*NO* Dragon Warrior 4 "Twisted Systerz"

[prophetik music]

last version

all six previous versions

 

Tried the file upload, it failed. 

I'm baaaack, lol. I read all of the advice given, and watched the videos suggested...and as a "treat" of sorts, I did not allow myself to listen to my last submission until I thought this one was ready to submit. After all of the advice followed....wow, I can hear the issues much more clearly in that previous version. As always, I give so much thanks for the time given for consideration and the critiques given, much appreciated! I also appreciate the feedback that has been given in the WIP forum:)

Originals 

 

 

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Games & Sources

Game is Dragon Warrior 4, and this is from chapter 4, Mara and Nara, the sisters of  Monbaraba. The music is mainly the walkabout theme, with a section that represents the battle theme included. I've always enjoyed the original 8 bit version more than the successors....with the exception of this ReMix;) I jest. 

Tried the file upload, it failed. Link given in space provided, and also here.

Edited Friday at 08:21 PM by prophetik music

[Chimpazilla]

The mixing sounds WAY better now, thanks for taking our advice.  I don't hear that overly sizzly high end now, and the lows are present and full.  The mastering is appropriate and not overdriven.  My only remaining complaint is that the kick is way too loud, heavy, and thumpy.  While this would probably be an easy fix, I'm not going to send this back again for that, and it isn't dealbreaker for me.  I think we have entered pass territory with this version.  Good luck with the rest of this vote!

YES

[Liontamer]

The panning's way too wide here. Perhaps on monitors/speakers it's no big deal, but it sounds awful on headphones, too many elements predominantly on one side or the other, which isn't a natural way to listen to music, and the overall sound feels substantially lossy and dull, which is a dealbreaker.

The sound design's meaningfully improved, though I'd argue the core beats (1-2-1-2) still plod from the start despite more interesting stuff going on around them and some more variations; it could partially be a sound design thing.

Writing-wise, finally some more interesting stuff going on with the dropoff around 1:21 and using that a rebuild into picking the beats back up at 2:01. Good job trying out different textures and sound design for the verse at 2:03; these ideas may have been introduced in some earlier revision, I'm not sure (there've been quite few), but the main point is that over time you've picked up on a lot more ways to vary up the presentation and keep these same verses & choruses fresh, which definitely wasn't happening in earlier versions.

IMO, the beats still drag, so I'd love some musician Js thoughts on why they're still underwhelming and any creative suggestions on giving them more of a spark without needing an overhaul. Good progression though in terms of creativity and quality, it's moving well in the right direction, Eric. :-)

NO (resubmit)

EDIT (11/8): Saw the revised version in the submission thread comments. Definitely an improvement where the panning issues are done away with. Still need to get the plodding beats worked out a bit more, and the overall mixing cleaned up. Much better section at 2:03 with the newly-added belltone ornamentation. I'm still not there yet, but tt's definitely coming along gradually.

[XPRTNovice]

I have no recollection of hearing this before, so I am coming into this without judgments on previous mixes. 

I agree with Larry that there's maybe too much room in the middle, but I didn't listen on phones. I might consider making that adjustment, but it's not so bad because there are so many elements in here that it does seem to fill the space, as paradoxical as that might sound. There is an overall deadness to the sound here, but it's more in the "could be better" than  "Doesn't pass the bar" territory. It sounds muffled, like the whole tune is coming at me from behind a pillow. This I think is the biggest overall problem with the piece. 

I like the variance of the leads and the instruments, swapping between leads in order to keep the relatively simply melody interesting. The ending was nice; I enjoyed you playing with the tempo there and having it feel like it came to some conclusion rather than just dropping out. To me this passes the bar, despite the adjustments I suggested above. 

YES

[prophetik music]

welcome back!

agree that there's a hard hole between about 150hz and about 275hz, which is part of why the track feels a bit scooped. there's not much past like 1khz either, which is why it's a little dead. separately there's also some elements right away that are hard panned all the way left and right (the early keys) whereas other elements are full-center (drums), which makes some things sound a bit weird on headphones but wouldn't be noticeable on speakers. i need to stress that this sounds so much better than it did last time though. it's like they're completely different tracks.

there's a big break at 0:57 which is well-timed, and then a bit of building action that goes longer than i initially expect and is more transitional into the battle theme elements. this noodles a bit before we get back to the A theme and content. the drums are a little contrived here. this trucks through the melodic content one more time before it hits the outro at 2:50, and then it's done.

i think this is almost there! you're to the part now where you don't need to make significant changes, but the little things you tweak here and there will result in a vastly improved product. if you filled back in that hold around 200hz that i mentioned before, open up the top of your EQs a touch to allow some >1khz content (especially from your hats), and reigned in some of the stereo separation of your keys, i think that helps a lot. a better transition at 2:02 would help too. lastly, the section from about 1:14 through about 1:50 drags quite a bit. finding a way to instill rhythm and forward focus without losing the vibe there would be a huge help to the middle third of the piece.

you're in the home stretch! what a ride so far. honestly this is really close as it is.

 

 

NO

[Flexstyle]

Gah why does this have such a WEIRD overall sound? Like, the elements in the mix are all balanced reasonably well against each other, but there's a really strange mastering chain or something. I mean if I were given just the individual stems (e.g. drums, bass, synths, etc) I could probably get this over the bar in half an hour (that's an offer on the table, btw).

As it is, even, it's not enough to necessarily hold it back. The rest of the song is solid -- it moves forward with purpose, sounds are neat, variation is sufficient overall. 

hrmmrmrmrmrmrmrmrmr, this is a really tough back and forth....

EDIT: Emu made some REALLY good, actionable points down below. In the interest of moving this one along, I'm going to go ahead and revise my vote so that it has a chance to not be a "HMMWELLMAYBE" track but rather a "GOODJOB" track. 

