*NO* Shadowgate "You Shall Be Sheared"

[Emunator]

Primary Artist: Fox Ferrari

This game has the best soundtrack ever

 

 

Edited January 17 by prophetik music

[Flexstyle]

Ah, a "source tune with drums over it" submission -- haven't seen one of those for a while!

OK, that's a little bit unfair of me. The drums are chopped up in interesting ways, and it's not a straight audio rip, but it sounds very much like mostly a MIDI rip for the most part. With a source tune like this that's so simple (just a lead and some long bass notes), I'd expect to hear some reharmonization, perhaps some embellishment and variation on the melody, stuff like that, but there's hardly anything here to differentiate from the simplicity of the original. 

Let's talk a bit about the audio engineering side of this, too: most of the elements are loud, midrange-heavy, and distorted. That makes them hard to differentiate from each other, and fatiguing to hear for a long time. You've got some cool individual sounds that might work well in other contexts, but combined together, it's struggling to work. The beat fights for space with the lead synths which fight for space against the gated chords, etc. Each sound needs to have its own place in the frequency spectrum, at least to a degree, and with these, everything's in the same place. 

So what does all that mean? Here's some takeaways:

- You'll need to probably do more arrangement of the source, not just play it back while adding layers on top.

- You'll need to improve your sound design and mixing so that sounds aren't fighting for space in your mix. 

- I recommend spending some time in the workshop forums and maybe in a competition or two so you can get feedback from other folks at OCR and hone your craft further!

 

NO

Edited January 17 by Flexstyle

[Liontamer]

Crazy, needless clipping & distortion throughout; plenty of ways to do wild percussion and noises without that (see: https://ocremix.org/remix/OCR04536). I liked the dropoff at 1:31, which was offering something different as far as the leads and briefly moving away from the source melody. Ending at 3:01 had a very nice trailoff, but otherwise came after an abrupt stop of the music with no real resolution.

It might be a MIDI rip, but the sound's meaningfully personalized and expanded, and we have a number of arrangements that spin off from MIDIs, though I hope in this case, this isn't wholesale taking an arranged MIDI and reinstrumenting it without credit.

Barring a Standards violation on potential lifting of an arranged MIDI, there's potential here though, and I'm open to approaches like this; it's a very basic source tune, and there needs to be adeqate space for an expansive concept like this to have a chance. In my opinion, it still needs further development, because while the instrumentation's personalized, the different patterns used here feel too repetitive, which (along with the poor mixing) is what sinks it.

NO

[prophetik music]

oh man, look at that audio sausage! right off the bat - you've got a ton of sub-40hz content that needs to be EQ'd out. also the drums are so loud i can't even hear the original through much of it.

the track is fun distorted drums (that probably don't need to be so loud, you can be distorted and big without overvolting everything like this) with the original under it essentially unchanged to my ear for the first 1:30. after that you start to do some new stuff, which is great! it's too little too late, however. there just isn't enough transformative arrangement throughout the track. even if the mastering and mixing was good - which they really are pretty rough - this wouldn't be near enough to pass.

i recommend muting your drums and make something that's fun to listen to with just the synths that isn't [the original plus a stutter synth]. once you've got that, then the drums are the thing that makes the track great! then you can actually work on mixing the parts together so that they compliment each other.

 

 

NO