Maindrian wrote:This line of thought was bought on by Waz's comment on a recent, very small sounding Sanxion remix. No problems with his thoughts on the tune at all.
Thanks for that Maindrian. I did think pretty long and hard about just what I thought on this one, and "valiant effort" sums it up nicely. I could see that it was trying to be something different with what's essentially a much-covered SID tune, but for me personally, its overall slowish pace and initial high level of sparseness might actually put people off listening to it. Nothing wrong with its craft or anything like that, as I can see that there's some playing in there and a definite feel as such, but it just could have been done a bit better than it was. I'm sure if it was tweaked and maybe with just a bit less sparseness (but keep the single guitar as that's the strength I think you found in it) it would actually work pretty well for more people and have that wider appeal. I hope that explains my mode of thinking after I'd listened to it a few times.
Maindrian wrote:
Is there a bias here towards going for the biggest, most "studio" production sound possible?
In terms of bias towards the most productive studio sound possible, I'd hope I don't feel that way. As an example of note, some people really hated the "fake" sax used by Mixer in his remix of Nemesis The Warlock, and that meant that they downmarked the tune somewhat. However, that was a bit unfair in my eyes because ultimately Mixer had succeeded in getting the feel of the tune across in the right way. After all, we don't all have real life sax players to call upon just for a free to release production, do we?
Besides, you can overkill a productive process so much that it may sound clean and crisp and well produced, but if the feel of the tune's gone in the process, then that means it wasn't a good idea, too. It's a tricky balance to get right, really. With Markus Schneider and Romeo Knight's version of Mutants, the balance just tipped the other way, it was a case of over-production that spoiled it slightly for me, no matter how good the playing it just didn't carry the feel because there was too much going on. Not least as Mutants is one of my all-time favourite SIDs and the man who composed it on the C64 I've actually had the privelege of staying at my place :)
I think that's what you were hinting at to some degree, Maindrian, and as I said, it's a tricky balance.
As for the sparse stuff, some of the stuff released on RKO might fit into that category. One that springs to mind is Andrea Baroni's piano version of Erebus. That's absolutely beautifully sparse and minimal and just has the right level of sparseness for me to sound just right, not to mention the lush piano playing. Part of me actually mentioning that in my review of the 2006 ROTY awards was that I felt it was criminally overlooked then, and now it seems to have got a few more reds since I last looked. Excellent.
As a fan of minimalist stuff (ever heard Johann Johansson's "Virthulegu Foresetar"? Buy it, it's a perfect example) I really felt that I wanted trv's mix to work, and I was absolutely gutted when it just missed the mark. I was torn between grey and yellow as it stood now, but tweak it and it'd probably score higher.