Christmas listing

[elser]

'Tis the season for retailing' Here's my arrangement of 'Greensleeves', thought I'd ask for some feedback before I submit this time. Thanks, Jonhttp://www.taximusic.com/song.php?song_id=57209&stream=true

[adrianne76]

I like it. Very soothing. Easy on the ears. I like the beginning better than than towards the end, though. I problably would've just kept it gentle and mellow the whole way through, but I don't know much about composing instrumentals...

[squidlips]

I like it better at the beginning too. Not sure about the intro but when you start with the melody, it's really lovely. The changing rhythms were cool through the offbeat tambourine hits but then....I don't know. I think the mellow approach was the most effective. Very pretty there. What does the listing say?

[mazz]

Nice work on this. It has a nice ambient vibe. I question some of the percussion that comes in around 2 minutes, the wide panned stuff. It kind of kills the vibe for me, it's a bit too electronic sounding for the rest of the arrangement, to my ears.I like your chord substitutions too.Good luck on the listing!Mazz

[Casey H]

Hi. Very very pretty. I would definitely lose that long intro. For over 20 seconds the reviewer might not now what this is and "click". No reason not to get right to the melody.I'm not sure about the percussion as the song progresses. It's a bit unsettling against the more traditional Greensleeves thing. I'm not sure it has to stay more traditional, but I think there is more chance that the percussion as it stands is a negative, not a positive. That's a guess, I really can't say. It just didn't feel "right" at times- out of place.This is nicely done. I'm not sure the sound quality is where it needs to be for a music library listing. But I'd bow to others here with more expertise than on that...Enjoyed... Casey

[elser]

Hi hurowitz, thanks for the comments, there seems to be a consensus so far on the intro and the percussion. One question on the sound, this track lost a lot in taxi's digitizing, I uploaded a 192kbps mp3 which sounds much better than what I'm hearing back from my hosting page. Any tricks here? I've dithered it using Logics built in dithering. Anything else I can do? If this thread goes to far I'll move it over the Tech discussion board. Thanks.

[squidlips]

Elser, thanks for mentioning this. It's been talked about elsewhere and it's what's keeping me from posting my songs on Taxi so far. I keep hearing this weird, watered sound in the songs I listen to from taxi sites. And yet, other taxi songs don't have this problem. Frustrating.

[mazz]

The sound you're hearing is probably the 128K version that is converted by TAXI for the streaming process. The downloadable version should be 192K and from what I've heard, the version that the screener's hear is the 192K version.I think they do the 128K version for streaming for bandwidth reasons, I'm sure bandwidth isn't cheap and some people are still on dial-up so it's a compromise.I recommend using iTunes for converting mp3s if you're not already. This has been discussed here as well. Always check your mixes at 128K before uploading them and even check by converting them to 128K from 192K which is what TAXI does. You may need to make some adjustments to your mix or mastering to accomodate the loss that occurs in the conversion. Back in the day we had to learn how to minimize the damage that cassettes did to the mixes, now it's 128K mp3s. I'd rather deal with mp3s, thank you!Mazz

[elser]

Hey mazz, well that's good to know, it makes sense for streaming purposes to knock it down to 128, and I'll bet that the whole process of converting from aiff to 192 mp3 and then one more conversion to 128 means even more corruption. I'll just take it for granted that the screeners are hearing the 192 version and leave it at that. These Taxi forums are great, you guys get me all jazzed up.