Dark Souls 1 [Gwyn, Lord of Cinder] "Lord Gwyn Unlinked" *RESUB?*

[HoboKa]

Remix

Old Version

Source:

[edit 3 lol]  I've done some tiny touch ups to the piano melody and added an original choir, which is the same VST as the first version I submitted in 2014**, Changed some of the piano notation with a few high-note trills and a few left-hand notes; though, the main changes lie in the production side of things, especially with a new Reverb space.  I also added an atmospheric pad in the background.  Is this enough to push it over to the YES area? 

 

Edited November 23, 2021 by Gario
Forgot to mention another thing...totally forgot a critical point. Derp. AND changed link to Newgrounds link, becuase YT link was a bit lossy sounding.

[DarkSim]

Listening to the original, reading the judges' comments, and listening to the new version, I actually think you've gone too far with the reverb this time! Maybe just dial it back a touch on the piano, although by your own admission, the tweaks were mostly on the production end, and from the judges' comments it seems that the arrangement was also quite conservative. Without some significant arrangement alterations, I don't think you'd get a YES for this one, unfortunately. Sounds really nice though, with the choir backing.

[Gario]

EVAL

Oh, I remember this one now - the pretty piano with the choral parts behind it to give it depth. There were a few criticisms that I had with the original, and I appreciate that there was some effort to address it. You took my reverb criticism to heart, and matched the piano's reverb to the choral parts, and it does help blend the track significantly overall. As DarkSim mentioned it's now overall too wet (the choral part was very wet in the original, too, as mentioned in that review), so the track is now oversaturated with reverb. That's a much easier thing to address than mismatched reverb, though; just decrease the reverb on everything a couple notches so it all sounds like it's in a church rather than in a cave.

The piano still follow the source pretty strictly, but with the choir being better mixed into the arrangement I can better see where you were going with this. You'll likely still be called out by the judges for being too conservative since the piano still follows the source pretty directly, but something interesting did happen when listening to this version: the piano gets buried by the choir sometimes, which gave it the illusion of not being there - and the song actually benefitted from that. If you want to make no changes to your original vision, that's fine, but if you want to tweak it so it's not as conservative I suggest cutting some of the piano or it's textures from time to time and let your more original writing come through. If the judges don't have the piano plin plin plon'ing away behind or in front of them the choir for the whole song the choir can do it's job of being interpretive with the source, as far as OCR is concerned. Give your interpretive parts some room to shine!

I see the improvements, and it's helped the track quite a bit. It'll probably still be rejected for being conservative and being too wet, but those aren't nearly as difficult of issues to tackle as they were in the original track. I believe it's closer than you think.