*NO* Raiden "Gallantry (Fighting-Thunder Mix)"

[Liontamer]

Hi djpretzel and ocremix-team,

 

i’ve made a remix and would be glad, if you can use it for Overclocked Remix.

 

ReMixer Name: Captain Lancer Crew

Real name: Roland Strunk

Name of game arranged: Raiden (Arcade)/Raiden Trad (SNES)
Name of arrangement: Gallantry (Round 1, 4)
Name of individual song arranged: Gallantry (Fighting-Thunder-Mix)

 

I’ve tried to give the remix with my modest possibilities a little 60s Instrumental-/Surfrock-/Spaghettiwestern-vibe while keeping it dancable.

 

Kind regards,

Roland

 

Edited July 14, 2023 by Liontamer
closed decision

[MindWanderer]

A cool concept and unique industrial/synth/surf take, let down by production issues and repetition.

When the arrangement begins in full at 0:42, we have an acoustic guitar with massive reverb. The reverb is turned up so high that the notes are mushy. The runs (e.g. 1:25) just sound like one long note. It's also doing all the work; there's a little bit of fake brass accent, and everything else is percussion. The kicks are so loud that at first I thought that the guitar was too quiet, but so's everything else; the bass is so quiet I didn't even realize it was there at first.

1:50 adds a vox synth which is really dry and sounds overfiltered.

Shortly after that, I found myself checking to see how much longer the track was, and was shocked to see it was barely half over. 2:06 loops back to 0:42, with just a change in percussion and some added brass harmonies that I can tell. The brass is a nice addition, but then that goes away and the rest of the loop is nearly verbatim. And then there's a third loop, with again fairly minor changes.

There are some nice ideas, but unfortunately the track runs out of ideas at about 2:34, about 60% of the way through the track. And the muddy guitar and kicks aren't enough to develop an engaging soundscape. Please work on making all your instruments sound like they're in the same space and are part of the same or at least compatible sound palettes, so we don't have sopping wet guitar, booming 808 kicks, fake quiet brass, and dry thin vox all together.

NO

[prophetik music]

bass synth in the original is awesome. super fat.

some sfx and a martial-feeling snare pattern start it off, and it surprisingly shifts to a club-style kick at 0:29. the melodic content is in a pretty quiet instrument that could be a guitar or an EP, can't really tell which. there's not much besides kick and lead here - the other stuff is window dressing, and the bass that's fake-sidechained is hard to actually hear since it's in the shadow of the kick.

there's a shift at 1:24 and the heavily effected lead really starts to show why the volume of verb on it isn't a good choice. there are some new ideas added in after this point, but it's either brass samples that are really not listenable or some vox samples that are not enjoyable to listen to. then it repeats in various combinations for another two minutes. so it's 4.5 minutes of an indistinct lead and kick with some other percussion alongside and a quiet bass line, and there's some other synths in there occasionally.

this is honestly an interesting idea. i don't really know if any of these instruments fit together at all, but i'm sure it's possible - it just isn't working in this combination. i think this needs a lot of work overall - trimming off at least half of the duration if not more (will need more new material as a result, a bridge would be nice), really thinking hard about what instruments to include and then fleshing them out so they're enjoyable to hear, and then spending time crafting the EQing so that they fit next to each other.

 

 

NO

[Liontamer]

Once things got going with the melody at :15, I was certainly intrigued given how different the instrumentation is from the original.

Oooh no, at :42, the textures here were super empty, despite the kick sounding so (needlessly) loud. I like the stabby accents that start at :30, but as part of the bigger texture at :42, they sounded anemic & flat in tone and should have sustained longer to help fill things out.

:56 changed the textures some, but if this track's going to be empty/hollow like this most of the rest of the way, it's already a dealbreaker. There's amost no synergy with these parts yet.

The guitar lead's been an interesting instrument though; it resides in the uncanny valley, but it's got a decent tone, and sounds best during the choruses, e.g. 1:09-1:24. I dug the metal clanging SFX a lot as well, those were effective accents.

Robo-vox first used from 1:52-2:05 sounded so out of place, maybe because they were mixed too loudly. Brass samples doubling the melody from 2:07-2:34 were also too flimsy. Warbling/double-timing the faux-guitar strumming from 1:24-1:51 & 3:02-3:16 exposed the sample more, so I wouldn't use that technique so much.

[/reads MindWanderer's vote] Oh shit, there was a bassline? Good catch! It was completely buried and might as well not have been there; poor placement, almost 0 presence. No wonder this feels so empty overall. Needs other padding as well, not just bass presence.

I agreed with the others that this has some nice and interesting ideas, Roland; I really like how distinct your version is compared to the source tune. More variations of the arrangement would help instead of doing rinse-and-repeat stuff, but you'll have to continue experimenting with how to choose more complimentary & cohesive instrumentation. You may not be at the level yet to be able to revise this into a passable state, yet you clearly show good potential, and it's still worth the journey of seeing what else you could do with this. Definitely take this to the Workshop forum or #workshop Discord channel for more feedback!

NO (resubmit)