*NO* Mario Kart 64 "Troppe Houseland"

[Liontamer]

• Your ReMixer name: Ordonis
• Your real name: Cameron Bellini
• Your email address: 
• Your website(s): https://soundcloud.com/ordonis
• Your userid (number, not name) on our forums, found by viewing your forum profile: 35966

• Name of game(s) arranged: Mario Kart 64
• Name of arrangement: Troppe Houseland
• Name of individual song(s) arranged:  Frappe Snowland/Sherbet Land
• Your own comments about the mix, for example the inspiration behind it, how it was made, how the source material was referenced in the arrangement, etc.:
  This is my first remix for OCR, so I wanted to do something that would be instantly recognizable. I've always loved Mario Kart 64 and specifically the Frappe Snowland music, but I always thought it would work better for a beach level. So I made it into a tropical house track featuring my man Toad on vox. I kept the arrangement fairly conservative in order to really emphasize the instrumental changes and reinforce the danciness of the track. Throw in a fun little bass solo, and you've got a head boppin' tune that'll keep the nerd dance floor pumping!

 

Edited November 9, 2023 by Liontamer
closed decision

[Liontamer]

Super cheap-sounding vox at :23. The strings at :15 also sounded flimsy, though they have more of a Mario Kart 64 quality. In any case, it's not about the samples, it's how you use them, so once the texture filled in more at :30, I thought things sounded more borderline, but in the right direction. The steel drums at 1:02 should have been louder; they feel too quietly positioned compared to the beats; nothing that ruins the track. At 1:33, the lil' bass kicks cut through too much, and the (exposed) strings were too laggy and behind the beat.

Good brief dropoff of the beats from 1:48-1:56 to give them a breather. When they come back, I'm just left focusing on how thin things feel despite a lot of activity going on. The boom-tss added in from 2:11 surprisingly helped fill things in well, but that only lasted until 2:26. Lots of textural changes throughout help keep the overall presentation from getting stale, but this should be mixed in a way to give the sounds more body and not let the fakeness of the samples be so exposed, whether that be applying some more delay or room ambiance, or adding some padding. The beat-writing does vary up, but the core patterns tended to feel bland. Melodically, this could also do more to vary things up somehow, but that's more about pointing out another available arrangement tactic.

To me, it's just lots of little things adding up to hold this back rather than any huge problems. Good base here, Cameron; the arrangement's in the right direction in terms of personalizing the presentation, and you're squeezing juice out of these sounds. I'm hoping another pass at this with percussion and/or production improvements can further shape it up and move it solidly over the line.

NO (resubmit)

[prophetik music]

heavily compressed beat. the brickwall limiter on this is significant. we get some bass and instrumentation around the 30 second mark, and there's not a lot of volumizing going on, just a lot of layering stuff on top, so it's pretty dense-sounding. the chorded version of Toad's voice clips is a funny idea but admittedly wasn't immediately clear what it was.

melodic material finally hits at 1:02, and it sounds fine. there's a stutter synth in the background that combined with the melodic material makes a fast-panning sound that is confusing on headphones. 1:32's section with the strings made me realize there's not much in the lower register outside of the bass - it sounds a little hollow there. beat drops at 1:48 for a bit and then it's back in going through the main riff from the melody.

2:28 sounds like the start of the end as things start to drop. it subtracts through a few lines of the melody riff and then it's done. 

i think what LT's talking about is that, even at the biggest part of the arrangement, you've got the beat, the melody, the bass, and a single mono synth stuttering as a filler pad. i don't hear an actual pad filling out the soundscape, and it makes it feel very open as a result. that can be a positive for some tracks, but i feel it's not as positive here. i also think that there's a heavy reliance on the first few bars of the melody over and over again - 1:48 until the end at almost 3:00 is essentially just repeating that line over and over with no variation or alterations outside passing it through a few different leads. there's a lot more to the melody than the initial riff, and it's also ok to not have the melody playing 24/7 in a track. you were patient in the intro, so it's clearly something you can do - i think there's just a little too much of it at the end.

i think LT's call of "lots of little things adding up" makes sense to me. the mastering is very loud, the panning effect is hard to listen to, the lack of a pad, the constant usage of the main riff - all of those aren't deal-breakers but definitely sum up to more than they are individually. i think that there's a great, fun, bouncy track here that's pretty close, and some simple adjustments would make for a far stronger track overall.

 

 

NO

[MindWanderer]

I don't have as many problems with this as my fellow judges above. There might not be a pad, but by 30 seconds in, there's bass, arps, and rhythm filling out the soundscape, so it doesn't feel empty or incomplete to me. The samples are of course fake, but there's no effort to make realistic instrumentation here.

I do think that there's a lack of ideas here. The entire first minute takes its sweet time adding elements in, one or two at a time, then dropping some out and adding them back, before getting to the actual melody. The rest is a fairly minimal expansion of the source material, of which the main hook repeats many, many times.

Balance isn't great but isn't horrible. The bass is quite loud, and the leads are inconsistent: the flute is much too quiet, and the strings and steel drums are a little too quiet, but the saw is fine; it doesn't sound like you accounted for how timbre can affect how loud a sound seems to be in a complex soundscape. The master volume doesn't seem too loud, and although I can definitely see the brickwall limiting proph mentioned in the waveform, I don't hear it.

