Hoping for some feedback on a game track

[hummy]

So I made a short (~3 minutes) medley of some obscure (PC-88/MSX/Sharp X68000) video game music, and wanted to get some feedback on aspects that I could improve on and I figured this forum would be a good place to ask.

Sorry if this is in the wrong place, incidentally. I thought about putting it in the self-promotion thread, but I didn't think it would fit since I'm not trying to promote any of my stuff.

Anyway, here's the link. Thanks for your time!

[sabbacc108]

It's... interesting? There's a lot of dissonance, since there are melodies in different keys and tempos layered on top of each other. When putting this together, did you re-sequence/perform the parts, or did you just use samples of the original audio?

[surnshurn]

I'll open by mentioning that I'm not familiar with PC-88/X68000 midi hardware. That said: I'm kind of a purist when it comes to midi rendering. Meaning - I appreciate sound sets that are accurate to the hardware they were originally produced for (eg. in keeping with the vision of the original artist),

edit - As for the my opinion of piece itself: it can't seem to make up its mind. It's caught between a relaxed disharmony, consisting of loosely bunched chords ; and then there's a melody that picks up and becomes energetic, but seems to linger in parts of the scale for too long without really going anywhere. I can tell it's a mashup, but it's really lacking an over-arching theme to tie it together.

It's good!

[hummy]

Thank you both for thee feedback. I actually sequenced parts of the track (like the guitar and piano sections) in separate files and independently from each other (merging them at the end), so I didn't try normalising everything into a single key at the end, but it makes sense to do that.

[alphex]

Polyharmony is possible, but you shouldn't count on stuff in different keys just fitting together. ~1:08 onward it gets pretty weird. I mean, tracks like that can still fit a specific scene as a soundtrack, but as a standalone piece, and to somebody who's not familiar with the source material, it's really hard to discern what the piece is trying to do at any given time.

[surnshurn]

Nov 3, 2015 15:50:49 GMT -5 hummy said:

Thank you both for thee feedback. I actually sequenced parts of the track (like the guitar and piano sections) in separate files and independently from each other (merging them at the end), so I didn't try normalising everything into a single key at the end, but it makes sense to do that.

That's a very artistic design approach that could produce some interesting results. I think the file as is should be considered rough or unfinished, and could perhaps use some work in figuring out how to make the final project work as a whole.