OCR04753 - *YES* Lyle in Cube Sector "Gimme Back My Cat"

[Rexy]

Submitted version
Remastered version
 

Contact info

 

Remixer name: Lashmush

Real name: Rasmus Sorber

Email: 

Website: lashmush.newgrounds.com

User ID: 20246

 

Submission info

 

Name of game(s) arranged: Lyle in Cube Sector

Name of arrangement: "Gimme Back My Cat"

Name of individual songs arranged: "her11"

Additional info: Originally composed by Estrayk.

Original soundtrack:

 

 

Comments:
 

I'm not really sure what to say about this one. It's my usual fare of metal fused with other stuff. I just really love the game and the soundtrack to it, this one especially striking a chord with me.

 

EDIT with artist comments from 9/1 resubmission: 
 

Normally I would've let this kind of thing slide as the kind of feedback this particular track got was minimal and superficial at best. However, I have studied a lot of mastering and mixing lately so I figured I could give this a retouch. This is a mastered source, unmastered and remastered. The techniques applied are all applied in a single pass and the end quality is improved versus the original as its a 16 bit file put in a 32 bit floating point environment. I have a 7 channel multiband compressor applied, and a slew of other effects to finish this off.
 

Understand, I love OC Remix and the help you give artists to develop, but if all I get is three brief paragraphs about "too much bass" and feedback on my creative direction, which will not change based on the opinions of anyone, then perhaps this site has run its course. I need more than just "I didn't like this" and so do all artists. Explain and elaborate about what can be done to improve. What you wrote was not what I used to rebuild this song, I simply remastered it again after my own liking using the same hardware as before.
 

This will be the one final time I resubmit a song and based on what I've just written, I expect it will not be accepted since there seems to be no rulework for judging other than "whatever you feel is good" which is NOT a barometer or measurement of skill, creative or technical.
 

Do better, OCR. Plenty of songs pass all the time, especially from your own inner circle and they bring barely anything different than the usual fare. So my song shouldn't have been judged so harshly by three people that perhaps haven't listened a lot to extreme metal genres in the past.
 

Thank you for your reconsideration and good luck in the future.

 

Edited January 25, 2022 by XPRTNovice

[prophetik music]

really meaty band sound, tons of bass and lows. notably the bass guitar is extremely loud, almost distractingly so, but there's very little attack tone on it, just the woof from the low end.

the first presentation of the melody is pretty straightforward, and it breaks up at about 1:08 for some piano that isn't particularly realistic in performance. the band comes in for some more aggressive melodic work around 1:28 and it drops off with some ensemble chugs. there's still not a ton of arrangement up to this point that's not just recapping the melody, although there's some exploration and an arp that's a callback to the original in double time in the middle of a significant break. after a build with organ there's some more guitars leading into a big last blow (and a well-timed kitty!). there's some more going on in the melody this time around. the end is a pretty aggressive blow but it's handled fine.

from an arrangement perspective, there's not anything ground-breaking here, but i liked the different ways that the remixer approached it between the piano break, the main ensemble playing, and some of the synth work in the breakdown. 

from a mastering perspective, this sounds super low-heavy. there's an intense amount of low/low-mid in the mix. it'd be essentially unlistenable on a system with even moderate bass representation - a car would be just mud. the bass guitar needs to be turned down significantly at the least.

i think the mastering pulls this one down. if it had a really transformative arrangement i'd consider it more, but this is just so bass-heavy that it sounds like it needs a few more listens on various equipment first.

 

 

NO

[Emunator]

Wow, the bass is REALLY overpowering in this mix. I'm not quite sure how that happened, but that instrument really needs to be reigned in. I don't know if it's necessarily a mastering issue as much as a mixing issue, since the rest of the instruments don't seem to have that same boomy quality to them. 

Aside from that, the track kicks ass. I love the unexpected instrumentation choices throughout, but that one aspect needs to be revisited in my opinion. Hope to hear this one again!

Revised vote below

Edited May 15, 2022 by Emunator

[MindWanderer]

Yep, that bass is pretty potent.  I listened to it on tinnier headphones at first, and it sounded great.  But on my bassier headphones, oof.  When the machinegun kicks came in at 1:28, it was indeed hard to keep listening.

The arrangement is pretty great, with a delightfully eclectic mix of SID sounds, metal, and assorted random oddities.  I love the coverage of an obscure source.  But EQ this sucker, please!

NO (resubmit)

Edit: The "remastered" version is identical to the originally submitted one.  After listening to them both a few times and hearing no difference, I overlaid them in Audacity, and there isn't a single pixel of difference in the waveforms.  So no change to my vote.

