Emunator

Yeah, honestly "additional piano, synth bass" doesn't really capture the scope of how much jnWake's "bullshit" helped sculpt the sound and direction of this piece - it was absolutely integral to the final product and this would not have come together without his contributions. More Wake+Emu collabs in 2025 for SURE

Totally on Larry's side (twice in one day? What a world we're living in) in terms of the string mix - the writing is great, but the articulations used feel too sluggish and lack the proper transient to really cut through the mix. Once the rest of the instrumentation kicks in, the impact of this issue is mitigated. As I go through this, I think the overall mastering on the track needs some attention. I don't usually comment on mastering in my votes, because usually I can isolate frequency balance issues to specific instruments, but in this case, I think the whole thing is just too bright. You can hear this in the drum kit, the sibilance in the voiceover, and the harsh tone of the strings and guitar that leads me to believe that there are mixing issues being accentuated by a mastering chain that's not ideal for your arrangement. Seconding the crits on the drums, those just don't hit like they should. I don't have any issues with the writing, but the kick has a lot of audible click, the snare lacks presence in the mix and feels like it's scooped out of the midrange too much. The rest of the kit sits alright, though the cymbals are extra harsh due to the issues I mentioned in the last paragraph. The voiceover is a great addition, my only issue is with the mix - for the first half, it feels like it sits too far forward in the mix on certain words, which suggests a lack of compression and volume shaping to get more consistent peaks. Then, when the rhythm guitars enter, they are getting totally lost. I don't envy your job of having to mix that, but the VO noticeably goes from too audible, to not audible enough. I'd do some very selective EQ cuts on the rhythm guitars wherever the fundamental frequency of Chris's voice resides. The arrangement is tremendously dynamic but the mixing and mastering is causing problems. I haven't touched much on the arrangement and performances because those are rock-solid - your high placement in the month should speak to your success on a conceptual level and I absolutely enjoy everything you brought to the table here, but the mixing/mastering needs some TLC in my opinion. NO (resubmit)

Celeste really translates so well to metal in a way you'd never expect by listening to the original source. The way you translated the rapidfire ostinatos (I especially loved the sweeps at :35) to guitar shows that you definitely know your way around your instrument, so the bones of this arrangement are really solid. You've added more than enough personalization through unique writing and expressive performances to clear our bar, but I agree with the gentlemen above that the mixing is not helping this live up to its full potential. Starting with the drums, those are easily the biggest area you should focus on when (hopefully not if) you choose to polish and resubmit this track. The programming feels too locked to the grid and sterile, and it's accentuated by the way that the drums are mixed. The kick comes through with way too much high-end click and not enough low-end oomph, so it feels pasted on top of the track rather than giving it a rhythmic pulse, and really draws attention to how rigid those double-bass kick drum patterns are programmed. Those need some velocity and very subtle timing adjustments to really feel like there's a human being behind the kit. On a similar note, the drum programming issue is compounded during moments like 3:25, where everything is highly rigid in its syncopation. Great work on getting your guitar performance so lined up, but instead of feeling punchy and climactic, it comes across as robotic, so I don't think that hit the mark. Once you've cleaned up the drums, my next area of focus would be on the frequency balance between your individual components. Make sure you're applying a low-cut filter on anything that doesn't need it. Your bass and kick should live in that low region, as well as some of your heavier rhythm guitars, but anything else is probably just contributing mud and reducing clarity in the parts where you really want the low frequencies to hit hard. Hemo also suggested some bus compression and overall glue to the mastering to tie all of the elements together, which is a great suggestion to get this sounding fuller-bodied. Also gotta double up on the critique of the ending - that fadeout didn't need to happen and took the wind out of your sails just as you were reaching the summit of your arrangement! Full send it all the way to the end :) Love this arrangement, you did justice to the source but the mixing needs some work. I highly recommend you take this to our Workshop Office Hours, since @paradiddlesjosh and @pixelseph will absolutely have some guitar/drum-specific techniques that can help you reach the top! NO resubmit (you can do this!)