 

NO

Edited October 3 by Flexstyle
from Y to N in the interests of what Emu raised

[Emunator]

OK, this is sounding remarkably improved from the last version I recall hearing. I think you've gotten to a point where the arrangement and creative production decisions are good to go, so I'll focus just on mixing here.

I'll start by saying that I don't think this is at OCR level quite yet, and this is based on a gut feeling before I dove into any of the analysis I'm about to go into. It's close, and certainly as close as you've ever gotten with this arrangement so far, but there's a few distinct qualities that, when compared to other tracks that we've posted, sound noticeably strange and unpolished.

The other judges have rightly called out the fact that everything sounds muffled, like it's coming from inside of a pillow. I'm guessing that this was done in response to previous feedback about the high end being too harsh. I think this was an overcorrection, and although it's objectively more pleasant to listen to, it leaves the clarity and crispness out of the equation that is essential for a well-balanced mix. It sounds like you might have just put a filter over the entire track, which is only very rarely a wise suggestion. I'd recommend dialing back some of those corrections and meet in the middle between this and your last mix.

There is also a big dip around 200-300hz which might not seem like a big deal, but it's a very critical frequency range for giving your mix warmth and body. I found myself leaving a lot of holes in my mixes because I frequently heard advice like "cut the low end out of your non-bass/kick instruments" and applied it too broadly. If this is something you did on your mix, I'd encourage you to use a less steep slope on your filter cut, or consider layering in an instrument that plays within that frequency range to fill it out - it will have a huge impact on how the song feels. Conversely, I still think you have too much bias to the 400-1kHz range, where you have a lot of overlapping melodic elements that occupy the same frequency range. Some very subtle EQ cuts (I'm talking 1-3dB maximum) will help clean this up.

Here's a screenshot from part of your track viewed through SPAN - while this is just a segment of the track, it looks like this for nearly all of the song so this should give you a nice visual idea of why the track is feeling lopsided.

Moving on from EQ balance, I also agree with Larry about the stereo width of the track. I will give you credit for keeping your low-end focused and mono, which helps with stability, and there's definitely a nice wide stereo image on the rest of the track, which helps it feel lively. However, the L/R panning on certain instruments presents some curious choices - the most notable instance of this is the snare drum, which sticks out like a sore thumb from the rest of the drum kit because of the panning. Sometimes I'll do a ping-pong panning effect on my snare fills, but when you have it only panned to the left side, it leaves things feeling imbalanced. Overall, I think you could reduce the stereo width of many of your elements to bring some presence back to your mid-range - I tried this in my DAW by reducing the stereo image on everything above 200hz by about 25%, and it already had a notable impact.

Lastly, the mastering is sounding better than previous versions, but there's still a lot of dynamic range here that is making large chunks of your song unnecessarily quiet. Again, to illustrate what I mean, I'm going to show a screenshot of your waveform:

See how there's a bunch of very sharp peaks that are going way above the average loudness of the rest of the waveform? These can add a lot of unnecessary headroom during most of your track and limit the amount of loudness you can get during mastering if you're just normalizing your song's volume so that it reaches 0.0dB loudness. To counteract this, you'll want to shave off those peaks, either by reducing the volume of specific elements that might be causing those peaks (frequently, this is the result of sound effects/transitions that are too loud, or a kick drum/snare that's mixed much louder than the rest of your song, or in your case, likely both) or by applying compression/limiting to your overall song. This should usually be a pretty transparent process, so you'll want to set the ceiling of your limiter/compressor so that it's just grabbing onto those waveform peaks and reducing them, without having a noticeable effect on the overall character of the song. Once you've done that, you'll see that your waveform looks a lot "cleaner", which will give you more room to increase the loudness of the entire song without clipping.

To demonstrate this, I ran your track through a limiter and set the input gain to +3dB, and this is what it looks like running through Fruity Limiter:

The dips in the purple line show where volume is being reduced when it reaches above a certain threshold.There's very little being done, but if I bounce your song down with this effect applied, this is now what your waveform looks like comparatively (your original is on top, and with 3dB of limiting is on the bottom.)

This is a very simplified example; in practice, it's better to do this on an individual track, or group level during the mix so that you're avoiding these peaks earlier on, but even doing this to your master track allows the volume of your song to be more consistent and bring up breakdown/outro so they're not so quiet by comparison.

I think if you were to address these three issues - fine-tuning your EQ balance, reducing your stereo width, and properly mastering the track so that you don't have such a wide dynamic range - this would be good to go. Even dealing with 1 or 2 of these would probably be enough to push it over the bar, but since you're clearly willing to work through revisions and take feedback to heart, I thought I'd go into detail about each of the points.

You're in the home stretch!

NO (resubmit!)

[Rexy]

I have not heard any of the revisions prior to this one, so I'm rolling with the one I see here.  I'm liking the approach with the theme variation, the breakdown, the brief referencing into the sisters' battle theme, then back into a theme variation at the end - and all the melodic florishes that I am hearing and the change of tonal moods have broken the sources enough for them to be their individual thing.  I can't fault the writing direction - keep that as it is.

But the thing I noticed first when listening is how muffled the entire mixdown is.  Joe mentioned the comparison to a pillow, which makes sense with the scooped mid secton that I'm hearing.  It's interesting because I'm able to hear everything in the mix as standalone instruments, but the flat impact tells me that those holes need patching before it's ready for primetime.  Whether it be tweaking anything on the master chain that might be causing it, or adjusting EQs on instruments with tones in those ranges, anything that can be done to add those values again can bring this over the bar after all the time it's spent like this.

I can definitely vouch that this is almost there.  If it fails this time, then another mixdown pass is all it needs to hit the mark.

NO (resubmit)