Emunator Posted December 19, 2021 Share Posted December 19, 2021 (edited) ReMixer: Snuffles Name: Matthew Kessler userid: 28179 Game: Pokémon Black Version Arrangement: Gateway to a Promise Original Track: "Gate" Additional Source Material: "Outer Wilds" - Outer Wilds || "The Promise" - Final Fantasy XIII || "Hall of Honor" - Pokémon Trading Card Game My third submission! Maybe third time's the charm. Last year while playing Pokémon White, I took notice of the Gate music for the first time. The relaxed vibe of the music really pulled me in, so I wrote it up using three guitars just as a fun experiment. Along the way I realized parts of the track also sync up well with another favorite Pokémon track: "Hall of Honor" from the Pokémon Trading Card Game on Game Boy Color. I tossed that in and fiddled around with the music a bit longer, but without a solid plan I shelved the project until this past week, when I rediscovered the project file and decided I should make something of it. Continuing where I left off, I fully incorporated Final Fantasy XIII's "The Promise using a lush string section (it has striking comparisons to PKMN TCG's "Hall of Honor"). After a couple days' work, the remix had grown further and further from "Gate" while struggling to maintain a cohesive identity. I knew I needed to reel it in. Removing the string-heavy "Promise" bits added left a simple alt-rock piece, and I was suddenly struck with the similarity to another absolute piece of art I had experienced last year - Outer Wilds. The decision to incorporate its title track riff was instantaneous. It added some personality to the remix and gave me a visual focus to nail down the tone. I continued working with images of stars, campfires, and a sense of wanderlust in my mind. At some point I wasn't sure how to progress the track, so I brought my husband into the room to listen with a fresh pair of ears. "It sounds finished to me," he said. ...maybe that whole story was a tl;dr, but it was an important process for me as the remixer. I tried to do too much, but the key to "Gate" is its serene simplicity. I really had to keep coming back around to that. I maintained allusions to both "The Promise" and "Hall of Honor" in the remix, but in the end I had to make sure they didn't overwhelm the core material. (I would like to note that I am not a guitarist, so when working with guitars I just...Google and do my best.) Thank you for your consideration! Edited May 23, 2022 by Emunator Good link Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MindWanderer Posted March 2, 2022 Share Posted March 2, 2022 This is a fun, creative arrangement with some production decisions bringing it down. The track opens up with an entire ensemble of bells with massive amounts of reverb. In fact, in place of a pad, it's using what sounds like a bell with infinite reverb. The result is that the sounds overlap significantly and everything conflicts with everything else. This bell/pad continues into the main melody, without variation in tone or volume, for two minutes, and it felt fatiguing to me within the first 10 seconds. I'm not too picky when it comes to guitar realism, but the lead and rhythm guitar here fall short of even my bar. It's clearly sampled, although the samples are good. The bass is better. They also have very strange timing, especially the rhythm guitar, which is so far offbeat that it's unclear what they're even trying to do. At 1:50, a bell synth joins in that has the same problem of being strangely behind the beat in a way that doesn't sound intentional; it just sounds like it has a really slow attack. And of course there's no ending to speak of, it just stops. I love your use of the themes here, integrating all four into a neat little ballad. Other than the ending, I felt like the arrangement was great. It's a solid direction, it just needs some tweaks in a few key areas. NO (resubmit) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
prophetik music Posted March 10, 2022 Share Posted March 10, 2022 what a disparate group of games. i love how this comes together, though. great job picking ideas and representing them in ways that are immediately recognizable but definitely different from one another. this is a bit of a mess in terms of instrumentation and realization, but there's absolutely a great track under this. in fact, i think just fixing the mastering would be enough, although some additional attention to most of the individual parts would result in a really huge upgrade overall. so i don't mind the opening bell section. sounds like you've got a basic pad under a very sine-y bell, and aside from the high notes being a bit too loud it's a very peaceful opening. i lost track a few times of where the measure start was in here - using lower notes to delineate an overall measure structure will help ears keep track of where you are. i like the initial guitar part as well! there's a fun concept of space you're working on here. the issue is that your bass, rhythm, and lead instruments all are a little too similar in tone. i would suggest adding some grit to the lead to make it more distinct from the rhythm instrument, removing some of the bass out of the rhythm instrument, and then make your bass guitar a little more distinct in tone by removing a bit of the highs and also probably using a different style (finger instead of picked would help differentiate for example). lastly, adding some panning or chorus to your rhythm will help spread it out of the exact middle of everything, where it's getting lost. i love the strum at 1:19. the drums sound pretty generic. if it was me, i'd tone them back a touch overall in volume, and use less busy patterns when everything's going on the snare at least (the snare seems to mostly be doing the same thing throughout). at 1:30 when everything comes in, the lead's a little too quiet next to everything else. i'd bring pretty much everything down (rather than the lead up) a bit. i like the simplicity of the strings but they're definitely too loud for a pad role - the rhythm guitar's more interesting, so let that be more in front. the subsequent piano section is nice but everything's the same velocity. bringing the velocities down a bit and letting the volume knob handle how it speaks out will help there. many of your transitions are twice as long as they need to be and serve to highlight your not-real bass and drums. i'd cut them down. the texture at 2:20 is simpler, but again the not-real bass and drums take the fore rather than the interesting rhythm guitar and lead (and later the synth). some more automation in your mastering will help with that. i found the ending to be unsatisfying ending where it did. i liked the arpeggiation going on, but didn't think it needed to change chord or end on such an unsupported chord form. sitting on the root would have been fine there. to be honest, i think it's short for the amount of stuff it covers. you're not really in the song until 1:29, and it's done by 3:05. that's a good feeling to have. to recap - i think volume-wise there's a lot of automation and attention needed, and some EQing to help filter out unneeded freqs in the low-mid would help clear it up. i think some panning would be good - there's essentially none, and you've got lots of instruments that could really be clearer with that - and i think that once that's done, brightening it up a bit with some multiband compression would be the icing on the cake. however, some attention to what things are playing what (like the opening being difficult to follow, or the piano's velocities) will help a ton as well. this is a great start that will be really fun with some workshopping. please do follow through, i'd love to hear it done. NO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chimpazilla Posted May 22, 2022 Share Posted May 22, 2022 Very cute and creative arrangement of so many themes. It does make a nice little ballad. I agree with MW that the opening bell timbre is overbearing, it has infinite sustain as well as infinite reverb and it is mixed in a way that some uncomfortable low-mids and mid-lows are emphasized along with a very piercy tone at 400-450Hz. That tone seems to sustain throughout the entire track! Perhaps that can be replaced with some other kind of sound that's less piercy? The bell is nice, but it really muds together in a way I'm not sure is working. I don't think this is all that far from a pass, but I agree some mixing fixes are needed. The drums could use some more impact along with taming those low-mids and replacing the sustaining 400Hz sound. The bass could be a bit louder, not too much though. A proper ending would really be nice too, as this just drops off. Other than that this is good to go for me, very cute. NO (resubmit) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts