*NO* Mega Man 2 "Pixel Perfect"

[Liontamer ⚖️]

Artist Name: JSONBach

An orchestral arrangement of the Dr. Wily's Castle theme from Mega Man 2. I am currently learning how to use Spitfire's BBCSO. This was a study project, chosen because I love the game, and because I wanted something challenging. The quick articulation and speed make this tough to arrange for orchestra, so I have worked hard to make this work as a transcription more than a recreation of the original material.

The orchestra is eventually blended with some authentic 8-bit synthesizers from the NES era, and the original audio is meticulously mapped (with hundreds of hand-placed cue markers) and then carefully stretched so that I can achieve a perfect crossfade. The original tempo of 180 is a bit too fast for an orchestra, so in the spirit of making an arrgement that I could transcripbe for profressional players, the tempo is lowered to 160 initially. That is subtly stretched to the original 180 near the end of the crossfade.

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Games & Sources

Mega Man 2: Dr. Wily's Castle

Edited 2 hours ago by Hemophiliac

[prophetik music ⚖️]

lol, what the heck

opens with a pretty standard transcription method - brass for fanfares, winds for accents, low strings for chords. the brass articulation is surprisingly good for this - i really expected it to sound like machine guns. and the flute articulations are nice too. the solo violin that comes in around 0:16, doesn't sound very realistic initially - it needs more vibrato, if you can add it - but the schmears that come in right after sound pretty good. the cymbals in the backing in the quiet section at 0:29 are a bit much.

this picks up with more well-articulated strings around 0:35 - the marcato is almost overstated there - and it comes back around into a similar scoring as the opening. trumpet note at the end of the run at 0:46 doesn't sound right. i liked shifting the melody to the brass right there though, and then letting the winds take the melody for a bit.

we start to hear the crossfade at 1:11, i think - the lead instrument there sounds pretty buzzy, and even more at 1:24 the buzzy nature of the lead starts to cut through. the backing elements are very close to the opening section, which is highlighting an underlying issue with this arrangement - it's short but there's a lot of repetition in how things are scored and represented. on cue, 1:35 has the same crescendoing violin line as earlier.

we do finally get some new material at 1:57 - i liked the interplay between the trombone and winds. soon after around the 2:05 mark we get more of the backing original synth tones. by 2:31 it's the original for 30s (or close enough it doesn't matter), and then there's a fadeout.

from a conceptual standpoint, this is a really clever idea. i love the idea of a crossfade into the original synths as part of a classical work - easily the farthest from those tones we can get despite having a lot of similarities (non-vibrato violin or flute vs. sine wave, for example). in terms of execution, the instrumental realization is pretty solid in most places too, with uncanny valley elements really only popping on some of the overly-marcato strings and the solo violin. my issue though is that the arrangement uses a lot of repetition of the same short blocks of harmonic content over and over. for a track that only has original material for 2:10 out of 3:05, we shouldn't only get eighty seconds of original material before there's repeats.

i will note as well that the crossfade idea is neat, but it should be more obvious when it starts to show up, and then slowly ramp up from there (that is, start slow, speed up in middle, end slow - logarithmic fade). i really only hear it in the lead initially, and then suddenly everything gets replaced. separately, having 20% of your piece being original audio isn't a positive - i understand referencing it for maybe 10s, but not so long.

taking another crack at the arrangement so it doesn't repeat itself so much and then separately cutting down the original audio at the end would be enough for me. as it is, there's too much repetition.

 

 

NO

[paradiddlesjosh ⚖️]

That's a pretty solid use of the multi-tongue articulation in the trumpets right at the jump! The result is much better than trying to brute-force staccatissimo 16th notes at tempo in terms of realism.

proph nailed all the major points on this one already: the strings are sorely lacking in realism (especially the solo violin) and the arrangement is overly repetitive. There's also too much of the original audio for an acceptable OCR submission. As an additional note, I'd sub the piatti (crash cymbals) out for tambourine during the A section: in a physical orchestra setting, it will be much easier for the percussionist to keep the tambourine balanced dynamically with the rest of the ensemble and the part as written lends itself to aux percussion like the tambourine for that reason.

If it wouldn't compromise your vision, we'd be more interested in a version of this arrangement with more variation in its presentation and less of a reliance on the original BGM.

NO

[Hemophiliac ⚖️]

The sequencing of the orchestral elements is not half bad here. In particular, the brass short articulations were executed well. Strings sound like they really could use greater variation in round robins, and the solo violin was heavily exposed. But really not the worst I've heard before.

The overall arrangement is fairly conservative structurally sticking very close to the original with a few melodic embellishments. The choice of embellishments was good, but more expansion on structure would have been nice as well. More of your own ideas would be welcome and less Wily 2 is what I'm saying. More variation and development of your ideas, and less repetition and similarity to the source.

The major problem is that the track then crossfades into the source in the final 1/3 of the track. Now, there's nothing wrong with, crossfading into another genre that you had created or using a simple chiptune sound to solo or improvise over the orchestra; for example. But utilizing the original source audio directly (or recreated nearly identically) is not acceptable.

NO