blaggles

744 here. So, okay - most of this remix is already done, but I need feedback on production/mixing. I have a limited set of speakers/headphones on which to really listen to this, but at the moment it sounds pretty good to my self-taught ears. I'd like to know: - if overall the arrangement is too close to the source - if the kick is too powerful and the compressor is pumping too much -- even though this is more a stylistic choice, I don't want to go overboard - if any other parts are hard to hear, overpowering, or are muddy. I'm not great at getting each component to sound separated in the mix, but I tried - what I should name it. I was thinking something like "Elnubnub is gone" or "Giant Alien Spiders" Thanks for listening!

Here's a new and improved version. I made an attempt to fix up the drums (especially adding some subwoofer frequencies to the kick), extended the Stickerbush section, switched to a different piano patch that is brighter without losing tone, added an actual ending instead of the lazy fadeout, messed with compression a bit in an attempt to make things sound more full, and tweaked panning.

Mashup of Aquatic Ambiance from Donkey Kong Country and Stickerbush Symphony from DKC2 done in a heavy synthwave style. It's not just a simple medley as both themes borrow elements from the other. The entire track was assembled mostly from memory, so things might not be 100% accurate to the actual thing, but reasonably close? Both tracks are really well-known, oft-remixed David Wise pieces, but I haven't seen anything done quite like this. I'm not the best with production/mastering so I'd love some feedback on that. Direct link to mix (mp3) Direct link to mix (uncompressed WAV) Originals: Aquatic Ambiance Stickerbush Symphony

So I used to play Top Gear to death as a kid, and its composer Barry Leitch used heavy arpeggio and really influenced my own style, when I think about it. I was in the mood this time for some overcompressed dance music and this particular theme from the first track of the game (or each four-race country cup in the game) happened to be stuck in my head. Mostly I left the original tune intact, except for some artistic license here and there; I added harmony when there wasn't before, a little pitch bend at times as an accent, kind of embellished on the original percussion track, and I tried to make the bass synth sound like a car engine in a few spots. I did fire up my old cart and play it for a little while. Top Gear was pretty much just a rehash of the Lotus series from the Amiga and Genesis, I think. It was a decent racing game for its time, but Top Gear 2 and especially Top Gear 3000 were better games, and I feel are both severely overlooked. Honestly I've spent many, many hours on this already, and it's pretty much done, but I could use some feedback regarding production (I have some minor hearing damage that makes production notably more difficult.) Link Original track on YouTube

This deserved to be accepted. The ambient, foresty/foggy, semi-R&B, downtempo vibe is definitely the kind of thing I've been into lately. It's tough to take a classic David Wise track that is already amazing, and make it better than the original, and you did. I've added this to my driving-to-work playlist.

I made some changes to overall balance, did a lo-fi drum track thing to help add some momentum to the slower sections and the break, added some subtle sweeps for some additional depth, a tiny bit of glitchiness, and really went overboard with automation. This one might be my final. Maybe. Draft 8

Thanks for the feedback. I haven't paid a ton of attention to the energy of the track nor done an exhaustive production pass on it yet. I'm going to redo the drum tracks from scratch and come up with a new bass line and try to get it to contrast better with the breaks. edit: Draft 7 with new bassline and percussion, and production pass (I skipped a bunch of revisions already) Regarding production - it may still need some more work; I have a bit of hearing damage in my left ear from working in audio for years and it's not helping me. If anything this one might be fun to play in audiosurf )

One over-a-month-long silence later and I'm back with another draft of this thing. It's more 90s now and is based on the level where the lights keep flickering on and off; the intensity of the track also alternates between intensity and darkness. Draft 2

Just something I started on a couple weeks ago. I like the Fear Factory theme from DKC a lot and I've been on an 80s kick lately. I dunno. Could use a bit more variety I suppose? Link to WIP (old, see newest post) Original theme

