1. Brinster Midi Rip RIP
   hobokaa
2. Bitstar
   Silverpool
3. Brinstar Trance (Demo)
   RonaldPoe

hoboka - There's something vinyl-y or kind of lo-fi about this. Was that intentional? Anyway I feel like this could fit in the game in an ending sequence kind of way, like in a "return to Brinstar for the final boss fight" sequence if the game had that. Very short so not much development on the musical themes but a good idea. Would have liked a proper ending!

Silverpool - Percussion wise it sounds like you took several stabs at different ideas for a beat, so it wasn't cohesive overall. If you listen to your favorite songs you'll hear that they basically stick to one or two patterns for the whole song, deviating only for fills and breaks. And that's for 3-5 minute songs! I'll say your percussion intro worked fine (although it was a little boring), but then you should have stuck with what you had going around the 0:40 mark through the rest of the song. The fill at 0:50 was fine but then you should have gone back to the main beat. I didn't like what you did with the percussion after 0:50. Can you hear how the beat you chose there is less driving and adds less excitement than the one at 0:40? That's at odds with the rest of the way you did the song. Use the beat to reinforce the emotion of the song.

RonaldPoe - I thought the beat worked alright with the melody although it's kind of weird to hear 6/8 done with that beat. Also you have a lot of low-end rumble beneath 50 hz that doesn't need to be there and is in fact hurting the clarity of your work. One thing that has helped me is listening to reference mixes alongside my mix, both through a narrow (say 0.5 to 1 octave) bandpass filter on the low end, so I can see what they're letting come through in those frequency ranges and what they're cutting out. One interesting thing I found is that in many commercial mixes you'll hear the bass drum and essentially *nothing else* in a narrow band somewhere around 50-80 hz. Cutting everything else away from it helps it come through clearly. In some mixes there will be some bass (and *only* bass) coming through below that, and in some mixes the bass doesn't come through until above this bass drum range. Whereas you have all kinds of stuff coming through in that range and it sounds like undefined mush. Basically I'm saying your tracks will improve if you highpass everything except the bass and bass drum around 80 hz. Start with that and adjust from there.

1. Brinstar Trance (Demo)
   RonaldPoe
2. Bitstar
   Silverpool
3. 
   

Both of the entries are ties to me, as there is something cool about both. I felt that RonaldPoe's style works here, especially since he got the source-tune down correctly and it def. has an MnP vibe here. Nice work Ronald!

Silverpool - certainly produced better than Ronald's entry. Thought the drums were OK and very creative. Definitely helped to move things along.

1. Brinster Midi Rip RIP
   hobokaa
2. Bitstar
   Silverpool
3. Brinstar Trance (Demo)
   RonaldPoe

Hmm, not as easy a vote as I thought it would be. This is a good ol' Meat and Potatos compo, but I was giving points to people who were somewhat creative. The best balance between creativity and adhering to the source would probably be Hoboka - the blend of voices to the theme worked really well. Kinda sounds like a Super Metroid version of the source.

Silverpool had a really clean version going here, though it was pretty bare bones as far as instrumentation. The speeding up was a cool idea, though. Nice production values.

RonaldPoe, great idea, would've won me over if the beats better lined up with the beats of the source. It sounded like a 3/4 song had a 4/4 beat placed under it, which can create a pretty cool effect. However, to be most effective at that meter shifting the source does need to either be expanded or truncated to fit the new meter - bLiNd's FF4 Cave of Monsters remix is a great example of what I'm talking about there.

Dex's track was kickass, but I can't vote for him. Alas!

Great source, nice round!

1. Brinstar Trance (Demo)
   RonaldPoe
2. Brinster Midi Rip RIP
   hobokaa
3. Bitstar
   Silverpool

All three were nicely put together, and captured the spirit of the Brinstar theme. They were of an appropriate length given the short length of the tune. All three ended a little abruptly, and would have benefited from a fade-out or cadence. It’s a very close run between the three, and difficult to pick an order of preference.

RonaldPoe: This deviates a little from the source material, but in a consistent way throughout the track. The bass was appropriately implemented. Not sure about the percussion (tambourines?) - not sure how common they are for trance.

Hoboka (?): The choral section was very appropriate for Brinstar, and I liked the descant near the end. (Could have let them breathe a bit though!) The off-beat vocals sounded as though they came in a little late in places. The samples could also do with some tweaking.

Silverpool: This could have used more bass, although the lack thereof did give it a cool NES-like feel. The gradual tempo increase was cool, although it could have been done over a shorter time-frame - it felt at first as though the player just couldn’t keep time.

1. Brinstar Trance (Demo)
   RonaldPoe
2. Brinster Midi Rip RIP
   hobokaa
3. 
   

Ronald Poe: I like this ReMix, especially the percussion. It feels like it never took off and I really want it to go somewhere. I'd love to see more developed version, because I really enjoyed it!

HoboKa: I liked the vocal "ahhing" throughout. For a short ReMix, I thought it was very rich.

Dex: I enjoyed. :) It's a nice rendition of the original. You might want to consider submitting it to OCR!