OCR04687 - *YES* Super Metroid "BLOOD CONSTRICTION" *RESUB*

[Emunator]

Previous Decision:

This is one of those "long time listener, first time caller" situations. I first heard of OCRemix back around the year 2000 while downloading Chrono Trigger MP3s off of KaZaa (remember that?). There was a feature that allowed clients and hosts to message one another while connected for P2P filesharing; out of the blue, one of the hosts simply dropped a link to ocremix.org along with a simple message saying "good music here". I discovered a wonderfully blue website with even more wonderful music which has brought me great joy over the years. The rest is history.

This particular track was originally a FL studio practice workspace that I started working on back in 2020. I was attempting to create "massive" drums and eerie soundscapes similar to what the artist Lorn is able to achieve. While I was never able to successfully emulate Lorn's sound, I did have some success on the soundscape front and continued to work on dark ambient tracks. I've always struggled with remixing the work of other artists which is why I've only worked on my own projects until now. I find it to be too constricting to be bound to source material I had no hand in creating. As a result, this RedBrinstar project languished on my computer untouched and unfinished for years. I happened upon it while juiced to the gills on booze and pain meds after a long day of having my face drilled on by my favorite dentist, and in my slightly drug addled state I decided to finish it off while I still had time off of work.

Coming back to a project after four years was difficult, and the project space was naught more than a shoddily constructed house of torn cards. Countless system crashes from FL10 -> FL20 conversion errors combined with the buggy 32-bit version of Famisynth resulted in a project space that would randomly implode at the slightest provocation (also, did you know that if you convert a FL10 project to a FL20 project that it takes your four default send channels and automatically transfers them to mixer tracks 100 - 104?). As I was nearing the end of my efforts, my trusty m-audio soundcard which had served me so well over the past decade finally had a complete meltdown. At that point, the only way to actually hear the track was to export it to a cloud service and listen to it on a different device entirely. Have you ever tried mixing a track that you can't hear? I can say from experience that it comes with its own set of frustrations and challenges! I found myself in iterative hell as I tried to simply get the music to develop into what I knew it could be and even then it wasn't enough. As I sat in silence contemplating this wretched failure, I recalled an unusual track I recorded which was simply two minutes of guttural groaning emitted from a rusty and decaying piano chair that I picked up at a yard sale for $5 many years prior. Although the source sample was easy enough to record, it didn't sound like much of a track on it's own. However, it did have the decaying hellscape vibes Red Brinstar gave off when I first experienced the beauty of Super Metroid back in 1994. At this point, I overlayed the two tracks and spent many long and late hours wrestling with the overall audio to give listeners the abyssal sounds of alien hell.

I hope you enjoy this abyssal hellscape more than I enjoyed creating it.

tl;dr

an abyssal hellscape of automation and reverberation

Inception: 2/1/20
Cost: 88 hours, 54 minutes
Tools:
FL20
Famisynth
Nani
Rusty chair

Final iteration 064 - the echo of death sustains existence

[prophetik music]

my last vote criticized the overall lack of dynamics caused by a blown-out master, and the lack of drive as a result.

sfx to start, and then some keys in the right ear. the chair sfx is super cool, as is the contrast between the clean piano and the heavily distorted other elements. this builds with adding some percussion and the iconic arp in the background. the clave is really loud when it hits, and i wouldn't mind if that was less.

the bass hits at 1:08 and it's appropriately meaty and distorted. more percs build in alongside some noisy elements until the melodic material surfaces from the grime at 1:31. lead's probably too loud here but i like the vibrato and tone on it. there's actually not a lot going on under the melody - there's the arp, some percs, and the bass. we get some organ at 2:10 which helps flesh out the soundscape some more.

there's a drop at 2:25. the pingpong sfx continues here (might be a good time to let that go somewhere else for a bit), and the keys stick around and start doing some new stuff which is welcome. the lead is here too and is way too loud as a result (there's no shift in volume from the previous iteration)...this was a good opportunity to do something different with it, maybe consider that.

there's a significant 'something different' right after it though, in the piano at 2:55. it's not particularly idiomatic (there doesn't appear to be any velocitization to make it realistically played) but it's some fun tones. it keeps trucking until the melodic material comes back in at 3:26, and continues going well past until we get other instruments again at 4:02. this section is probably too long as a break - it felt like switched to an entirely different piece, and i lost track of what was going on in the first third of the piece quite a bit. i like the concept a lot, but the combination of non-idiomatic playing (ie. obviously sequenced) alongside a repetition of the very loud melodic line played the same as the previous several times really lost me. moving some of the elements in the piano to other instruments as this section goes on may help tie it to the first and third section better.

there's a recap at 4:06 - again, the melodic line just feels played out at this point, mixing it up really would help - and then we get sfx for the remaining 45s or so. i actually liked the outro but felt it needed to be set up better. we go from groove with percussion and instruments to just a sustained bassline almost instantly, and some subtractive work here to set us down there would have been welcome.

i think this is a huge improvement over your last iteration. that had some neat ideas but was essentially unlistenable with how much clipping it had. this is a much more functional work with proper dynamics and contrast, and that's great. at this point there's still too many unintentionally rough edges to the arrangement and mix that i think need to be sanded down before they're ready for primetime, but you've got this one on the run for sure. i'd love to hear some less reuse of elements throughout (particularly the main melodic line, any updates to that as the track goes on would be great), a trimmed-back or otherwise updated bridge section so it doesn't feel like it's so different from the rest of the song, and some continued attention to volumization of the leads and percussion.

