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[HOST SUBMISSION - Disregard Placement] - The Spirit of Rage's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Composing Quality | #2 | 4.632 | 4.632 |
| Correlation to Theme | #2 | 4.684 | 4.684 |
| Overall | #5 | 4.347 | 4.347 |
| Listenability | #6 | 4.263 | 4.263 |
| Uniqueness | #7 | 4.263 | 4.263 |
| Execution | #13 | 3.895 | 3.895 |
Ranked from 19 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Description
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STORY
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The prologue of a game that my soundtrack goes with.
"The Spirit of Rage"
A youthful angel sees a shadow spread like a rumor through Paradise, which fulminates suddenly in rebellion - war. Enraged, this angel seizes the archangel's sword. In a rage, he starts hacking the rebel angels to pieces. The sword lights aflame, a raging inferno that matches the rage inside. Eventually the fire spreads up his arms, charring his hands, and soon this angel is engulfed in flame, with flaming wings.
Much to this angel's sudden shock, he finds himself being cast out into the same pit that the rebels are cast into in the aftermath of the battle. It's a horrible place - rebel angels scream in shock and rage.
They surround the angel who grabbed the sword, about to attack, mocking the angel. But, before they can do any harm, the archangel appears, and removes the angel from this pit and sends him to wander the earth as a lone spirit.
He wanders, and his rage at the rebels consumes him. As he walks the earth, he becomes a Spirit of Rage - for a time. Eventually, his rage burns him out, and after his wandering, he is about to perish into shadow, until the archangel appears again and saves the angel before perishing, instead incarnating the angel as a human on the earth, without his memory of any of the events that came before.
The incarnated angel's life as a young adult human the main character of the playthrough - and the details of this incarnation are only slowly revealed over the course of the story. As the story progresses, he starts to learn of his angelic past in strange and unexpected ways, and this gives access to abilities of increasing power - but part of the game is that this power has to be expressed with restraint.
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COMPOSING DECISIONS
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I decided to go with not only both themes and a looping track. Not only did I do both themes, but I overlaid the two themes (almost). I overlaid theme 2 with a variation on theme 1 play over it. At 1:06 you can hear this.
Additionally, I felt that theme 1, while it is clearly defined, has this ambiguity when you listen to it without context of the beat, like it almost sounds like it's in a triplet meter.
So, instead of interpreting one or the other - I did both. The flute at the very beginning plays the theme exactly as written.
The theme returns in a slightly different form later.
This was a great challenge and it really flexed my composition muscles.
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OTHER NOTES
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The cello at 1:21 took about 50 takes to get it right. I literally got noticeably better at the cello from attempting this with my own instrument instead of using a virtual one.
Screenshot of DAW
https://imgur.com/a/ZF1qj0A
Pick your mode!
Which Motif did you use?
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Comments
Who can say no to some good old harpsichord and sequences 😉
The whole feel of this is great and has that nice spacious sound as you usually get.
Some of the WW legato transitions are a bit bumpy, but that's unavoidable with samples (at least I have had the same issue with EW Hollywood Woodwinds).
Love that you kept the breathing in noises on the recordings, it really adds a lot feel of the vocals.
There's been so many stellar production quality submissions this time around that I really feel like I need to get off my ass and learn that stuff properly to get out of the "produced by a monkey on a typewriter" category 😅
Stellar work!
Very nice, your first classical style i've heard from you so far. It definitely sound like the era, probably the woodwinds up high have some annoying frequencies to look for, the bass at 0:38 is great but the cut is too brutal when you ended it XD. The structure and arrangement are well done, can the mix be louder on the mastering, of course but its still very decent already since the arrangement and instrumentation are already well seperated. I'm looking at the daw picture and you'll have to start using some panning, everything is dead center, especially for orchestral arrangement you can use the actual orchestral disposition and base the panning of of those. Good job !
I'm actually using DearVR Pro to pan/place things in space.
Nothing is quite dead center, but I didn't really spend much time placing things in space very well because I ran out of time, so things sound mashed together.
Agreed on the flutes and the high frequencies; they do need to be tamed. It was something I was thinking about the whole time lol
0:38 is also a spot that needs work, that transition/pause.
At the end, I noticed that somehow my flutes/oboes never actually got sent to my reverb send, and I noticed that in the last 5 minutes so I just flipped it on and submitted it... hence a kind of unbalanced mix. Loll.
Thanks for the feedback!
