Looked at your profile, you seem to be a new face, so first off: Welcome to Overclocked ReMix! I do hope you enjoy your time on here. It's always a pleasure to hear what newer folk have to bring to the table.

Great source to start with - intense, and in game quite meaningful, so I'm sure folk would love to hear an arrangement of it. A pumping trance arrangement would not be a bad way to approach it, and through the original material added I can certainly hear the source as the centerpiece of the track so good work there. I don't hear anything clashing or unpleasant in the original material, it blends well with the source.

It was mentioned that the track was made in Garage Band, I think I can hear it. I wish I could provide more specific commentary concerning the DAW, but as far as the instruments go there are better instruments available on the internet. Sometimes one can tweak the instruments we have to make them sound better, but in this case I think it'd be easier to expand your instrument library to include higher quality material. I assume Garage Band can use VSTs, so I recommend checking out a few freebies like Vital, Synth1, Surge, and Spitfire BBC Orchestra, just to get you started. Heck, my bread and butter Reason released a free VST rack and a pack of instruments & utilities to go with it (Europa and Monotone Bass are two synths I use all the time - it's high quality stuff!), so there are quite a few cool options you can use. But yeah, the instrument quality isn't passing our standards, I'm afraid, and you don't need to spend a cent improving this.

Concerning the arrangement itself, while I understand the trance it's trying to emulate the drums and patterns drone on too long. The drums have two patterns and no fills, which even in Trance would become unbearable after a few minutes, let alone nearly nine minutes. I think there are some cool examples of subtractive arranging in this track, where a relatively full arrangement cuts down elements to bring focus to something different, but the additive arranging often simply repeats a phrase and doubles a line with a different instrument, repeat as necessary for a minute or two.

The production quality isn't bad for a first pass, but it does need some work. The mixing doesn't seem to have been touched, so some instruments pop out (the saw at 5:04, for example) while others are almost impossible to hear (the pad holding the lead at 2:52). I don't hear any obvious issues with the production quality otherwise, but it is a pretty quiet track which I imagine would be difficult to gain in volume without introducing production artifacts like clipping due to most of the instruments sharing the same EQ range (the bass is pretty high frequency with the texture and pads all sharing the same two octaves above).

It's a good start, but it's not something we can post. Good source and idea, but the overall arrangement quality is unfortunately repetitive and the instrument quality could improve with many free resources readily available on the internet. The production comments probably should not be tackled until the quality of your library is improved, but using a lower register for your bass and exploring more of the upper registers for your other instruments would give you a track that'd be easier to work with, in production (and don't neglect the mixing, either - the relative volumes of your instruments are important!). Thanks for sharing this with us!

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