Edited September 3, 2021 by MindWanderer

[Liontamer]

So I was working in the inbox this morning and saw an unhappy resubmission from Lashmush (resubmission comments added into the OP). I hadn't voted on this one, so I wanted to check it out. We never mind checking things again if the artist has complaints on the feedback. I don't agree on tracks being passed by the "inner circle" being the "usual fare", but I appreciate you being candid!

I linked the version the panel originally voted on as well as a remastered version that was sent as a resub. I didn't really hear any significant difference between the remastered version and the first one, so I'm just voting off of the original version. BTW, I'm voting on my trusty Sennheiser HD 497s. (Thanks, GrayLightning!)

This was a very aggressive yet expansive arrangement that I dug. Great source tune choice and this is beefed up nicely.

I definitely understand where the others are coming from on how this was mixed, e.g. :31-1:08, and then 1:28-1:47 with the machine gun drums. Genre staple of production or not, I'd argue the bass creates some mud and obscures the other instrumentation, and that's what other judges hinged on. We certainly don't require crystalline clarity, but I could see dinging it for that reason. That said, that area (:31-1:08) actually didn't bother me, and I felt like it added a kind of rumbling, unsettling undertone with a kind of a surrounding effect that added texture.

I didn't agree that the mixing was a dealbreaker and I could make out the instrumentation enough; less so from 1:28-1:47, but IMO things were fine from :31-1:08 and I could make out the critical partwriting just fine. 3:26-3:45 had the bass crowding as well (but, again, it was fine for me), then 3:45-4:03 was another run of machine gun drums towards the finish. I thought the machine gun drums were too heavy, but at the same time, nothing was distorted, so I can get over it.

The mixing was super strong for the entire rest of the track, and I'm not feeling like that problem sections pointed out by the others were a significant enough issue, subjective or otherwise, to hold this back.

From the sound of it, Rasmus would like the NO votes to offer some further feedback; to some extent, I feel he's right about this not being given a fair shake, inasmuch as there happened to be another judge (me) who didn't feel this was a NO who just hadn't voted. So I'll move this back into the judging queue and add my YES, which splits the vote and re-opens discussion. It's not a table flip, but at the very least, I thought this mixing wasn't ideal, but also doesn't hold it back. Let's get some more votes and see if anyone has further thoughts.

YES 

[DarkSim]

First off, great decision to ReMix this track from an obscure freeware game - I love hearing music from little-known games, especially if there isn’t a ReMix from the game already on OCR. Additionally, I see the source is a demoscene tune so that’s extra points in my book!

The style you’ve chosen to make this piece in is very similar to the “SID-Metal” style of Machinae Supremacy, a Swedish band who did the excellent soundtrack to “Jets ’n’ Guns”. I love the sound palette when you have heavy metal elements mixed with clean synth sounds, especially those SID-style pulse arps and saw leads that you’ve got going on in here. It makes for a very intense, high-energy listening experience that gets the pulse racing.

So, on to the play-by-play:
After a short drum fill, we get hit with a huge sound, and absolutely enormous bass. Too much bass? I’ll get to that later, but it is certainly attention-grabbing! Rhythm guitars are panned left and right to give them some space but still a chunky presence, and there’s some subtle panning changes in the synth lead and arps that is a nice touch so that those higher frequencies don’t fatigue one ear too much. The original solo in the intro is a nice touch and leads into the A source section well.

At 0:50, when the B section comes in, we’re treated to another signature Amiga synth - that modulated pulse wave that is just so deliciously retro and evocative of my youth. The piano break is a welcome reprieve for the ears, which, although care has been taken to spare them from arp fatigue, are beginning to struggle with the bass. When the C section of the source is brought in for a chorus midway through the track, those 1/16th kicks are super heavy, accentuated moreso by the preceding break. That said, there is some nuance with the kick velocity so it sounds a little more natural and rhythmic, despite its dominance. I’m glad you chose to keep the melody simple here, and layer it with what sounds like very fast-picked rhythm guitar, as anything else in this chorus would have been entirely too much.

1:48-2:54 is a much-needed breath of air, with an extended rhythm section. After such a breathless chorus, this is a good stylistic choice, despite being fairly light on source usage. The guitars give way to an arp, which in turn leads in to a pretty epic-sounding organ build. Could it be time for the final boss fight? Oh boy, strap yourself in for this!

There’s a really cheeky 1-bar break at 3:24 in which Lyle finds his cat, presumably has some choice words with the boss, and all hell breaks loose. As if the energy level wasn’t high enough, the key change of the B and C sections for the finale lends it an even greater sense of urgency. It’s familiar because we’ve already heard these melodies in the track before, but choosing to separate the key change present in the source until after the final build is a really cool arrangement decision, adding to the climax.

