ReMix:Tales of Symphonia "Perfect Day" 3:39

Super-catchy synthwave take on Tales of Symphonia from Michael Hudak:

"I've been obsessed with bass arps for years now, with finding cool sounds and writing parts for them. I have a ton of remixes in the synthwave-ish style of this one, but most I don't do anything with. With this ToS submission, I wrote a busy bass part first, and tried to wrap the rest of the song around it. Maybe a risky move to not have anything panned center for over a minute other than bass and drums, but it allowed me to really dig into the bass with multiband processing; mono subs, very small width lows, distortion on the mids, and chorus on the highs. Hopefully, it's interesting enough to not have the center sound too empty with everything else panned fairly far apart during the first buildup. Some of the white noise distortion on the snare crackles out now and again, but I feel like it's a nice touch, and not too distracting.

As I tend to do, I arranged it like an 80s dance track, but treated it like a rock song in terms of panning and compression, because I think it's fun to replace guitars with plucks, and big airy chord stabs as crash cymbals (the intro has the synth plucking panned right but the reverb panned left, which is something Jimmy Page and Eddie Van Halen did a lot with their guitars). Little bit of real guitar at the end though. Mid-side processing to *really* open it up, which gives space for all the reverb to move around. Chords and melody are mostly the same as the original.

"Perfect Day"... you can rarely predict when they happen, and when they do, you don't want to them end. They come and go almost in a flash. Like this song, in my mind. What was a perfect day you had?"

While much of his work on OCR has been experimental and "challenging" (or at least disconcerting for some listeners!), Hudak also has a real knack for easily-digestable & downright amicable synthwave, and I'm loving this take. Something about the source melody avoids being **too** obvious or simple and lends just the right intrigue for a synthwave hook - it's a great & perhaps less obvious genre adaptation, and the production work backs it up with smooth, punchy dynamics. I've had some days where, at the end, I thought to myself that I wouldn't change a thing, but I'm too old to rememeber 'em :) We took the girls out for their first hibachi restaurant experience last night, and there were no meltdowns & everyone had a good time, so I'll settle for a perfect night. Title made me think of the Lou Reed song, but the vibe is of course pretty different. Judges did have some pointers, and Greg in particular wasn't feeling the mixing/mastering, but Liontamer summarized the prevailing wind:

"Cool idea altering the rhythms of the various fragments of the source tune. Very lush soundscape, and great dynamic contrast throughout. Extremely well personalized, that's for sure. Always loved this theme, and this was something you wouldn't immediately connect back to it, but I love and respect the extreme transformation here. Nice work, Michael!"

Indeed; this ReMix manages to be highly transformative while still keeping substantial parts of the source unaltered, shifting the time sig & synthwaving it up to the nines in the process. It's not quite summer yet, or even spring, but it has that carefree, open-air anthem vibe that would make it appropriate for driving a silhouetted Testarossa against an oceanside backdrop. I'll be driving our minivan around the corner for school pickup, myself, but you get the idea. Great, dare I say "happy" tunage from Hudak, with a creative and FUN reimagining of the original!