*NO* MechWarrior 2 "Iron Piston"

[Liontamer]

Iron Piston (Cover) 

Remixer: Animattronic
Game: Mech Warrior 2
Track: Iron Piston

 

The Mech Warrior 2 soundtrack was a big influence musically so naturally I had to try a remix.
This track along with my own original mech inspired music was used as a soundtrack throughout the official MechCon 2018 event. All things Mech Warrior & Battletech.

Thanks,
Animattronic
 

Edited December 27, 2023 by Liontamer
closed decision

[prophetik music]

significant sfx to start (it's very loud!). 0:24 is where melodic material comes in, with an industrial-adjacent beat underneath it. there's a lot of noise in the backing beat, and it's hard to confirm if all of it is intentional as the track is mixed mega loud. there's some added elements in the opening minute or two from a countermelodic standpoint, but not a ton there.

once we get to 2:00, however, there's a significant uptick in energy as the rhythm guitar gets going. that section is great with the driving beat. this however is over too quickly, and around 2:25 we get what sounds like the same elements as the opening section - strings, some pads, same industrial beat now for a while, and it doesn't really shift until after 3:00 when it does the same build that it did before 2:00 and does the same more intense section. so that's a lot of mirrored material with virtually no changes in there.

coming out of that harder section, we get a nice shift to double-time at 3:36 - this is a good shift after hearing the same groove with mostly the same synths for >3.5 minutes. it's mostly guitar-driven and there's not a ton relating it back to the original through this. i liked the bass synth at 4:26. the drums simplify around this time and they sound like they did during the earlier harder sections, which is a bummer.

the energy drops off significantly at 5:12 and the next 30s are mostly just vibing along the same drumbeat with the same vocal elements as before above it. we finally get a break from the beat at 5:42, but again this is repeating the same strings in the same octaves doing the same things as earlier, and the pads and vocal elements are even the same as before. there's a rising element and it's done.

this is roughly three and a half minutes of music scraped over nearly 6.5 minutes of bread. i think that there is way too much wholesale repetition in this track for it to be a standalone thing vs. a background track at a presentation or con. separately, it's mastered so loud that it is very tiring to listen to. most of the instruments sound unintentionally distorted (separate from the drums, which i really like the grit on). i think you have some really great ideas here - the initial elements with the strings and vocals, the heavier section, and the double-time section all by themselves are objectively fun to listen to - they're just repeated ad nauseum until they lose impact. it's not good technique to paste in the same blocks of audio as you've already done several times, it's just going to bore the listener regardless of how exciting and masterful the block is.

this needs serious trimming and to be scoped way back in the loudness department before i'd be willing to consider a yes vote.

 

 

NO

[Liontamer]

Opens up with some cool sound design. Melody kicks in at :23 and it's ultra-muddy. There's also a distorted line that comes in around :23 that's also abrasive.

At :47, the bassline's handling the source tune's melody, but it's very quiet and just too understated. At 1:12, it's louder and accompanied by the tremolo strings, so it's more audible, which was better. There's some pizz strings at 1:47, but the rumbling of the bass buries it.

At 1:59, the lead is playing the part from the bowed strings at 1:13 of the source, but the way it's mixed, it's more of a low rumble, so it's another melodic part where it's more abstract than it should be due to the mixing. Nice bowed strings at 2:24 though, and I hadn't commented before but the vox accents were also solid.

Strings at 2:47 were slightly behind the beat, but seemed like a stylistic thing. This arrangement concept sounds awesome, it's just the mixing holding it back, IMO. There's no sharpness here

Transition at 3:11 seemed like there was gonna be a big boom or something to mark the change, but then that didn't happen. Sounds like the highs were cut out of this, then something got scooped out briefly around 3:35 for an odd effect.

I'm not gonna play-by-play anything else, but I disagree with prophetik's POV that it's too repetitive. The way this is mixed makes the length fatiguing, but it's not on account of the writing, IMO, and the track continued to vary up the textures for the second half. I'm OK with the way things and mixed and matched, it's enough variation and the presentation also stands apart very distinctly from the source tune.

Yeah, the arrangement itself is amazingly transformative and high octane, and I completely understand why it was used at MechCon. Yet, at least for me, this mixing is the dealbreaker here, and perhaps that's something where on headphones the issues are easier to isolate than in a booth or over a speaker system. Hopefully another pass at it could get this sounding sharper and clearer, Animattronic, because it's a shame to say no to this when the writing and sound design are strong. What could have happened on the mixing side to undermine this so much? If the source files are gone or there's no way to revisit this, that would be a shame. If this track isn't approved in some form, please submit something else. I appreciate your style and like what I heard, it just needs some TLC on the production side.

NO (resubmit)

[MindWanderer]

I played the living heck out of this game, but the soundtrack never registered on me. I can't say this source really grabs me either, so it's interesting to see what someone's done with it.

Those phat industrial beats certainly dominate the soundscape. There's a lot of overcompression going on here. It's pumping like mad and frequently distorted. Some of the distortion sounds intentional, but not even close to all of it. I can see how this would have played well over loudspeakers at a crowded venue, where you lose a lot of sound quality anyway, but on personal speakers or headphones, the issues really leap out.

I honestly don't see where proph is coming from in regards to repetition. Sure, the source material is only so long, and it's used a few times. Some of the sections are pretty long, notably 0:23-1:49. But wholesale repetition? I'm not seeing almost any. Every pass through is notably different from every other. The intro returns in the outtro, as an appropriate bookend. 5:12-5:35 is similar to 0:23-1:49, but that's 23 seconds of not-quite-repetition out of a 6½ minute piece, hardly worth mentioning.

Still, the production is not where we need it to be for our purposes. I like what you did with this in every other respect, it just needs some TLC to get rid of the pumping and distortion, and to let each instrument shine through distinctly.

NO