58, it sounds like you have a kick that might be double-layered and not balanced correctly.) The ending also cuts off extremely abruptly and would need a clean fadeout. My bigger gripe with the arrangement is unfortunately the repetitiveness of it. Listening to the source, I understand that there's really not much to work with - the original essentially rides the same bass note for the entire duration. Unfortunately, I feel that this works better for a short looping track than a full-fledged arrangement. When I scan through random points in your track, no matter where I click, it always seems like most of your instruments are doing the same thing at any given point. The breakdown at 1:50 was an excellent reprieve, but for the most part, the meat of this track feels like it's based around a few simple loops without a lot of growth or dynamics throughout the arrangement, bookended by some traditional trance intros/outros. With the drums staying fairly static outside of major transition points, this ultimately feels like it was built as a short loop and not fully realized as a standalone arrangement. Great work in a bubble, and I'm glad that you chose to share this, but for the standard of arrangement and interpretation that we're looking for at OCR, I don't feel that this quite hits the mark. NO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
prophetik music Posted June 9, 2021 Share Posted June 9, 2021 kick has a lot of reverb. i'm guessing that'll cause issues later in the track. opening synths are interesting but quiet. already by 0:28 there's a lot of heaviness in the lower mids because of how oofy the bass is and the amount of sustain on the kick. the melody coming in at 0:55 is nice, though, and i like the handoff between the two synths to make that initial arpeggiated line. the melodic content is definitely pretty repetitive, and that's just the nature of the original here. that said, there's a lot you can do to expand it out, with one really obvious idea being updated chords. a fun thing is that when the melodic content is highly repetitive, you can essentially put whatever chords you want under it and it'll still sound right (within reason). i'd recommend looking into some easy progressions like I-vi-IV-V or I-bVI-bVII-IV to get some movement out of the second half of the track. the break at 1:49 was needed. i think you had a chance to branch out more in your sound design here, also, to make it even more separated from the main section. the ending drop to just synths is a nice idea to help wrap it up. needs some extra blank space at the end to allow your ending hit to fade naturally, it's clipped now. overall the bigger issue here wasn't the repetitiveness, as emu said (although it's definitely repetitive and should get some more body to the arrangement itself), it's the mastering. it's very boomy because of the bass and kick both having long sustains that aren't trimmed, and because both clearly have a ton of spare freqs flying around. an EQ pass and trimming down the envelope for both the bass and kick will help immensely, and open up a lot of room for some of your more interesting mid parts to speak easier. NO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MindWanderer Posted August 30, 2021 Share Posted August 30, 2021 I agree with both of the above, sadly. A certain amount of repetitiveness in a trance track is to be expected, but this is a smidge above even that. And even though I'm not listening on headphones with the best bass response, that kick is boomy, and while I love the rich timbre on that bass synth, it does result in a lot going on in that high bass/low mid range. The bass almost seems to change timbre in different parts of the track because it's competing with different frequencies throughout. An EQ pass would indeed help with this. It's creative, it's fun, but I have to agree that it needs a bit more love to make it on the site. NO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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