I've noticed that DearVR does not pan exactly like the PAN is working on an actual track, its more like a spacialisation plugins than an actual panning pluggin, it can work for sound design but have to be careful on instruments, i've tested a bit and i'm losing some artefacts if not placed well.
I'm curious about what you notice you're gaining/losing with DearVR - I am curious if it spatializes it in part by simulating the ear like a binaural mic does.
To be honest, I wish the plugin was a bit more transparent about its workings so I could use it more carefully.
I guess the other thing was that I used a stereo mic setup to record everything.
What this comment does is makes me think that I'll want to be more strategic about which tracks I used DearVR on, really depending on the frequency spectrum of the instrument. I.e. wide range instruments with a lot going on like a piano - probably avoid.
But stuff like flutes and vocals - as well as my cardboarderidoo (lol) it seems to work well and get really solid results.
I suppose what I would like is a plugin that makes it easy to toggle ear simulation fourier transform as part of the binaural effect. Heh, maybe I should also put an object between my SM57s to make the IRL recording sound more lifelike, since I like the idea of getting a full stereo image of IRL recordings.
Vocals that IRL stereo image matters less since most of the sound comes out of an area that is the size of a microphone - unlike say a guitar or cello, where there's a lot of unique acoustic information lost by not recording a second mic.
Mixing with any binauralizer is kind of a pain because of the internal EQ process and the fragility of the illusion. My personal best results have come from collapsing the input to mono, and not using DearVR's built-in reverb (Reflections Only). Then, sending the final result to a convolution reverb send with all your other instruments. It only sounds vaguely "real", but frankly all your Master bus effects will crunch the spatialization anyway.
I'm still a big fan of the sound-stage effect despite all the work.
Cool submission, very different scale and atmosphere from your other works!
Oh, yeah, mono sources only for DearVR.
Geometrically it has to be that way, otherwise you're making it like you are basically having four microphones for two ears worth of sound, making things muddy.
I've done both cases where I use thr built in reverb and turn it off, but by default I tend to turn it off.
Which master bus effects are you talking about, specifically? If you have a clean stereo signal, reverb should function almost physically.
My line is as follows - EQ, compression, DearVR, send delay to reverb.
I don't put any mastering on top of those things precisely because of the illusion.
This time around I had no time to spend on really dialing any of that in, unfortunately.
Nerd rant ahead:
I think mono inputs are easier to control, but you can of course find stereo input workarounds by splitting the L/R channels and spacing them apart on the DearVR XY interface. The coolest way is of course multi-miking your performance with different distances from the instrument, then recreating the setup in DearVR to get some sweet 3D richness and texture.
Having a reverb on the master after spacializing everything won't have the same physical effect as dialing it in for each individual element using DearVR. Imagining a virtual space, elements further away take longer to reach your ears (reminder: they won't reach both ears at the same time), and elements closer to your ears would in turn take longer to come back after each bounce. These would be pre-delays, decay/delay times on regular reverb controls that you would have to dial in for each element - butDearVR goes further to EQ and delay that reverb signal to account for the physical head and ears - these functions can get messed up by basically any processing if you apply them after. That's what I meant in the previous reply about the "crunching" post-processing can do to your signal.
TL:DR - If it sounds good, it doesn't matter - but if you really want the listener to feel like they are physically "there" despite the fragility of the ilusion, It's gotta be purely in the DearVR ecosystem, including using their reverb models.
So, I do try to physically simulate the stereo signal to some degree with a delay sent to the reverb on my tracks, generally. I didn't end up actually carefully setting up that delay here, however, due to time.
The "closer" something is, the higher the delay I use.
Generally I've been using neoverb, and turning off the DearVR built in reverb, manually setting delay and wetness to what sounds good.
I think the most important things for the illusion are the initial dry signal to each ear being timed right and undergoing the Fourier transform to simulate the shape of the ear reflecting the sound (something UE5 actually has built in).
The reverb is a wetter, more complex signal that comes from too many directions to really easily distinguish between a real space and an artificial one as easily, hence the illusion can still be largely preserved in terms of the physical location of the sound source.
If you were to EQ, you'd want to EQ before DearVR and adjust the EQ after DearVR is in the chain. Mostly saying this as a conscious note to self next time I'm mixing to solidify that point.
What I was curious about was the things you are doing after the DearVR chain in post, considering what those things are, what their benefit is, and if they are necessary or can be put in a different part of the chain as to not screw up the illusion.
