2025/10/24 - Donkey Kong Country "Azurite Horizons"

[prophetik music ⚖️]

To the esteemed judges panel, OCRemix community, and any other listeners,

This is what a remix sounds like when you're a hobbyist musician who only has spare time and energy outside of regular joe working hours to engage in this hobby, among other hobbies (video games, of course). But actually, in all honesty, this is technically a resub, though the first and only submission prior was a fair number of years ago. I am thankful it was rejected, as it allowed for the various refinements that resulted in the current version of this remix. Not only have I learned the electric guitar and the Arturia Microbrute since then, I had also been interested in refining my sound, which included long hours of mixing and mastering for the fun of it. Needless to say, I haven't been working on this song this whole time, only refining little bits here and there on a small number of occasions over the years, whenever I fancied the effort.

My choice of DAW has been FL Studio (since version 4), and the guitar amp I currently employ is Guitar Rig. My guitar is a "House of Blues" Washburn, and I think it needs better strings. I used a fair number of VST instruments, some from FL studio, some free to use ones from the internet, like the drum kit, which is the "MT Power Drumkit 2". And as I mentioned earlier, the Microbrute was used for the first instance of the melody, a square lead with tone modulations, as well as for the following sections, as the 'bass wubs' for lack of better terminology. 

The remix itself, in a word, is progressive, as I strive to be as minimally repetitive. In fact, the melody doesn't occur until 2:30 using the square lead mentioned above. That being said, I feel there is no single genre this can be categorized under, as there is a section best described as reggae, with a separate one later best described as heavy metal, though the whole song maintains the same BPM.

The song encapsulates an auditory journey from the shore, above the waters, into the depths of the ocean. You are accompanied along the way with some familiar sound effects, which includes a familiar swordfish, as well as the collection of some bananas and the KONG letters. I hope you enjoy the ride!   

Though I feel that I have accomplished the vast majority of what I would like to accomplish with this song, as any artist understands, one's art never really feels complete. And so, I figured its time to get this remix out there! Been a long time fan of OCRemix, now I would like to join the ranks! 

I am always happy to hear any feedback and criticisms, and can make any adjustments if there is anything standing out that I didn't catch. The sense of proficiency I feel towards music production after working on this song makes me hopeful that I can get more done now, better than ever before. There are a few on the backburner, already. 

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Games & Sources

And now presenting the prospective 30th remix of David Wise's ultra beloved Aquatic Ambiance! I don't know if there really is such a thing as too many remixes of a song, as it is interesting to hear the sheer variety of takes, for instance, on this theme alone; while quality goes a long way, which is what I appreciate about OCRemix's submission standards, what is really valuable is the opportunity to share with the internet one's vision, or in this case, music! I don't think anything more can be said about this source song, that hasn't been already said, but it merits repeating, who could ever have expected a song about a monkey riding on a swordfish to be so transcendental! 

 

Edited 3 hours ago by prophetik music

[Chimpazilla ⚖️]

This remix is telling me a story, which always gets my attention.  Going from the crashing waves to suddenly deep underwater is so super cool.  You added just the right kind of reverb to really make it sound like it is underwater, the instrumentation is sparse enough to really feel the underwater isolation when we dive down. The sonar pings starting at 3:20 are truly excellent.  I love the mix of instrumentation here, and there is a ton of ear candy and morphing of sounds.  I'm a huge fan of patterns and instruments fading in and out of an arrangement.  The guitar performance is very good and mixed well.

I'm in love with this remix, but there is one major issue that absolutely MUST be fixed before we can post it.  I always listen and analyze mixes in Cubase when I'm judging, and I use SPAN to look at the frequencies.  Right at the one-minute mark, I see SPAN's correlation meter start to move to the left.  Ok, that happens sometimes.  But there's an acoustic guitar fading into the soundscape and it's hella wide.  The more I hear this guitar come in, the more the correlation meter is moving to the left until it's in the RED.  Uh oh.  So I check that section in mono, and unsurprisingly, the wide acoustic guitar is GONE completely.  Whatever was used to widen that guitar has pushed it almost totally out of phase.  Anyone listening on a phone speaker or otherwise mono playback system will not hear the guitar at all.  So the problem is from 1:00-1:48, when the reggae section begins and the guitar is done, the problem is gone.  I didn't see that happening anywhere else in the mix.  This should be a fairly easy fix, just widen it another way that isn't pushing it so far out of phase.  If you really want it super wide, I suggest using a haas plugin (kilohearts has a freebie) but my feeling is that the guitar does not need to be *that* wide.  Either way, it should at least not disappear in mono.

