*NO* Castle Crashers "Four Brave Heroes"

[Liontamer]

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: Castle Crashers
Name of arrangement: Four Brave Heroes
Name of individual song(s) arranged: Four Brave Champions

 

 

Edited July 22, 2023 by Liontamer
closed decision

[Chimpazilla]

Whoa, a Castle Crashers mix!  First one ever on OCR.  This theme is seared into my brain from the years my son played this game when he was much younger.  What a nice reminder of a pleasant time!  Adorable game, violent, bloody, and cute.  Bloody cute?

On to the judging!  Mix opens with pad and super-wet dance piano.  At exactly 0:12, and again at 0:26, the chords are very awkward. The pad notes at those timestamps will have to be altered to make those chords work.  At 0:27, the saw lead jumps right in full blast.  This sound is balanced well enough when the drum and bass groove kicks in at the drop, but here in the intro, it sounds so loud and sharp like a bunch of angry bees.  I think a better approach would be to start the lead writing there with something on the softer side, and fade that sound out as the saw fades in as the drop approaches, then bam full-force with the saw lead.  Or, simply filter in the sound so it isn't so sharp right away.  It is a very aggressive sound and feels too heavy for the intro.  

Once we are into the drop, it sounds/feels more balanced although this saw is still loud.  The bass is mixed on the quiet side by comparison.  There are some awesome growls that I'd love to hear more prominently, and all the vocal shouts and crowd noise is very hard to hear over this saw.  I love the vocal bits but they should cut through better.  

I like the variations in the lead writing, and the countermelody added starting at 2:26.  The arrangement here is fine, plenty of source as well as personalization.  I would have liked some other lead to appear at some point in the piece to break up the monotony of the soundscape, but what's here works well enough.  I'm not a huge fan of the complete dropoff of the lead down to piano-only at 3:00, that feels rather abrupt.  That final crash sound is very cheap and tinny. The render cuts off before the reverb tail finishes and that will need to be fixed with a re-render.

I actually really like this mix and I think it is close to passing.  At a minimum, those two clashing chords need to be fixed, and the render needs to include the reverb tail.  Although not a dealbreaker, I think changing the lead sound in the intro to something less irritating and fading that out while the saw fades in for the drop (or, filtering the saw sound in) would be good.  (NOT required though).  Also it would be nice if the saw was brought down enough to allow the bass and vocal bits to come through.  (also not a requirement)

NO (please resubmit after fixing chords and rendering entire tail)

 

[MindWanderer]

My intiial impression is that this is one of the better Pixel Pirates remixes we've had on the panel.  Good groove, pretty clean mixing, interesting embellishments.

Production isn't perfectly clean, though.  There's an instrument that creates a lot of white noise. It's most noticable at 1:15-1:29, but it's there almost the whole time starting from where it goes electronic. I can't tell if it's an out-of-control sweep, or way too much tail on a cymbal, or what, but it muddies up the whole mix.  It gets even worse when the tambourine or the SFX are added (e.g. cheering crowds).

It also gets pretty muddy when the lead drops into the lower pitches. It isn't selectively EQ'ed, so this causes it to overlap with the bass.  2:25-2:52 is the worst example here because there's just so much going on: the orchestral harmonizing, the crowd, and things I can't even pick out.  I can't hear the vocal part Kris mentioned at all; I'm only assuming it's here somewhere.

I tried several times to hear those dissonant chords, and I can't make out anything that sounds wrong to me.

This is really close, IMHO. The writing is really good, and the production is passable most of the time. The cut-off ending automatically demotes this to CONDITIONAL at best, but between the bothersome white noise and the occasional muddy sections, especially the climax, which has a lot of cool stuff going on that I can barely hear, I find myself leaning more towards a

NO (resubmit)

[Liontamer]

Arrangement opens arranging the original right from the get go, and adapted the rhythms to a club/EDM style the whole way through. The pad-like synth was vanilla but got downplayed by being layered up at :14. Electrosynths arrived at :27 and though the soundscape was muddy, and the levels were loud, I was making out those limited parts well enough. Melody picked up at :47; the bassline resonates, but the beats otherwise felt. I liked the changeup at 1:15. No matter what, I'm digging all the minor shifts in the groove.

Saw lead at 1:56 was way too loud, and the other crowd SFX and tambourine stuff was getting steamrolled until 2:26, so it wasn't contributing as much to an already crowded texture. The core groove at 2:25 (along with the lead) was feeling stale by this point, so while the added countermelodic stuff there was good, varying the instrumentation further could help the textures not slide into feeling boring and repetitive. The ending keyboard section cut off before fading to 0, which was sloppy; are you guys double-checking the rendered tracks before submitting?

A lot of the same issues as past tracks where the levels are so loud and aggressive coupled with lead fatigue from overuse. I'm with Chimpazilla that this is actually fairly close, but varying the lead (which doesn't have to be changing the synth, it could be varying up the effects on it) would be key and making sure the overall volume isn't too high. For a lot of these submissions of yours that are ~3 minutes or less, it's important to ensure the track stays dynamic most of the way. Good base here!

NO (resubmit)