To your curisoity on my approach: I do quite a bit of context-dependent post-processing on spatialized signals during both the mixing and mastering stages. Off the top of my head:
All of this will in some way ruin the illusion, but it often leads to a mix I enjoy listening to more. I tend to sacrifice realism for a more modern sound, which is probably why both Fox and I find some of the frequency shaping a little annoying.
Your process is probably closer to a more pure, realistic sound. I'd be interested to hear why you have a preference for NeoVerb over, let's say a traditional convolution verb sometime.
If I missed addressing something in this thread, Hit me up on Discord and I'll be happy to chat about this topic anytime,
The importance of the voices, a very beautiful musical journey :)
Kale what happened to you!?! Did the ghost of Mozart posses you? First seconds and I get immediate Lacrimosa vibes. The choir and instruments paint such a hauntngly beautiful hurtful moaning atmosphere with a dramatic urgency. I can already hear and feel that german poet colourfully lamenting about his grief and pain. While not exactly what you described I feel some connection to the poem Prometheus by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as for a mor human tragedy (Sadly I can’t say if there is a good translation in English). This is just theatrical! What makes it even more astonishing is that you played your own cello and I guess also other instruments. Do I hear a cardboard didgeridoo at 0:37 ^^? Joking aside, this is just marvellously done!
Heh.
I wasn't initially going for Mozart, but after I decided to go with vocals in that first/last section, it became pretty quickly apparent that it was stylistically very close to Mozart.
I actually composed that beginning/end part on the very last day, and I was struggling with it until I decided instead to focus on the feeling I was trying to convey. All that improvisation I've been doing has been training me to compose from a place of unity - that is, we perceive music as a unity at its core.
"While not exactly what you described I feel some connection to the poem Prometheus by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as for a mor human tragedy (Sadly I can’t say if there is a good translation in English)."
If you're getting Prometheus vibes from this, I think that's actually quite close to the feeling I'm trying to communicate. The story from a symbolic perspective is quite similar, perhaps especially in the pattern of what Goethe was writing in his Prometheus.
Reading some English translations of that poem, I'd say the themes and patterns are very, very much embedded into the story I wrote for this music to go to. It also has Paradise Lost vibes, which revolves around the very same theme as Goethe's poem.
I love how ghostly and haunting this is, those vocals are angelic 🙏
I've really got to stop reading comments before ranking stuff because I read Dark Souls from Tommy Li and couldn't think of anything else, this song would fit very well in that kind of baroque setting. It's light and feels like it's moments away from exploding out into a massive orchestra, making it the perfect score for a pre-boss theme imo. Really I just want a full album of this lol, amazing work!
What I was picturing while reading and listening to this:
I love how you flow into the part at 36s, and the choir there poked at my dark souls bossfight time neurons, and again at 1:36, I also hoped the bit at 1:15 was extended because it really gave me the chills.
Quite enjoyed your implementation of the motifs the way they are spaced out and cleverly blended "in and out" with the other instruments, good work!
As always, vocals are S+ tier. I mentioned this before, but it gives off the vibe of being executed (not that I have any experience with that lol).
Instrumentally and compositionally, no notes, really solid!
Wish you had more time, I think you could have nailed a longer track!
Yep, its missing some sections I actually composed of which I really like compositionally speaking.
I also didn't have time to really get the mix done at a higher level.
How very Tchaikovsky of you.
The song is a good mix between pure depression and hope?
Like the atmosphere is good, just the one thing is the flute was loud, very loud.
But one bad thing doesn't always paint a bad picture, I did hear the motifs.
I ran out of time to mix, unfortunately.
I was hard focused on composition this time around.
This is really cool, the vocals are great! I love the melody and counterpoint lines
"Elves bury old ol' Santa Claus.... A crowd of teenage elves whose voices are breaking stand in epic glee while another old elf, who has spent his life learning to play the harpsichord, realizes this is his finest hour!
Meanwhile, birds with big noses make violin-like sounds ...
...Santa is buried in the center of the church..."
Of course, your story that was originally laid down for this composition is the stuff of touching.... But... why do I feel the atmosphere of a Christmas funeral?
Oh, right... I completely forgot...
It was magic! The arrangement and mix was like I was sitting in a pit, and the angels around me, instead of helping me, started singing in Latin. And I don't even understand Latin well, so I have to die in the unknown.... Creepy...
...but wonderful work!
P.S. I admire people who know how to play instruments....
P.S.S. Rawr ^^