Liontamer Posted July 11 Share Posted July 11 (edited) Artist Name: Heel Tactics Made this a long-ass time ago. Thought I'd propose it for funsies. Edited September 19 by Hemophiliac Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
prophetik music Posted July 18 Share Posted July 18 submission email game is on point. opens with some glittery sfx that is high enough to make my ears hurt a bit, and eventually some arpy filtered synths. kick comes in soon after, around 0:35, and it's super high, like over an octave higher than i'd expect. more of the beat comes in at 0:52, and there's a panning bass that's very active. the bass is actually playing lower than the sub portion of the kick. at 1:15 we finally get more fleshing out of the harmonic elements so it's not just the bass and the lead synth. i think what that lead is playing is a bastardized version of the A theme from the original, but it's honestly not very clear to me where spark man comes in during these first two minutes or so. 1:42's a 'break' with the synth bass and kick, and it builds back up at 2:09 to be the A theme like it is in the original, and then the B theme. most of this is just a lead, bass, and maybe a single sustained pitch as a pad. it sounds very thin through here, and the fast pan on the bass emphasizes how thin it is. 2:59's another break, again focused on the bass, and there's some sfx this time in there also. this is a single note for nearly 30s until a running synth comes in at 3:26. the snare that's used in this section is also pretty grating by itself vs in the mix with lots of other elements. we finally get more harmonic elements at 3:49 in the form of a nice sweepy pad, and then some melodic material soon after. my primary critique of this track is the choice of drums. i found the snare to be very sharp and hard to listen to for five minutes, and more importantly the kick is well over 100hz and is so high that it's conflicting with pitches the bass is playing despite the bass not being particularly low. i'd love to hear a more appropriate kick that isn't so high in the frequency spectrum. beyond that, i found the arrangement to often be lacking body - there's a lot of the track that's only a bass, or bass and lead, with nothing between the two. the bass panning was super strong and disconcerting on headphones - i like the concept, but pulling back the max bounds of the pan lfo would be great so it wasn't so wide. lastly, there were really long sections where nothing was really going on - 2:59's a single note for 30s, that's probably 15s too long, for example. and the opening took over a third of the piece to get to the actual source material, meaning we wandered around for a third of the piece before getting to some meat. adding some snippets into the opening section will help tie that first part to the rest of the work. you've got some great ideas here! i love the energy. there's a lot of nitpicks that need to be cleaned up right now. NO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
XPRTNovice Posted September 15 Share Posted September 15 Felt like the freq spec dropped out at :54 and didn't really come back in for 30 seconds. That snare is on autopilot and is sticking out pretty hard in my ears. 100% with prophetik on this one. When that thing is going, it's hard to focus on anything else - there's very little variety to it, and its soundscape sounds a little trash-can-lid. Got major transformers vibes at 1:50 The break at 3:00 is being murdered by this snare. We also have about a full minute here where very little seems to be going on, and its quite repetitive, until 3:50 where we get into the last bit of the song. In general, yeah, we gotta fix the drums, particularly the snare, and we gotta kill some of the repetition in the arrangement and fill back in some of the frequency spectrum that feel empty. I think that honestly could solve some of the arrangement problems by simply adding variety in the instrumentation - it would fill out the arrangement AND fill out the sound. NO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hemophiliac Posted September 19 Share Posted September 19 (edited) This sounds and feels like a throwback to the early days of OCR. It would not be out of place to have heard this back in the early 2000s. The biggest issues are the blend of parts and the mixdown. The drums are the most present part of the mix and the melodic elements are further back. The bass could be a lot fuller. As both of the previous two votes have noted, this snare is like a laser that cuts through everything. It's the number one thing you hear and not just because of volume, but it seems to be taking up much of the frequency range as well. Structurally it's not terrible, as you do have some contrasts in texture and even have a dropout around 1:42 and 3:00 that helps to break up the repetitiveness of the track, however it quickly gets repetitive again. If you keep following a drop out to just reintroduce the instruments one at a time it will get stale. The synth choices are pretty vanilla and are lacking some sophistication, could use an update to a more modern palette. As well as taming of some of their harsher upper frequencies, such as the lead that enters at 2:08. If you do consider revising this, take another look at the sound design, try to get the parts to blend together better rather than them being so separate in the mix, and see about reducing the overall repetitiveness within each section. NO Edited September 19 by Hemophiliac Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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