SkyeWint's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[Techno Voltaire Pt. 1]

Hello! This is a review for the NGUAC competition.

I've gone over one or two general categories of issues specific to your song, and one section of things I think also deserve complimenting. I prefer being very direct with my critique, none of it is meant to offend. Thank you for your understanding!

Constructive Criticism:

- Alrighty! I have two issues perfectly primed for fixing up, and I think you'll do fine on them. First things first, some of your sections sound like they have good basic ideas but they're also REALLY rough. You have a wonderful sense of development and progression through this track, but think of things like transitions. At 1:01 for example, the bass just... comes in with no 'fanfare' at all (also 3:40 where everything dies out without really snapping back in properly). Even a reverse kick to lead into it would have been something to improve it. Otherwise, the chord progression is okay but generally a little odd for the dark tone you have through this piece, and there are MANY times where some extra drum and bass fills would have broken up the more monotonous sequences of steady repeating rhythms. One system I like to use is to organize four-measure hypermeasures into drum sequences of ABAC, where the first and third measures are the same, but there are small fills on B and C which are different. You can expand this into ABACABAD, or larger following the same kind of formula to add consistent variation.

- No getting around it... a lot of the harmonic instruments above the bass just kinda... flop. They're very flat and honestly generic by comparison to the entire rest of the track, causing a dissonance not unlike the chord progressions. Some of the plucks are okay, but in general with this dark tone, your instruments need more IMPACT. Here's a song which has a similar tone, though it's much faster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEbWiv6SMt4 Especially in the section focused more on the synth starting at 4:28 (and later at 5:13 with more of an arpeggio), it has IMPACT to the sound along with the bass underneath, and variation (as mentioned in the other point of criticism) to keep things engaging. This song is drum & bass, but this should show how much of a difference instrument tone can make.

Compliments to the Composer:

- Holy atmosphere, man. So I know I just got done bashing your synth design, but the BASS design and atmosphere like in the section starting around 0:30, as well as the build starting at 3:25... that stuff is *so* good, and I desperately want the track to be more focused on it. The clicks coming in around 4:45 as well as in the first section... also very excellent for building tension. I firmly believe if this track leaned harder into its atmosphere and dark bass focus, it would be extremely tasteful. Just do be careful with reverb in atmosphere though, it can fill things up a tad *too* much at times!

Final score: 7

BlighterProductions responds:

Hello SkyeWint. First of all, thank you very much for your review. I like people the most when they're direct, and outspoken. I read your multiple times to fully understand it, and I have a few things to remark if that's alright.

The first thing is that I tried expanding my musical area with this. Besides only a very small handful of tracks I made, it is mostly ambient that I make (you can find more melody and welcoming sounds in those tracks), and almost everything I did in this track was completely intentional.

Indeed, instead of a fanfare or a whirlwind movement into the next section at 1:00, I wanted to keep the energy back for just a little bit longer. I did that because people who have listened to a lot of music may predict there to be a full impact drop. I wanted to be more unpredictable with this track. In order not to sound too 'generic'.

The second thing is that I wanted that rougher sound. I just recently got into Aphex Twin's music (he does many different styles under the IDM genre), and I was so moved by both his ambient and acid works, that I began liking the rougher sound more. Let's say Aphex Twin grew on me as one of my favorite artists right now.

I like seeing different perspectives of people, and I love how you wrote the review in great detail, going over the overall composition and over some timestamps. Telling what could be improved and what I did well, and such.

I'm also very glad with the postive parts about this track. Your compliment about the atmosphere and basslines really motivates me. I know it would be a good idea to capitalize on that, but I just feel like I shouldn't. I feel like I need more variety in my stuff.

Anyways, thanks for the rating and comment. It's a pleasure being in the NGUAC again.

[Dream Continuum]

Hello! This is a review for the NGUAC competition.

I've gone over one or two general categories of issues specific to your song, and one section of things I think also deserve complimenting. I prefer being very direct with my critique, none of it is meant to offend. Thank you for your understanding!

Constructive Criticism:

- There are two fairly obvious things in this track that definitely need improvement. The first is the mixing and general levelling of the track. See how it makes a literal flat rectangle taking up only about half of the space in the waveform visualizer? You can absolutely INCREASE the peak volume of the track by limiting it more appropriately. Try setting the threshhold closer to -1.1dB so that it stays around -1.0dB (sometimes it goes slightly above the set threshhold). At the same time, try to vary the volume of individual instruments. You don't need to bring ALL of them up together, and in fact that can make it extremely difficult to identify individual instruments. Around the 2 minute mark this is very clear, where there are many instruments, some clearly bring brought up in 'volume' and causing clipping, but not actually increasing the volume of the track because there's no room given for it to actually increase and develop.

- Secondly, the vast majority of this track is audibly made with arpeggiators tossed onto the instruments being used. Arpeggiators are extremely useful, but not when they're applied to so many instruments. Others sound as if their patterns are made with the randomizer function in FL applied to the chord at any given time, which... has the serious issue of leaving all melodies essentially aimless and without any intensity curve. It may be good to try replicating pieces of music you like in midi to see how their chords, harmonies, and melodies are laid out. In this way, you can bring your music into having more cohesiveness and clarity through their length. Remember that listeners typically want some kind of hook or concept to really cling onto!