This mix is very early on at the time of this post and is actually missing some things I wanted to do with it, but I'd also like to know if it's really worth pursuing. This is actually a project that's been sitting on my hard drive in various forms (all of them very unfinished) since around 2009, I think? I feel like it needs some countermelody right now; being locked into the same chord progression the whole track is kind of boring, it's WAY too close to the original piece in a lot of ways, and production hasn't even been addressed yet other than some really basic compression and EQing. After listening through a few times I have also just decided that I don't like the drum samples I'm using all that much. Plus there's a section where I just kind of randomly noodled on a keyboard and it doesn't make a ton of sense. Oh well. Thoughts? Link to WIP Original theme

I was commissioned to create a soundtrack for an RTS game called Iris Burning; there's not a ton of info out about it right now, but it's an RTS game set on an alien planet where different corporations fight over resources. It's like a hybrid of SimCity and Starcraft to some extent. Let me know if it's any good? I'm not really asking for a purchase, just a hearing. http://744music.bandcamp.com/album/iris-burning-soundtrack

This post is kind of rambling and disorganized, please bear with me! .-. I'm still pretty new to OCRemix, far from being a professional, and make music in my spare time, but I've spent thousands of hours using Logic. Don't underestimate what you can do with Logic Pro X's built-in plugins; they are extremely powerful. Sure, some of the presets might sound pretty synthetic and cheesy at first, but that's where clever manipulation of MIDI parameters and EQing come in. You can get some pretty great results using the expression and modulation parameters alone for some of the built in orchestral samples, particularly the strings and woodwinds. As far as synth sounds, Logic Pro X ships with a pretty massive library: The Alchemy plugin, which they added only a few updates ago, will have a preset for pretty much every electronic genre you could name, and then some -- it's now my most-used plugin. It is extremely versatile and is actually one of the big selling points for Logic Pro X now. Sculpture is an extremely flexible and awesome synth modeler that can produce a wide range of sounds as well. EXS24 ships with some quality samples and can import soundfonts; you just need to drop the .sf2 file into the proper directory. The ES1 bass synth and ES2 oscillator synths are also very powerful. Ultrabeat is pretty fantastic and pretty easy to use. For orchestra, there's always the basic stuff in Squidfont; it's not the most authentic on its own, but works fairly well layered with other sounds. French horn is legendarily difficult to capture using samples; to get an even reasonable sound I had to layer the Squidfont legato French horn with a Garritan horn choir and a synth! Saxophone is also extremely difficult to realistically set up, if not more so than French horn. There used to be a Ben Boldt library with some okay orchestra samples in it as well but I can't seem to find a download that is working at the moment... EQing is something you can develop a sense for; Logic's built in channel EQ is also very simple to use. You can get pretty good through experimentation but it's best to know what frequencies to boost and reduce as well; a chart like this one is a good starting point. Single out a regular snare drum on a track sometime, and turn on the analyzer; boost somewhere in the 180-220hz range and the 4500hz area and see how much of a difference it makes. Also, while I don't really recommend using Apple Loops in a real project, sometimes they're handy for inspiration. They make good placeholders in some projects until you're ready to replace them with something you made yourself. Same for the Drummer tracks. As far as external plugins, the posts above mine cover a pretty good range and the majority of them I already have sitting around on my hard drive. The top three third-party instrument plugins I personally use are the Garritan Personal Orchestra, MusicLab RealGuitar, and Image-Line's Drumaxx, but none of these are free and they also require some effort to get sounding great. Anyway, I liked your Sonic 2 mix above a lot. Your composition skills are definitely there.

In case something goes weird with Dropbox again, here is the link to the final mix.

I did bring that bass drum hit down as well as applied some significant compression in an attempt to even things out some without losing too much perceived dynamic contrast (I have the privilege to run live music on an almost weekly basis and if there's one thing I love it's dynamic contrast.) Overall it's been boosted ~3.5dB without clipping. I've just kinda ... overwritten the file in my dropbox. c: @Uffe von Lauterbach I'm going to go with your title, Frozen Mourning fits perfectly. Thanks for the suggestion!

Thank you for the kind words! Unfortunately I think it might be too late to adjust the title, but in the future if I submit anything I'll be consulting a multilingual thesaurus.