There are indeed a lot of little issues here, but to me they don't add up to enough to merit a rejection. There's certainly room for improvement, but there's enough here that it doesn't get in the way of my enjoying the piece.

YES

[Emunator]

I would disagree with MindWanderer that there's a lack of ideas here. There's a characteristic iterative buildup of layers that is a staple of house arrangements, which is what we see here, but within those bounds, there's actually a lot of good ideas flowing. The tropical house soundscape is pretty unique, especially when you consider the snowy source material, it's a great adaptive spin. There's lots of clever transitions going on here - I'm surprised no judge has called out the writing at 1:29, which was easily a track highlight for me. There's so much variety in the sounds you used that, even though the core 4-on-the-floor groove holds down the fort for nearly all of the track, it feels like things are always staying fresh.

There are indeed some balance issues present in the overall mix. It sounds like you tried to get the kick drum to cut through by cranking the volume up really high, but you could also achieve a better balance overall by reducing the level of the kick and increasing the amount of sidechain compression that it's applying to other elements in your track. I would start by sidechaining the kick to the bass and background arpeggios first, but you should really be doing this to some degree to nearly all of your instrument chains. This is going to allow your kick to cut through when you need it to, but let the rest of your instruments cut through during the space between beats, and it's also going to give your track a much greater sense of groove. From there, once you clear up more space, review the relative levels of each of your instruments and make sure that your leads cut through when they're supposed to and lead the track, and your background instruments are present but not dominating.

I also agree, those vox at :23 just sound cheap I generally liked the sounds used here, even if they weren't super realistic or high quality, but this stuck out like a sore thumb.

The ending also feels like it fades out really abruptly, I'd give that a longer fadeout time and let the delays ring out for a bit.

There's a bit of a "death by a thousand cuts" feeling with this vote, but honestly it's really close to where it needs to be. I think sidechaining will get you over the bar alone, but there's other areas for small improvements that will make this a much stronger product! Hope to see this one again soon

NO (please resubmit!)

[Chimpazilla]

The master is driven hard indeed, and the track does not have a lot of dynamic range as a result, but I don't hear any overcompression artifacts.  But still, -8db RMS is fairly heavy-handed on the mastering side these days now that we've realized the futility of fighting the Loudness Wars.

For a three minute track, I feel like the intro goes on too long before the lead motif begins (0:00-1:02).  The intro is a very slow build, with elements being added one at a time.  The guitar that starts at 0:15 sounds very fake and stiffly sequenced (although I love the reverse transition!).  The vox starting at 0:23 sounds weak; I get the gimmick but it is more comedic than cool.  At 0:30, the sound playing the arp is very vanilla with no effects on it and isn't doing anything too interesting.  At 1:01, there is a combination lead consisting of steel drums and a flute, and both of them sound stiff and fake.

1:33 is the bridge section of the source tune, and in the remix, a similar string patch is used to the string patch in the source.  I feel like this string patch (and also the one in the source) are too slow in their attacks to keep up with the fast writing and it ends up sounding awkward. This could be fixed easily by layering something with a faster attack right over the strings. 

There is a ton of creativity in this arrangement, lots of instrument changes, sfx, filter transitions and additional ideas as the piece moves along, full credit is given for that!  I love the bassline throughout the track, super creative writing for that bassline.  I wish the bass sound had quite a bit more beef to it though.  I also wish there was a section with the lead writing personalized, or a lead solo, or something to break up the verbatim source-tune motif writing.

My favorite part of the track is the lead starting at 1:56, finally a lead that has a bit of movement to it!  It needs to be louder, stick up front a little more and perhaps have some light reverb on it.  Most of the instruments in the mix sound like they are very dry.

You've actually done a very good job placing the various elements in the soundscape, with some things more center-focused and other things like arps sitting widely in the stereo field.  Excellent work on that!  Careful with autopanning though, as it can make some people dizzy especially on headphones; keep autopanning instruments from panning too widely and/or too fast.

The ending is abrupt, short, and disappointing, but not dealbreaker.

Wes is correct about sidechaining.  I can't tell what if anything in the mix has sidechaining on it, perhaps the bass does?  I can't tell, but he's right that sidechaining most of your elements in varying amounts throughout a track like this will let your kick punch through well, and will give the entire arrangement much more groove.  If you're going to do this, the bass should get the largest gain reduction (somewhere between 6-10ish db GR), then plucks and leads and even percussion loops should get less gain reduction (like 3-6ish db of GR, in varied amounts so it isn't all the same), all with a very fast attack and release setting.  Sidechaining like this will also allow more overall headroom for doing a clean mastering job, as it stops things from competing for volume and frequency whenever the kick hits.  All of that said, sidechaining (or lack thereof) is not dealbreaking my vote on this mix.

Just like with Wes's vote though, my vote reads like "death by a thousand cuts."  I want to emphasize that there is a LOT to love about this arrangement!  So much creativity going on here, and it is a fun, upbeat arrangement.  For me though, the cheap/vanilla sounds, stiff sequencing and lack of reverb and/or other effects (delays, filter movement on the leads, etc.) is killing it for me and making the arrangement lack finesse.  These sounds, sequencing and effects would have gotten the job done back in the day, but not in 2023.  I hope you will work on this more though, I'd love to hear it again with improvements made!

NO (resubmit)