Danse Macabre (Full Length Original Mix)

[Eric Danger]

Uncut version of the "Radio Edit" that I submitted for the April contest. It's not just twice as long, I had to cut some of the best parts to meet the contest's time requirements.

This was composed by Camille Saint-Saëns in 1874 as a "tone poem" that begins with the twelve strokes of midnight on Halloween when Death comes out to dance with his skeletons until dawn. The style is EDM, though the tempo might be a little awkward to actually dance to if you're not a skeleton. (I wouldn't know; dancing to any tempo feels awkward to me ) Downloads are enabled if you would prefer a 320 kbps mp3 over Soundcloud's 128 kbit re-encode.

https://soundcloud.com/eric-danger/dans ... e-original

[seismic1]

Overall, I enjoyed this one, having not listened to the original for a very long time. The pulsing chiptune sounds gave this a very surreal and creepy fairground carousel vibe. It may be that you might want to look at the eq or levelling of these sounds. I found that they were cutting through the mix in a very prominent manner at quite moderate listening levels.

I haven't tried dancing to this. It's still a little early and I may need a drink first.

Good work

[Eric Danger]

a very surreal and creepy fairground carousel vibe

That's exactly what I was going for. Good to know it worked!

[kryptonaut]

I've always liked Danse Macabre - it was one of the first things I tried to record in the early 80's using a homemade monosynth with a keyboard made of brass draught-excluder strips, and a reel-to-reel recorder from a junk shop. Didn't work out too well!

This version is interesting - the creepy feel is entirely appropriate! I would have liked to hear some more variation in instrumentation/effects/dynamics/tempo for a piece this long - I found it a little tiring on the ears to listen to the whole thing. Putting a 4/4 beat behind waltz-time music is disconcerting and I think could have been used sparingly rather than constantly.

But electronic versions of classical pieces can be great fun (Tomita, Wendy Carlos, etc) - I enjoyed this and hope you continue to develop your work in this area

[Eric Danger]

It may be that you might want to look at the eq or levelling of these sounds. I found that they were cutting through the mix in a very prominent manner at quite moderate listening levels.

I have apparently been spoiled by my new Mo-Fi headset, because they seem to be more tolerant of sounds that would produce ringing/sibilance than what I've been used to. I used SPAN to identify the offending frequencies and eq'ed them while listening with my RE-Zero earbuds. It seems to have worked, because now I can turn the Mo-Fi up until it feels like it's trying to crawl off of my head without getting any ringing . I uploaded the new version (nixing my stats in the process), but it was a big enough improvement to be worthwhile.

[Edit] Forgot to mention, for anyone who cares...part of the "creepy carousel" sound comes from using a pipe organ microtuning on all the synths.[/Edit]

[seismic1]

That sounds better. The overall sound seems more "rounded" now.

[davidstiles]

Great stuff! I enjoyed the version you submitted for the contest, but you're right - you had to cut out some of the best parts to get the length down. Thanks for sharing!