Liontamer Posted January 29 Share Posted January 29 (edited) Artist: Str1ctur3 Made using FL Studio Games & Sources This is a new arrangement of Field of Motavia from Phantasy Star IV: End of the Millenium Edited March 6 by Emunator Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liontamer Posted January 29 Author Share Posted January 29 Not a bad sound upgrade (albeit with pretty exposed string samples), but boy doesn't this sound lossy and muddy; not sure what happened here to degrade how this sounds, and it's at the DAW level or something with the encoding settings. Melodically, Str1ctur3, there's not much going on with interpretation, and at 1:57 the track basically looped with no further ideas, development, or variations. Again, not a bad sound upgrade aside from the mixing being poor, but definitely very underdeveloped (and the track unceremoniously cut off). A decent starting point, but a very limited approach together with poor mixing that undermined the positive improvement in the sample quality compared to the original track. NO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
prophetik music Posted February 2 Share Posted February 2 the initial sound quality is an instant no regardless of arrangement elements, so let's address that first. the track is super blown out - there's no reason for orchestral samples to be so massively sausage-ized on the waveform. all of these instruments need to be turned down by half if not more, and i'd recommend turning off your limiter and compression chain before doing initial mixing to ensure that you're not compensating for blowing the ends off of the main with your inputs. once you've got that covered, then you can slowly add back in the mastering chain to top it off. from an arrangement perspective, i think the initial concept is interesting. you've got a broader, more interesting sound palette, but it quickly grows stale as the only change is the addition of the synth lead eventually. i'd recommend either leaning more into the orchestral element and doing more part-writing (so it's not just lead, stabs, timpani, and string pad) on individual instruments, or else lead into the synthy element where that kind of sustained pad works well and flex some creative sound design muscles. either way, this is too simple of an arrangement right now, and larry's right about the loop and ending cutoff. we need more transformative arrangement to be something that can sit on the site. NO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Emunator Posted March 6 Share Posted March 6 My fellow judges hit the nail on the head here, not much more that I can say. This shows a lot of promise for an early concept but there's a lot to learn about mixing theory to help you achieve a balanced, clean-sounding mix. There's a number of great resources on Youtube that can help you here - since this is FL Studio specific, I would check out In The Mix (https://www.youtube.com/c/inthemix). I've learned a ton about the basics of mixing and mastering a song from him. This will just be a matter of practice to get to the next level, but you've got a solid start. Hope to see you again soon! NO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts