*NO* Mega Man 3 "Power On: System Boot"

[Liontamer ⚖️]

Artist Name: maiorano84

Years ago I had written an arrangement of the Megaman 3 Intro and submitted it to Newgrounds under the handle "italian-dragon84" (a terrible name in hindsight). This was created and posted in 2004:

I'd always liked some of the elements from the original piece, and occasionally revisited it over the years with many failed attempts at a new arrangement.

I wanted to continue using a very piano-forward piece, and felt that it suited the introduction much better. Unlike the original arrangement I had done, I wanted to incorporate more instruments and began experimenting heavily with electric guitar sounds. The biggest hurdle was mainly me not knowing how to actually play guitar and not finding any suitable preexisting electric guitar sounds, so I relied pretty heavily on distortion effects, auto-tuning, and using my own voice to fill in a lot of the gaps.

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Games & Sources

Megaman 3 Intro by Yasuaki Fujita: 

Edited 4 hours ago by Hemophiliac
closed vote, removed links.

[prophetik music ⚖️]

>5db of headroom.

opens with a straightforward version of the original in piano, which quickly adds some band stuff at 0:13. mix is very dense in the low mids especially and is very muddy. sounds pretty low-poly too, like it's been downsampled at some point - it feels like when i used to run 64kbps on my 256mb mp3 player so i had enough room for all my songs =D 

0:29, a guitar lead comes in. it's fantastically handled and sounds great. the arrangement up through here is doing a good job of letting the fun parts of the original come through and not getting in its own way. there's a break at 1:24, again with the keys. we get an electro build-up (i really expected edm after that), and then we get another guitar solo that again is great and well-handled. another electro break and there's a recap at 2:08 with the guitar leading again. one more lick in the piano, and it's done.

this is a really fun arrangement! it's nothing over the top or complex, but it does a great job highlighting the reasons this is such a heavily covered theme. the lead guitar does a fantastic job especially with the solos. my main issue is the mastering sounds pretty rough. there's a ton of sub-40hz content which is gumming things up, as is a very broad and dense freq package between like 100-300hz. you have a ton of fundamental and not much in the mid to high mid space, which makes it sound really heavy and cluttered. cleaning that up is just a matter of pulling back some of the filtering on the lead elements (the keys sound like they've got a significant low-pass on them for example) and notching in the EQ on some of the other instruments to avoid conflicts between, say, the rhythm guitar and kick.

this is really close to being super fun! just adjust some of the mix and we'll be there.

 

 

NO

 

Edited Wednesday at 12:06 PM by prophetik music
updating formatting

[jnWake ⚖️]

Ah, such a classic tune, definitely one of the best classic Mega Man tunes.

Quick note before starting the breakdown, this seems to be mastered with a -6dB peak for some reason, we don't ask for that here so you can go ahead with a standard master aiming higher!

Begins with piano doing a slightly sadder (less blues-ish) interpretation of the source's intro, lovely. Sound quality immediately catches my ears, it sounds very muffled and some notes are hard to discern (there's a left hand arpeggio around 0:04 where the left hand is basically mud). In a fun swerve the band joins in at 0:13, I really like that change since I was expecting a full piano solo rendition of the intro but instead we get an energetic feel quicker than the original. Sadly, the mix keeps sounding muffled, like proph mentions above there's a lot of content in the lower frequencies and few in the higher ones (you can easily check this with an EQ plugin and I'd recommend having a reference track to compare). After a small break we get the guitar lead at 0:30, I like how it sounds, I was expecing something bad given your write-up but I think it sounds great. Anyway, we get some source melodies on guitar after a few bars, I really like the mood you created here, it's emotional but hopeful. At 1:10 there's a repetition of the main melody on different instruments and at 1:24 a small piano break followed by a quick build-up and then a guitar solo. Still enjoying the guitar work a ton, although there's parts where the lead guitar randomly decreases in volume for no apparent reason. Another repeat of the main melody at 2:09. There seems to be some sort of glitch at 2:29 and at 2:36 I'm pretty sure there's some artifacts, is it possible you actually rendered this at very low quality for some reason? Anyway, near 2:52 we move to another piano break and the track quickly ends. I think the outro could've had a few more bars of development as it feels sudden (and you can let the final note ring longer!).

On arrangement I really like this! Maybe it's my bias but piano driven rock is such a mood. You did a great job adding your own touch to a well loved original and ended up with a cool take. Not much notes from me on this, except for maybe developing the end a little more.

On production, however, this really needs more work. It sounds muffled and low quality, and the mix itself is also muddy. The rhytm guitars are completely buried on the mix for example. It's usually tough to balance piano with guitars thanks to some overlapping frequencies but it's definitely possible to make it work. There's also a few glitches and audio artifacts that should be fixed.

Sadly, while I love the arrangement the production is way below the standards at the moment. Please hit the #workshop channel on OCR's Discord because I need a polished version of this remix to exist!

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[Hemophiliac ⚖️]

Sweet approach to this classic source. Piano focused rock is nice. I'm digging the arrangement as there's a lot of melodic personalization with embellishment and improvisation. Kudos there, this is the kind of melodic personalization I'd like to see more of in other submissions. The overall structure is pretty much the same as the source, but with the amount of improvisation and embellishment on the melody that can excuse the closeness to the source structure.

As the others have pointed out, there is almost 6db of headroom available.

0:28 this guitar transition was really cool. The guitar soloing late into the track is awesome and really puts your own spin on it while not getting too far away from the source. This is the highlight of the track to me.

The mix and production are the major issues here. There's a lofi or lossy quality to this piano sample used. The whole track sounds like it has a gentle high pass and low pass applied to the whole track. I think that's a contributing factor to making this sound muffled and lossy.

There's also clutter in the 100-300Hz range that is contributing to an unclarity of sound overall.  You've got low drums here, bass, and the left hand of the piano (and rhythm guitars somewhere?) fighting for space. When they're all going together it just clutters the soundscape and contributes to muddiness.

It's awesome that you've spent so much time working on this over the years. There's some really sweet spots to this, but the production just isn't at the level we're looking for. If you need feedback or extra ears on mixing passes, I would highly encourage you to check out the discord workshop.

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