 

 

NO

edit 4/24: this has iterated multiple times in the last few months, so i'm back to do another read on this. i still think the piano bridge is too long (and the tail on the delay's so loud it's hard hearing what's attack and what's tail), but overall this has had a lot of nuance added that i can hear to the various elements so that they're more a part of the piece vs. layered bits. the shorter length helps control that a lot as well. i think this is over the bar but only just.

YES

Edited April 24 by prophetik music

[MindWanderer]

I didn't hear the original submission. My initial impression is that this definitely doesn't seem like a 3-NO remix, so that's a good start.

Opens with environmental effects that tastefully interweave melodic elements, great way of establishing tone and source together. Loud bass drop, but I don't hear any clipping. The part with the organ is pretty darn dense, though, and seems slightly distorted. After a couple of minutes of this dark take, it transitions to piano; a smooth transition, but it's a complete tonal change. A minute and a half of this and briefly back to the dark bassy stuff before an environmental ending.

I can't say I'm feeling any of proph's crits. I'm not hearing a lot of repetition; each section is at most one slow full loop of the source tune. There's plenty of atmospheric whitespace to add depth without sounding static. The mechanical piano "playing" doesn't bother me much when it's largely a synthetic piece anyway. My one big gripe is that the middle piano section really doesn't go well with the beginning/ending, but the transitions into and out of it are smooth enough that it's not jarring.

Overall, it must have been a massive improvement from the first version you submitted. Strong work.

YES

Edited April 8 by MindWanderer

[Chimpazilla]

Wow, that is a LOT to go through during the production of this remix. I feel for you; computer issues and DAW issues and soundcard issues all together does sound like literal hell to me too.  I have no doubt that the jump from FL10 (32 bit) to FL20 (64 bit) mid-production was a nightmare.  I didn't see all that detail written in the first submission.

I remember this submission, I liked it a lot!  But it was ridiculoud and clipping and pumping.  Now the render has some mastering on it, which is great and the unwanted pumping and overcompression artifacts are gone.  The arrangement has been extended and varied in terms of the beat and energy level.  There's a drumless breakdown just as I had suggested.  I still feel like more could be done to add interest, more ear candy and surprises, and some of the instruments sound blocky such as the piano that lacks any humanization or dynamics, but this is a massive improvement from the previous submission.  I think the arrangement is interesting and moody and cool, with good use of sfx.  I don't see anything holding it back from being posted now.  Nice work!  You switched my NO to a 

YES

Edit 4/24/24:  Listened to *ninth* update, still cool with YES vote.

Edited April 24 by Chimpazilla

[prophetik music]

there is a version in the submission comments from 4/13. make sure you're listening to that version. @MindWanderer @Chimpazilla just fyi as this is from after your votes.

Edited April 24 by prophetik music

[Chimpazilla]

22 hours ago, prophetik music said:

there is a version in the submission comments from 4/13. make sure you're listening to that version. @MindWanderer @Chimpazilla just fyi as this is from after your votes.

*Checks submission thread* Ok so this track has been updated NINE times???  First, that's too many updates.  Second, we need a better way to have more visibility when submissions have been updated. 

I'm still cool with my YES on the track as of the 4/13 version.

[Gario]

Well you come into another Red Brinstar mix with anticipation, since you never know what someone's gonna bring to the table with it. Seems like the flavor of the day is A T M O S P H E R E, and a good heavy dose of it to boot. I like the soundscape this provides throughout, up to and including the lovely piano bridge (and I agree with Mindwanderer that any mechanical edge it may have is softened by the overall artificial soundscape this has), and the production values are up to our bar, at least. I'll agree that some of the reverb on the instruments (like the piano) is too heavy, which does cause the arrangement to be muddy in places, but it doesn't sink the arrangement.

Rarely do I comment on this particular issue when I see it in arrangements, but since the piano is as exposed as it is in the middle of the arrangement I need to point out that those chunky block chords don't do the section any favors. Open up those chords a bit, don't utilize closed triads in sequence like that since it tends to make the accompaniment sound plodding. Opening up the chords also has the added benefit of giving more flexibility with how to shape every chord, allowing each of the lines to flow better than "every note moves in tandem". Yes, this is a rare "Gario is upset about the counterpoint and parallel 5ths in the harmony" moment I tended to have a lot in the past, but it's something folks who arrange sections for solo piano (or any solo instrument that can make chords) should pay attention to since when everything is the same timbre the blocky, chunky movement is much more noticeable.

It's not an unbearable issue but it could certainly be better.

Counterpoint critique aside, I think this is a pretty good arrangement that certainly clears our bar. Nice work, always glad to see more Super Metroid on here!

YES

Edited April 24 by Gario

[Liontamer]

Quick co-sign on the excellent atmosphere here. The piano tone has realism issues, but nothing major. Very cohesive sound for something that was a very start-and-stop process! My man tinkers too much after submitting. :-P

YES