*NO* Castlevania "Vampyric Pixels"

[Chimpazilla]

Your ReMixer name: Pixel Pirates
Your real name: Tobaunta Torkelsson & Fredrik Vinterstjärna
Your email address: 
Your website: pixelpirates.nu
Your userid: 37469 

Name of game(s) arranged: Castlevania
Name of arrangement: Vampyric Pixels
Name of individual song(s) arranged: Vampire Killer

Edited April 28, 2023 by Liontamer
closed decision

[MindWanderer]

Starts off with some uncanny but nice-sounding original choir, adding Vampire Killer on piano. Good so far. But then it transitions into this super-gritty and vanilla-sounding version of the theme.  Drums are all kick, almost nothing else, and even the kick is thin. It loops this twice with no changes. Then there's a SID-ish breakdown, which is fine but minimalist. Then that transitions back into the plain gritty saws; though there's some original transformation here, the bass and kicks are far too loud. Then, following another loop, it just ends.

I hate to say it, but there's a good amount of work to be done here. The synths are primitive and unclear. The drums in particular consist of just one weak 808 and some really quiet vague noises. The soundscape is all concentrated in the mids. The leads are too quiet, and the only layers I hear are lead, bass, and percussion. The source treatment is, by and large, very straightforward and a bit repetitive (though 1:58-2:44 is quite good in this regard).  So there's quite a few areas of improvement needed.

NO

[Liontamer]

Opens up very prominsingly; I love the initial instrumentation, so I'm wondering how this could start out with a NO. The fakey-piano at :25 was not a great sign, but it was a stylistic thing and seemed fine in the grand scheme of things -- certainly not an out-of-the-ordinary sound for this genre. Track then escalates with saws at :42. Something was sounding too abrasive, buzzy, and muddy with the saws as they rose in volume, around :54 or so.

As soon as the beats arrived at :59, the soundscape was sounding very lossy; the "tss" beats (not the big kicks) were getting swallowed up and were barely audible, and the additional tick-a-tick-a stuff added in at 1:12 (and again at 2:43) was audible but still significantly muffled and obscured. Right now, all the space is taken up by the saw and beats until 1:55, and you don't hear any significant part-writing underneath the melody to add some depth to the composition, so it feels very simplistic (i.e. melody + beats).

I overall liked the transition into the chippy palette at 1:55; it's abrupt, but OK. The textures gradually build up, but ultimately felt barren for too long, but things picked back up by 2:30, so I'll get over that. That said, when things filled out more for the 2:30 section, the beat-writing was super plain and droning, with the beats mixed in too loudly over everything else, and the textures feeling too simplistic & basic, which left the final minute sounding underdeveloped and underwhelming. The original writing with sprinkles of the source motifs from 2:30-2:57 was OK, just too quietly mixed.

The mixing most of the way could be tweaked for clarity and to allow some additonal part-writing to be better heard, which would make the track more texturally interesting and varied. Like MindWanderer said, there's much to be done, but there's a decent base there for sure.

NO (resubmit)

[Chimpazilla]

The opening dance piano at 0:26 isn't the best fit with the choir, a darker piano might fit better.  The drums don't sound too bad to me other than the weak percussive thing playing snare/clap, but the saw lead beginning at 0:43 (and filtering in a few seconds before that) is sooooooo buzzy.  I don't feel like it makes a good lead sound, at least not by itself; it is nebulous and annoying.  Perhaps it could work as a background layer with something else being the primary lead sound, something more focused.  The shift at 1:58 is extremely abrupt as the arrangement changes instrumentation and groove, suddenly there's a swing pattern.  It feels completely disconnected from the rest of the arrangement.  Then at 2:30 the swing goes back to straight 4/4 beats and I like the writing there because some original writing ideas are happening, but that saw does not carry its weight as a lead at all, leaving that section actually feeling leadless.  Back to the source's melodic writing which is fine but adding another sound to play lead would make a huge improvement.  Then the track ends abruptly and with no closure, just full-blast energy down to zero with just an impact, not a total dealbreaker but disappointing and the final element leading me to a

NO