ReMix: Amberstar 'AmberTrance'

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Hail to the Redskins! While I'm not the biggest American football fan in the world, Washington D.C. is ultimately a football town, and the 'Skins win today in OT against the Jaguars was pretty sweet. Speaking of pretty sweet, if you've been waiting for some good ole-fashioned four-on-the-floor trance ear candy, newcomer VIRTUALVIBE, in real life Beat Gregoric, has cooked up a fine example of such with this arrangement from a relatively obscure Amiga title called Amberstar. As an interesting sidenote, when I Googled for screenshots of said game, I got some rather risque materials mixed in, which always livens up the ReMix-posting process. Jesse had some problems downloading the track from Beat's site:

"in trying to download this track i accidentally "bewerten"ed "sehr gut," which is opposed to "schlecht." I'm not sure I made the right decision."

Fortunately, that situation eventually sorted itself out. The panel's vote on this piece was actually split - trance somewhat notoriously raises red flags around repetition and arrangement that the genre inherently makes a little more difficult - but there's been a number of relatively straightforward trance pieces that have similarly managed to incorporate enough variation and interpretation to cut the musical mustard. BGC, whose demo will just blaze you, came in with the tiebreaking passing vote, and had this to say:

"Well, I guess I get to be teh n00b ti3br34k3r, zOmGz0rzz!!!!!11!!!eleven!!!1!!one!!!11 Upon listening to the source, this is passable on the arrangement level as far as I'm concerned. 2:20 onward was a bit of a let-down in terms of expectations, but overall, this song was decently constructed. The gating was nicely-done, and the crowd effect blew my socks off. The theme itself is catchy enough. 1:05 suffers a little clipping/overcompression, but it doesn't cripple the piece, nor sway my vote. I would have preferred for the crowd to make a 2nd appearance in the 2nd half of the tune, but that was your call, and while it's not what I would have rather heard, my preference is not what this vote is based on."

This mix isn't attempting to be caviar, but rather a quick bit of solid fish n' chips, and in that sense its near four-minute running time gets the idea across and employs standard additive and subtractive trance arrangement mechanisms effectively. The filters used here are supple and deep, which helps a lot when they're being spread out gradually over several bars, and from a production perspective in general everything's pretty crisp and clear. Some additional harmonic risks and some extra counterpoint elements would have upped the arrangement ante and added a bit more distinguishing character, but Beat's turned in a fun and architecturally sound first mix nonetheless. Don't let the (likely) unfamiliar source material throw you - this is a track almost anyone should be able to get into.

― djpretzel