Thanks, I'm glad the dancing part is effective ! For the stereo center, I'll try to do that for other musics, I'm not used to panning so I usually put the violins on the left, the cellos on the right, etc, otherwise it would saturate with all the instruments, I don't know if something soft or snappy would be better at the center to not draw all the space. And for the end, I came back to the leitmotivs I've composed, but on guitars, and I think you're talking about the notes before the last chords, I don't know how it's called, but I had the choice of slowing the tempo or adding bars ; I chose slowing the tempo because it was easier to modulate. Again thanks, it makes me happy you enjoyed the music and thanks for the feedback !
Viewing post in The Dance of the Timesteels jam comments
With the fake cadence I mean the last few notes on the guitar that imply a V/dominant chord, then hang in the air for a moment, letting the listener experience the tension of the "unfinished" chord progression, before resolving to the I. You pulled that off really nicely.
In the old days of record mastering, things like bass drums were mixed in the center, because low frequencies need more volume/wave amplitude to be heard in a mix, but the literal wall thickness of the record between sections of the groove in the vinyl put a limit on how much energy can be put left and right in the stereo (records use mid/side stereo encoding - the needle movement up/down is encoding the information that is the same in both channels and the left/right movement of the needle is encoding the difference between left and right). So the convention became that the bass drum is in the center of the stereo field and other rhythm instruments at least somewhere near that. I'm not trying to limit your artistic expression with this, but I think it's useful to know the mixing conventions that commercially published music has been following for the last 60-ish years, and what people are (subconsciously) expecting to hear when listening to music.
In addition to just the history of why we expect rhythm instruments to be mixed a certain way, I would also add accessibility (like in my own example) to the reasons why a hard left/right pan should be used sparingly. Over headphones, I would have missed out on this neat little trick that carried the whole track further into steampunk.