Loved this arrangement when I heard the first WIP back in Workshop Hours, and I love it now. Never would have guessed this was a Sim City arrangement, wonderful choice of source. I have very few gripes until the vocals come in. I love the creative textural addition they add, but man they are LOUD in certain frequency ranges. I think there's a confluence of issues at play here - the panning is very wide, there's a specific frequency where the vocals peak as they're panning, they're rather dry and don't have any sort of reverb/delay trail to blend them in with the rest of the song, and the overall volume is loud on top of that. This is a showstopper for me because of how many times it repeats, it's honestly distracting in a way that has nothing to do with the actual quality of the vocals and everything to do with how they're placed into the song (which is a good thing - this should be easier to fix!) Beyond that, the orchestration quality was solid enough to pass my bar, with some dings for realism on the lead instruments (oboe/bass clarinet specifically.) Those two instruments are also panned right on top of each other, mixed quietly, and drenched in a lot of reverb, so while the writing seems to suggest that they're harmonizing or doing more of a call and response, they feel more like they're stepping on each other more often than not. I think you need to evaluate the volume levels and stereo field placement for those leads specifically to make sure they have their own space in the mix to accommodate what you're doing with the arrangement. Overall, this piece has a strong vibe to it and is easy to get lost in, in a good way. There's some very emotionally impactful moments and a lot of layering to the orchestration that shows how much care went into bringing this to life. There's really just two core elements that aren't clicking, and unfortunately because they're such critical aspects to the song, I can't sign off on this in its current state. I think you could get this up to par without much fuss though! NO (resubmit!)

Yep, exactly what the two gentlemen above me said. I'm not going to muddy the waters by trying to restate it, but this has a SUPER high amount of potential and reflects a really clever arrangement and some enthusiastic performances, but the level of polish makes it feel like a sketch in most regards. There's a lack of separation between the instruments in terms of stereo separation and EQ/frequency masking, the sax performance and volume is inconsistent, and some of the supporting instrumentation has moments where it's exposed and highlights the lack of realism in the programming (see: the low piano notes.) Lots of actionable advice above, hope you're able to bring this up to the bar because there's a killer arrangement in here! NO (resubmit)

This is really nifty - I know this source inside and out through Super Smash Bros, like most listeners likely will, and you latched onto the essence of the original in such a great way. This is incredibly satisfying as a listener. It's funny, the other judges mentioned the guitar being too wet, and although your submission comments referred to this as a metal arrangement, my brain heard it and immediately thought "this is mixed like a surf rock track." It's not necessarily something I dislike either, it's just unconventional and doesn't seem like something you may have done intentionally! There's some very strange hard-panned hi-hats in the middle of the mix but that was the only thing that felt truly out of place - the rest was just a little curious and ultimately didn't impact my listening experience in a negative way. There's some great feedback to take into account for your next one, but you rocked this one just fine! YES

I listened back to this and see the argument for the NO more strongly this time. I was obviously very borderline at first, so there's no need to hold this up - let's get this polished up and hopefully the next version will jump over the bar rather than barely eeking over it.

Time to play the game of "are the sour notes actually sour or just some weird Earthbound shit?" Hmm, yeah I don't love that alteration to the chord progression, I can see why Flexstyle decided it was a hill worth dying on. Things get way too crunchy there. I also felt the first note of that guitar solo at 2:11 in my bones, and not in a good way. The rest of the solo was good, and offered some much-needed expressiveness to the song, but man, that was a jarring start. Aside from that, the lack of groove to the drums and bassline actually bothered me more than the rest of the judges. The hi-hats are incredibly sharp and in-your-face in the mix, and they're playing a VERY static rhythm so the first thing I notice about the song is how rigid it is. That ends up drawing my attention to the fact that the rest of the drum kit, the bassline, even most of the melodic synths, have the same issue. I know that, to a degree, this is a genre convention but there's a lot you can do with simple velocity/micro-timing adjustments or even delay/effects to add some of that rhythmic life back without having to actually change your part writing dramatically. I don't think this is a massive dealbreaker relative to the sour notes mentioned above, but it impacted my listening experience a lot more than the rest of the judges thus far. At the very least, if you're not going to adjust the drum programming, that hi-hat needs to come down in volume. Sorry, but I don't think this is there yet! NO (resubmit)

