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*NO* Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask "Cold Spell"


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RebeccaETripp
Rebecca Tripp

http://www.crystalechosound.com/
ID: 48262
Game(s): Majora’s Mask
Song Title: Cold Spell
Songs Remixed: Snowhead Temple

This is actually something I had fantasized about creating for an extremely long time, but I just never got around to it until recently! I was forced to prioritize it, however, since my patrons voted for it on Subscribestar. It's a cover of the Snowhead Temple theme from Majora's Mask, originally composed by Koji Kondo. This was always my favourite temple and dungeon theme within that game.

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Edited by Liontamer
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These minimal pieces always bring out the weaknesses in samples, and this is no exception.  The piano clearly has round-robin velocities, but the tone often sounds like a toy car horn.

As I've said before, I always have a hard time with evaluating source usage in these.  There's clearly enough of it, but to me, I'm not hearing a lot of interpretation.  Lots of sound upgrades and flourishes, but the arrangement itself seems very straightforward.  There also isn't any ending to speak of.

I consider that piano sound a dealbreaker, at least.  I could waffle about the arrangement for a while, but as it won't affect my vote, I'll just end here with my

NO

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  • MindWanderer changed the title to 2021/06/17 - (1N) Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask "Cold Spell"

wow, only 1.5db of headroom. a turning point?!

this is an intentionally difficult choice for a remix as there's only a few motifs to hang your hat on. there's the offbeat percussive sound, the I-bVII-I piano chord pattern, and a bucket of sfx.

there's some wind samples initially and the original's downbeats in the piano. there's some attempts at replicating the sfx with orchestral instruments, and some really badly exposed samples of winds. the clarinet and bassoon's attacks just sound very unreal. at 1:07, they're attacking just separate from each other and it's intensely distracting from anything else going on, until the keys come in at 1:27. those keys have zero room effect on them and also sound very strange in a bad way - no verb, right up front in the mix when everything else has more atmosphere on it. it seems so baffling to me that rebecca can have these incredibly handled sections that are so atmospheric like at 2:25 and then put a keyboard with zero reverb right next to it. 

i think that the source is prevalent and what interpretation there is is more than sufficient. there's a lot of what i'll call adjacent arrangement (that is, taking the original idea and applying various techniques to transform it into something relative but not obviously the same) and a lot of interesting uses of orchestral percussion to keep it different in my ear. the lack of a cohesive soundscape and sample issues are what kills this for me. if rebecca takes a bucket of reverb and slathers it on so that there's more of a cohesive sound to this, it's a pass for me and i'd grit my teeth about the samples. fixing up the sample quality or using them in a method where it's not very obvious they're not real would be even better.

 

 

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  • prophetik music changed the title to 2021/06/17 - (2N) Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask "Cold Spell"

Attempting to remix sparse, atmospheric sources is always a challenge, because there's no room to hide. When there are only 2 or 3 sounds working together at once, it's very easy to expose flaws. For the most part, I enjoyed the instrumentation and effects, however a couple of instruments really stood out like sore thumbs. The piano and clarinet both could use more TLC in getting them to sit right in the mix - and as proph mentioned, the attack difference between the clarinet and bassoon doesn't do the layering any favours.

I'm not against ambient/minimal remixes such as this, but I have to say I found the arrangement very uninspiring. Ideas from the source are introduced in the same order, and although there are some hints of expansion, nothing really piqued my interest or excited me.

This remix seems to lack a philosophy - that is to say, it's neither fully atmospheric and immersive, nor does it have sufficient arrangement expression to add intrigue and replayability.

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  • Liontamer changed the title to *NO* Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask "Cold Spell"
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