This could almost be a "conditional" but I'm going NO just to ensure this gets fixed, but please do this and send this awesome song back to us stat!

NO (resubmit please, I love this)

 

[jnWake ⚖️]

We begin with some waves and congas before a dulcimer-ish instrument starts playing the main Aquatic Ambience arpeggios. Fun vibe to start, I don't think the congas' sound quality is particularly high but it still works fine. At 0:54 we move underwater and a somewhat loud clean guitar enters the soundscape. AA arpeggios continue on the background. At 1:52 vibe starts slowly shifting into some sort of reggae mood, which is established at 2:20. A synth lead plays the main Aquatic Ambience melody here, after 2 whole minutes! I feel the drums and bass are a bit soft here, but they get better after a few repeats. Love how this sections sounds, the laid back style with the synths playing melodies and flourishes is a great combo. There's another change at 3:15 with a big break. Arpeggios once again are the main element here but there's some bass wubs on the background. Guitar returns around 4 minutes in and after a bit of build-up we get distorted guitars! Mood is still quite chill though. A lead electric joins a bit later, playing the main AA melody. I love the change-up around 5 minutes in, sounds Tool-ish. At 5:16 the rock section ends and once again we focus on piano for the track's end.

Arrangement is fantastic, we go through a ton of several moods during the 5 minute duration so it never gets boring and a lot of the sections are very memorable. I don't really have any nitpicks! It's great that people can still come up with fun ways to reinterpret these sources.

Production is also mostly great, mix is clean and most samples and instruments sound good. Clean electric guitar, as pointed by Chimp's vote, is the main issue, it's super wide and also kinda loud (plus the mono issue she highlighted).

Overall, fantastic track! I absolutely love the arrangement but sadly I think the one present production issue may be a dealbreaker. Rules don't really state anything specific about your track having to play well in mono but on the "Production" item we have the following:

With this in mind, I feel a song not playing properly in mono may be enough to reject it, as much as it pains me. Like Chimp said I hope you can look at an alternative way to produce the electric guitar section since this NEEDS to be on the site.

NO

Edited 13 hours ago by jnWake

[prophetik music ⚖️]

opening xylophone doesn't really have any velocitization on it, so it's very mechanical initially. same feel for the conga, there's some repeated hits from that which feel machine-gun. the filtering to make it feel more underwater is a really clever touch, and the acoustic that fades in with the bells handling the arpeggio is a nice feel. there's definitely more in the right ear here, which is a little confusing.

percussion comes back in for the transition at 1:49, and the feel moves towards reggae or island. the plectral instrument in the right ear here doesn't seem to have verb on it, so it's sticking out of the mix a bit among all these other very verby elements. and then we finally get the melody line at 2:30 - what patience! i love it. i do thing also that the lead needs more reverb as well, same reason as above.

there's another deep drop and build - the sonar pings are inspired, and i really like the big bass hits that are so far away. really neat spacing here. guitars and drums come in at 4:00 for a pretty big build. the rhythm guitars that hit at 4:15 are too dry and loud, but i really like the idea. and then the lead comes in soon after, and it's louder than everything else combined - way too loud. needs to be turned down drastically. the spacing of the lead in the original (or in Vig's arrangement from the DKC album) is a good demo of where this should sit in the mix. it's well-played, but it dominates the soundscape.

coming out of that, there's a bit more of the 12-string, one more sonar hit, and it's over.

what a creative, interesting arrangement! really shows the breadth of the original's composition that we can still get really solid, unique mixes all these years later. i think that there's a ton of story in how you approached this, and the variety of realization elements you've used is really fun. i think if you do some cleanup - more velocities to the opening xylophone, avoid machine-gun repetition in the opening conga, fix verb levels on some instruments, and then turn down the guitars and especially the lead guitar at the end - you'll have an all-timer. and fixing the mono issue described above would be a meaningful update as well.

so close! can't wait to hear this one a second time with a few tweaks, as it'll be amazing.

 

 

NO