Liontamer ⚖️ Posted May 25 Posted May 25 Artist Name: H36T Hey guys, another sub by me, this time with a tiiiiny tiny source of just about 14 seconds or so. Still, i wanted to challenge myself to take something that small and try and make it my own or at least create something expansive off of it. To be honest the arrangement wasn't that tough this time. A lot of it came in a few days. It was...everything else that pushed me and my skills to their limits. I think it is just outside of or the edge of my skill level to try and tackle a sound palate like this and make it sound good. Some aspects I'm quite confident with still much to learn and others....I still have a long ways to go haha. Also usually I come at composing and the like with a story first and then the music goes from there. Here it was the opposite. The story came along as I was writing and I might try more of that. I'm interested in how others approach writing in this regard! Welp, that's it for me. I hope you and others can enjoy Manoria Cathedral: Corruption! P.S. Them demons was wiln' in that cathedral Games & Sources
prophetik music ⚖️ Posted June 6 Posted June 6 opens with some very verby piano outlining a b7 chord, and picks up with a second less-verby piano soon after. very patient, quiet start - which then gets obliterated by a really wild bass or cello bow sfx alongside some obligatory-for-H36T vocal clips. 0:47 brings in a cello in countermelodic fashion alongside a piano carrying the melody. i admittedly didn't care for this piano's tone - it's very bright and dancey, and your earlier pianos felt much more fitting for this style. there's a big shift at 1:07 - we get some percussive elements, and notably some panning electronic burbles. this transition was sudden and it took a second to make some sense. the cello and some choir comes back in soon after the percs hit and outline the chord structure for a bit. there's an interesting off-beat plectral instrument that carries the initial few notes of the melody that comes in at 1:35 and bounces around. we finally get back to the melodic material at 1:54 with a bigger, fuller texture featuring some more percussive elements and the choir carrying the lead. there's a specific cymbal scrape which kept getting used every few bars that started to be a little grating by this time. there's some big brass swells as well which are great - really liked the extra texture from them. they're quite panned though so my ears felt pretty unbalanced through here. 2:34 is a big shift, much more intense, with lots of big stacks in the orchestration. there's no one element carrying the melody through this section, but the men's voices carrying the last part and swelling up from the bottom sounds great. there's a non-sequitur ending with some vocal clips and the choir instrument from before, and it's done. any track with a long start and tail that aren't source requires a bit of check on the timestamps, and this one's fine - there's at least the source's chord progression with melodic snippets for most of the middle two and a half minutes out of around three and a half minutes, so we're good there. i'd have preferred a more balanced soundscape with less panning, and a few adjustments to the instrumentation, but this is an interesting take on the manoria cathedral theme. i liked the intentional effort to not focus on just hammering through the melody repeatedly, since the short track already has a fairly repetitive structure anyways. there's a lot of variety here and the time you spent making it unique shows through clearly. YES
Liontamer ⚖️ Posted June 29 Author Posted June 29 The track was 3:40-long, so I needed to identify source usage for at least 110 seconds to consider the source usage dominant in the arrangement. 46.75-1:06.5, 1:16-2:33.5, 2:37.5-3:07.75 = 127.5 seconds or 57.95% overt source usage There could have been more I wasn't recognizing, I was just doing my due diligence to ensure it was over 50%. Normally, I'd mind the intro and outro both being unrelated to the source, but the middle was fully about arranging and expanding on the original VGM, so with the source usage handled and dominating the arrangement vis-a-vis our Standards, the sandbox was H36T's to play with as far as the overall structural approach. After an extended original intro, the source finally comes in from :46-1:06, and I like the added string writing underneath it. Switches over to some handdrums and metallic percussion. At 1:35, the melody's swung and staggered on the keys before going back to straightforward and doubled with nice choir vox from 1:55-2:33. Solidly done escalation at 2:33 into more grandiose orchestration and more forceful choir for a strong conclusion. Shifted at 3:07 into an original outro punctuated by the female vox. The brief hits of sampled female vox for both the intro and conclusion were tasteful. The textures were relatively simple yet effective, and every part registered while meaningfully contributing to the overall sound; this is a strong example to point to of something with only a few elements going on that nonetheless sounds spacious. Nice work! :-) YES
Hemophiliac ⚖️ Posted July 4 Posted July 4 (edited) Gotta give it to you H36T this is your most developed arrangement I've heard thus far. Really nice work to take a short source and really expand on it a lot. You keep the Chrono Trigger in the forefront meanwhile including the trademark H36T sound. Vocal samples, dramatic percussion, hand percussion, and orchestra. Despite the added material, this still feels CT dominant to me and time stamping it confirms it. The ritardando just before 2:34 was a nice touch to give some contrast as you kept building energy and dynamic levels up to the climax. Also great macro-dynamics as well because everything is covered here, from whisper quiet to near bombastic levels of loud. The climax does get hefty and dense. It's pushing the edges of what you could include before being too much. I agree with prophetik here, no one part is really carrying the lead and things are trading off and stepping in front of each other for the foreground. Maybe doubling the melodic element you wanted as a focus could help with that. It would keep the energy high but also potentially keep the source melodic focus as the primary. People will dig this and it's nice to see an under appreciated source from CT being turned into a whole new thing. YES Edited July 4 by Hemophiliac
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