*NO* Pokemon Stadium 2 "Lil Cup"

[Liontamer]

Sean Tartaglia

 

https://vocesnaturalis.com/

 

Pokemon Stadium 2

Lil Cup

Little Cup Battle

Hajime Wakai

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3C2EfU1s0t4

 

I originally did this arrangement around January 2019, if I remember correctly. I made a new mix in March of this year that's floating around on youtube, but when I went back to it a few months ago I felt it was too thin and wanted to do an overhaul, so if the result is well received, this is the definitive version in my mind. I wanted the drums, bass, and horns to be much thicker and crispier, so I tweaked the EQ slightly and fattened up the horns. I also doubled up the horns and panned the doubles the opposite direction of the original, which gives the stabs more piercing power. I slightly lowered the reverb, but I kept the super super slight slapback delay as it was, which I think compensates for them being a bit drier. The baritone hits like a truck now, and oh man, it really fills out the sound. Pushing these up also ups the saturation, which makes it much more tight and crunchy now. The biggest risk is riding the loudness wars line, but I think pushing it to where the signal starts to fuzz gives it a bit of the edge the old mix needed.

 

The bass is pretty much 1:1, with some fills here and there, because it really holds the original track together. A lot of the elements of the original track are hyper hard panned, which gives that groove a lot of weight, and Hajime Wakai shoved it way up in the original mix to the point it's really a counter melody. The original track had a deep, very wide ebass, courtesy of my favorite electric organ emulation, Lazysnake, but I recently grabbed the great JP-8P emulation, the PG-8X, to use some classic roland sounds, and the old b3 preset on that thing is really punchy, which pierces through the mix better than the lazysnake, which muddied up the low end more.

 

The drums are also much tighter, though I didn't do much more than trim the EQ for the cymbals a bit more so the snare would pop a bit more in the mix, then threw some final EQ on the master bus to crisp up the cymbals at around 8kHz, shelf the bass at the sub 100Hz range while highlight the bass above 100Hz. It's a bit closer to that position in the mix drums would be in 60s rock, funk and soul (my favorite music aside from grindcore :p), so I think it works out nicely.

 

Pumping these up also lets the organ and guitar feel much more like they're floating through the mix, a sort of quality where the main melody points weave in and out of the overall mix, kind of like peeking through the harmony rather than standing on top of it. I wanted to play the guitar part intially, but I never really got around to setting up a studio environment, so the samples will have to do. If I did I'd probably give it a bit more grit and the attack might be more pronounced... my first love is surf rock, and my favorite players are mclaughlin and bloomfield, so I guess in your mind you can swap the chorusy sound of the samples with something that has a bit more bite (I used to get called out for this a lot when I played at jazz clinics back in the day, no one liked my tone :p).

 

Maybe I'm going crazy, but since 2019 I've gone through so many mixes of this track that I've started to question myself about if what I even like in the mix is what I hear when listening to other music. I mean, I know what I want, but I seem to keep making the mistake of comparing my sound with others and thinking it's inherently deficient. Then, when I start to feel that it's all wrong and I need to rework everything, when I go back and listen a few days later, I hate it and instinctively go back to the mixdown I originally did before the I made those changes. I just want this track to be out of my life, so it can be judged by an ear other than my own, otherwise I won't be able to get over this, and I'll keep mixing it forever. Hopefully people like it, otherwise I really did just waste all that time tweaking everything for nothing.
 

Edited October 16, 2023 by Liontamer
closed decision

[prophetik music]

been a minute since i've heard this original.

there is significant clipping right off the bat, continuing throughout - i don't mind the distorted tone of the drums, but getting that effect via effects is preferable to just cranking it too loud. there's some fun interplay between the horns and the drum parts, but i'll say that the lack of verb at all on the horns makes them sound like they're in a totally different world from the drums. speaking of the drums, the hats sound like they're part of a different kit entirely than the snare, and the kick is very noisy and doesn't have a lot of beater tone so it's hard to tell exactly when it hits. the delay effect on the drum doesn't help it around that either, i feel strongly that that's really making it hard to understand what's going on. the kit overall has more of a garagey sound which doesn't really fit the way the brass and organs sound. beyond that, i can't say i like the organ you're using for the bass - it doesn't have any bass presence that i can hear, and just kind of exists down there without any real meat.

the arrangement itself is a clever idea. it's hard to focus on one melodic instrument due to how loud the stabs and drums are, but there's some neat ideas and countermelodic material going on in the organ and guitar lead. the ending is sudden after all the back and forth.

if you went through and removed the delay effects from the drums, tightened up the kick tone, reduced the volume of the horns by half, balanced the levels significantly so that the melodic instruments weren't at most the third-loudest instrument you could hear, and leveled out the verb throughout, i think you'd have a much more effective mix that'd be ready for workshopping in the forum or on discord. right now it's pretty disjointed and difficult to follow, and the mastering is all over the place.

 

 

NO

[Liontamer]

This source tune actually doesn't sound very melodious, though I chock that up to this instrument set.

Not a bad jazzy cover here. Pretty fakey instrumentation (really, all of the extra dry DarkeSax), but still a legitimate sound upgrade over the original, and the bassline even cuts through more. At a lower volume, you can't tell the drums are distorting, but at a full volume, you hear it.

I don't mind the drumkit as much, just the way it distorts, as the writing's awesome. The gliding line first heard at :11 didn't have quite the right tone, or at least the presense, for example when it was handling the chorus at :55 and trading off with the guitar.

1:08 felt like it was repreating :14's section, and really the track felt like it was going through 2 1/2 iterations of theme with minor textural changes, but the overall level of interpretation and personalization was substantive enough that I was still OK with the treatment of the theme. The writing is strong and energetic throughout. prophetik music gave much more granular critique on what could stand to be touched up. To me, if you can just give the sampled saxophone a less exposed, more sophisticated sound, then this would have my vote. Would love to ensure the drums didn't distort, but that would be more of a nice-to-have. Enjoyable base here, Sean!

NO (resubmit)

[MindWanderer]

I'm not getting clipping from this on my setup, just a overwhelmingly boomy sound from those kicks. It would have been safer to cut it below 0dB, but I don't see anything above that. I've heard old jazz recordings that sound a lot like this, so I'm inclined to give it a pass on this front. The overly clean sampled instruments are a bit more concerning but again not necessarily a dealbreaker.

However, I do think the arrangement is underdeveloped.  The general structure is three loops of the same thing, and while there are some changes in the riffing and whatnot that make each loop distinct in an appropriately jazzy, improv sort of way, for me it's not enough.  There isn't even an intro or ending to make the first and last loops distinct.

I like the approach, but I think it needs to do more to hold the listener's interest. And the votes above mine contain very good points as well.

NO (resubmit)

Edited October 16, 2023 by MindWanderer