About the review

Title: The race driver
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Artist: T.Kuusniemi
Genre: Soundtrack/Game: Soundtrack
Reviewed by: Sjef van Leeuwen on April 01, 2008 (All reviews by Sjef van Leeuwen)

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1Overall Description
The Race Driver is an energetic and composition consisting mainly out of acoustic type instruments such as the accoordeon, and snare instruments played mostly in stacatti. The whole track is driven by small cymbals sounds and taiko like drums. As this track is written for a short film and I do not know the exact script of the movie the remarks I make can sometimes seem not so objective. The reason I did choose to assume certain things without seeing the movie script first is simply because otherwise this piece would not be able to be reviewed.
 
2Creativity Description
I found the composition pretty repetetive, which could be a good quality for the Short Movie score, it really depends on the movie script, so let's assume its appropiate to be repetetive. Still in this repetition I miss changes in dynamics and timing to make the track sound less mechanic. Therre could have been more creativty put in the FM7 synthesizer work, now it just sounds like someone is just playing a couple of notes to try filling it up.
 
3Artistic License Description
The artist certainly does not push this piece to its limits, comparing other works from T. Kuusniemi will reveal this undoubtly. The choosen samples all sound a little cold and do not work well as a whole together, its too chaotic. Though I give the benefit of the doubt, maybe this was intentional and part of the assignment for the script of the short movie otherwise I would have rated this at 3.
 
4Arrangement Description
There are almost know noticable transitions in this track. Personally the beginning of the track you hear a pitched flute like instrument (not sure what it is) but it gives a sense of a race car shifting gear. It would have been most welcome to bring this back through out the score and stop the drums for a brief moment. It could be the screen play did not allow for this but still there surely could have been some kind of transition to make the track more versatile. The only transition know, if you can call it that, is taking out the accoordeon and replacing them by synthesizers such as the FM7. Its arranged in such a way it doesn't sound like a unit, just some fillers here and there pushing some notes. Also the accoordeon is erratic, now again this coulld be the style, but let it breath now and then and let it say yes, here I am!
 
5Sound Quality Description
The sound quality is not so good, in the sense that the dynamics of the track are all loud, and way to much reverb. This results in the drums now sound deep and wide. There is no headroom in the mix for the vibrations of the drums to really reach your ear, as you want to take the whole volume a notch down when you are listening and thus reducing the headroom.

The instruments overlap too much in the stereo field and could have been made wider. T. Kuusniemi works with SONAR and it has a 64Bit engine, this is the main reason to choose sonar over other sequencers, and results in a much better but correlation between mixed tracks. Certainly with the high quality audio libraries it wouldn't have been hard from a sound engineering perspecitve to make it sound better, though I do not rate it as the worst i have heard.
 
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