If it weren’t for the insane level of bass in this track, I’d say it would be a comfortable pass. Great source usage, well thought-out arrangement, perfect choice of synths and it nails the style it’s going for right on the nose. Unfortunately, it seems like there’s a - dare I say - certain stubbornness when it comes to metal, in that the bias it has for heaviness can work detrimentally to the rest of the track.
Allow me to illustrate my point with some frequency and amplitude analysis from Audacity and Ableton Live.

I referenced Machinae Supremacy at the start of my review, so here’s a side-by-side of my favourite track from the Jets ’n’ Guns soundtrack: “Death From Above”

Surprisingly, I found it a very similar balance in terms of frequency. I was expecting a low-end bias of course, but nothing as drastic as this. In that sense, it’s a good representation of the genre. I was expecting something like this, from Enter Sandman (an old track, admittedly, but fairly early in the loudness war and a well-known piece):

When I put both your track and Death From Above into Live, however, I got this on my master track from yours, and no excess from Death From Above:

That’s objectively too loud, and adding a 3-channel multiband compressor with -6dB  at 180Hz on the low end seemed to settle this down nicely. That was just a quick fix, and can probably be done with EQ as well. My suspicion is that although the peak values aren’t too high (no clipping), the RMS values are, which comes from too much compressor gain. RMS will fatigue your ears much more than brief peaks.

Some ways to avoid this would be to:
1. Turn down the compressor gain
2. EQ down the low-end on the master
3. Notch filter (subtly) your bass with the dominant kick frequency
4. Sidechain the bass to your kick
5. Shape the transients of bass notes and kicks
For the last point, it would be especially important to try shaping the transient of the kick sample for the 1/16th hit sections. Copy the sample, edit the transient, stick it back into your sampler. That way, you can use the same sample so it sounds cohesive, but it plays shorter so there’s less risk of it bleeding into the next note. If your sampler already cuts off the sample when the next note is played, try shaping the transient anyway and seeing if that helps clean those sections up.

All that said, I’m still landing on the side of YES for this one. The track is well-crafted, with perfect synth and genre representations. There’s a lot of care and attention here, and it is something of a shame that the bass is overpowering this at times. Seeing the spectrum analysis compared with Machinae Supremacy however, I’m convinced that the bass bias is a stylistic choice and although not to my personal mixing taste, I don’t think it should hold this one back.

YES

 

Edited December 6, 2021 by DarkSim
removed extra screenshot

[Chimpazilla]

There are a lot of detailed votes here already so I won't dwell on the issues.  Could this be mixed cleaner, yes.  Is the master bass-heavy, yes!  Is the track loud, oh hell yes (but it's not clipping or overcompressed). But holy heck, this track is well crafted and well performed, the arrangement is interesting and full of excitement, the sound choices are varied and all elements works well together, and the whole package is creative as can be.  I love it.  Let's go.

YES

[XPRTNovice]

Comes in right in your face and I love it. Drums are tight, though I think I could hear a touch more cymbal in the mix. That's nitpicky. Guitars and bass are tight as well, with clean lines. The synth melody is well-placed and the countermelody background synth is tight and adds good flair while not detracting from the melody. 

Piano at 1:20 is BANGER. I would maybe have liked it to come up a bit in the mix and sound fuller, especially in the lower end as befitting a grand piano, but an argument can also be made that the contrast is artistically pleasing, and there are plenty of genre references that have a more rock/pop sounding mix on their pianos. I was just wanting a little more Muse and a little less Dragonforce

The build section at the conclusion of the piano solo is also great. This section gives us a break from the limited source, while referencing it enough to remind you that we're in a remix, and then sets us up for the end of the piece. The arrangement is really stellar here; you take a simple 8 bit piece and weave it into something that really tells a story and is epic as hell, with fantastic variations to keep it interesting. 

I personally don't have any beef with this mix at all, other than the couple of small nitpicky things that I listed above; it seems tight, and the arrangement is just great. 

YES

[Emunator]

I'm coming back to this with a fresh pair of ears after some time away from it, and I think I was too dismissive and got a case of tunnel vision on the bass specifically without really expressing my love of nearly everything else present in this mix. Sorry for coming across that way! Your arrangement, performances, and sequencing are all incredibly tight and dynamic, getting a lot of mileage out of the source while putting your own personal spin on it along the way. DarkSim did a way better job covering the play-by-play of what works well in this arrangement, but just know that I agree with him at nearly every step.

This is one of those times that Larry would (rightfully) ding me for making perfect the enemy of the good. Sometimes as a judge, it's easy to just assume that an artist will be ready and willing to make simple changes at the drop of a hat, but it's important as a judge to remember that I should be evaluating tracks as-is and truly consider whether or not one singular area for improvement is enough to sink an otherwise-amazing submission. In this case, it's definitely not, so I'm happy to flip my vote here! 

YES