As a proponent of shamelessly mashing up two extremely popular SNES source tunes myself, I tip my hat to your gumption here. There's certainly a lot about this approach that works - I do think some of that is simply the strength of the original compositions, but the blend of elements on a compositional level is pretty cohesive. I have no nits to pick with the arrangement here, and it doesn't surprise me that this was made for a composition-focused community challenge, because I think that's the strongest aspect of this piece! So the good news is that you've got a solid foundation. I hate to say this, but didn't find the sound design to be very engaging. Everything feels fine and competent, but compared to some of your other submissions where sound choice, I can't help but feel like the sound design component of this track is keeping it from being something greater. I find it very hard to quantify this feeling, so I hope you don't mind me being a little more unfiltered and subjective than I would normally be when voting. Everything feels serviceable, but nothing is really inspiring me. It's hard to say this especially because I can tell that there was a lot of work that went into fleshing out these sounds with different effects and selecting a wide range of patches - it's not like you just loaded up a couple of soundfonts and called it a day. I think this might be a level of personal preference for more unique sound design, so take it for what it's worth. All that said, I will express that I think the drums cross over from a matter of personal preference to a more quantifiable critique - these just sound bland here in terms of creative processing and programming. Trap drums live and die by unique fills and rhythms, and this feels like you leaned way too much on a single loop. It's extra-noticeable in the hi-hats because they poke through the mix so much due to their dryness, but it's basically doing the same short rhythmic pattern ad infinitum. At the very least, I think this aspect of the song needs to be reworked and expanded on in order for me to sign off on this. Brad also touched on some mixing critiques that I'll also cosign, but those never really escalated to the level of a dealbreaker in isolation. I know I'm probably putting off bad vibes with this vote, but I do think there's plenty of potential with this arrangement. If the drums were reworked to introduce more variety/fills and a processing chain that blended better with the rest of the song, I'd probably be able to sign off, but I also felt it was worth expressing the feelings that I came away with that were more subjective too, because you've submitted multiple songs that felt much more inspired and ambitious in terms of the sonic world you created with them and I'd love to see you lean more into those impulses here and on future songs. I hope this comes across in the spirit it was intended! :) NO

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!)

Oooohhh, this is so cool! It's immediately recognizable what source you're covering, but that makes all the changes to the chord progression and harmonies feel all the more engaging. I don't know enough to break this down from a theory standpoint, but it all goes down smooth all the same. Everything finally breaks wide open at 1:49, and I agree that it couldn't have come at a more perfect time. The first 1:45 is just enough to lull you into a sense of security before hitting the listener with some much more powerful beats and more of a rhythmically-charged focus. It's all paced wonderfully, even if it feels unconventional. Love this so much, great stuff! YES

The issues and merits of this track have been covered pretty well, so this is going to be mostly a recap from me. There is a lot of promise to the concept of a super mellow, soft electronic take on this source material, but the sounds being used are fairly basic, with the exception of some occasional vibrato effects on the lead synth, there's not a lot of effects or development happening on the sound design front. The sounds themselves are well selected and pleasant on the ears, but there's not much happening with them. When you start to explore automation of the various parameters in your synths and effects, you can do a lot to keep even the chillest arrangement engaging by gradually evolving and varying your sounds. The Workshop would be a great place to learn about some of the techniques you can use to spice up your sounds and arrangement. I also would suggest experimenting with different percussion sounds and layering different loops throughout the track, rather than relying on the same core beat unchanged for the entirety of the song. Using organic or unconventional sounds as a percussive element can bring your grooves to life and make them sound more unique. For lo-fi/chillout genres, this is especially important to find ways to keep your percussion interesting even if the beat itself is uncomplicated and slower. There's definitely a vision here and you can totally get to a point where you can execute on that vision, but I'm afraid this would require a lot of work to bring it to that point here. Keep at it and use the resources that the community has, and you'll get there! :) NO

Jewbeiiii, it's so good to see you back in the fold and hear that you're doing well man <3 Life is good. This truly feels like you haven't missed a beat since your last trance submission. It's got all the things I love about your mixes - the production is rich and punchy, and you've got a great ear for pulling little melodic hooks out of a source and building off of that. That said, the runtime on this piece is pretty long and I think you've overstretched some of these ideas and sounds past their breaking point. I'm less of a stickler on repetition than most judges, I feel, but even this one felt like it was dragging toward the end. Without any chageups to the way the melody was presented, or any substantial breakdowns or changes in the arrangement structure, it's just trying to make too much. I'd consider approaching the OCR submission as a Radio Edit, or if you do want to keep it at more of a club edit length, the other judges have brought up a ton of great approaches that could add some spice without having to stray away from what you expect from trance music. Real close, I don't think this would require any major changes to reach the bar, but just a bit of fine tuning and variation will go a long way in keeping the song engaging all the way through. You got this! NO (resubmit)

LOL, I never thought I'd hear a Youtube Poop sentence mix in an OCR submission, but there's a first time for everything. I just played Wand of Gamelon for the first time this weekend... man, that is a bad game. As much as I appreciate the concept here, this feels sadly underbaked to my ears. The percussion lives on auto-pilot, and isn't a terribly compelling groove or set of sounds for most of the arrangement. The first half of the arrangement is highly simplistic, which is unfortunate because the back end of the arrangement proves that you do have some sauce, it's just that everything comes together far too late in the game for it to feel complete. If more of the arrangement felt like the last 30 seconds, this would be a slam dunk for me, because I really love the brass and synth noodling and the richness that they add, but it takes too long to get there. If you could beef up the first half of the arrangement, I'd love to see this on the site, but we're not quite there yet. NO (resubmit)