Compliments to the Composer:

- Speaking of hooks, there are a couple sections I really like. The organs in the outro, as well as the switch to piano is a wonderful touch and I wish this was used more throughout the track as a time of reduced intensity. Orchestral power metal music often nails this type of thing - I think you might love listening to Kamelot if you haven't before, not to mention their music might be particularly good to study if you plan to continue this type of music! Another section that also really hooked me started at 0:43. Those changes in instruments with intense rapid rhythms was fantastic and made me perk up - if developed more, this could become a really solid foundation for more of a climactic section.

Final score: 3

BALDORF responds:

How many times did you listen to it?
Also the only arpeggiator used was on one riff, that starts at 2:11 and becomes promenant at 2:27. It is used on a few different instruments, but it is only used for that one specific riff and only for that one specific part. from 2:27 to 4:04. That is not the vast majority of the song.

[cable fables]

Hello! This is a review for the NGUAC competition.

I've gone over one or two general categories of issues specific to your song, and one section of things I think also deserve complimenting. I prefer being very direct with my critique, none of it is meant to offend. Thank you for your understanding!

Constructive Criticism:

- There needs to be more to that arpeggiated bell sound. 100%. It repeats far too much with zero variation whatsoever. This piece would be tremendously better if it were a pad with a slow progression, simply expressing ambience rather than an arpeggio. This would also let your piece develop a lot more, such as if you used the bells for that ambience by swamping them with reverb (though be careful with this) and reducing the dry signal, varying the chords played by those bells and slowly fading the dry signal in and out at low volume. These types of little effects would work fantastically with the feedback played by your guitar while providing more variation to keep the listener hooked into the piece over its full length.

- The overall mix gets pretty swamped as your drums and bass come in, seemingly because of the intense reverb on your distorted guitar and even the mild reverb on your bass (bass frequencies have particular trouble with reverb!). It might be beneficial to reduce the reverb and feedback on it during that section of the piece with automation, or at least check your EQ mix to make sure it isn't muddying up the sounds of your other instruments by flooding the same frequencies. Further, sometimes the guitar feedback gets a tad too sharp in the high frequencies and can be painful to listen to. Using a very gentle high shelf filter to reduce those high frequencies would reduce this issue.

Compliments to the Composer:

- Okay, so. Your atmosphere and sound effects are fantastic, especially at the very beginning. I actually love the distortion on your guitar, though do be careful with the high frequencies and feedback as they can get a tad TOO intense sometimes, as I mentioned while commenting on the mix. Good work!

Final score: 5

Aweror responds:

thanks so much, you gave me a lot to work with here ha. i appreciate the feedback!!

[Heavy Frog-Step]

Hello! This is a review for the NGUAC competition.

I've gone over one or two general categories of issues specific to your song, and one section of things I think also deserve complimenting. I prefer being very direct with my critique, none of it is meant to offend. Thank you for your understanding!

Constructive Criticism:

- This has a lot of neat sounds, but what this particularly needs to reign in is the harshness of your sounds. A couple examples I would point out are the high hat, the initial sound effect once you open the filter all the way, and the clipping in playing the sounds around 1:15 (if you listen at the start and end of the sample, there's a popping sound - make sure the sound effect has a very short fadein and fadeout to avoid this clip to 0db in that sample's waveform). I would highly recommend compressing your drums slightly less, and having at least a light filter to reduce the particularly high frequencies as they can be painful to listen to and certainly tiring over the course of the track.

- Your drums could greatly use some variation. While they're already very harsh, keeping the drums the same in music like this - music that's so focused on drums and bass and sound design to the point of no other instruments - can lead to it being far less engaging than it should be over the course of the track. For a point of comparison, this track isn't as fast as yours but the drumbeat noticeably has quite a few more interesting sounds and subtler details keeping it engaging and varied as you listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zqagld13kL4

Compliments to the Composer:

- MAN you have some tasty bass in this. I'm not sure if it's made of samples or fully synthesized, but I love how liquidy it is. The filtering makes it very interesting, and it's probably the best part of this entire track. When I mentioned variation and how the drums need more, this does not apply to the bass where it exists. It might need more if it was applied more broadly in the track but as-is, it's quite good.

Final score: 3

Aracnofobia responds:

Men. Your words would never offend me. I thank you very much.

[FD - Hope From Destruction]

Hi hi. Review time! Two points of critique and one compliment. Also, can't say I was quite expecting this genre from you.

Points of critique:

- Man this feels heavy and reverby. This seems to be very common with orchestral music, but it does notably give the whole track a "boomy" feeling which fills up the L/R space with reverb rather than actual instruments, and causes less clarity in the fast runs, letting their detail almost completely vanish in some cases without specifically listening for them. Most of it is ok obviously, it's fairly stylistic even if I would prefer more clarity - but in particular, the bassy sections boom out and make this actually somewhat tiring to listen to because it saturates the bass for *so long* without much break or variation in the tone. It might be nice to reduce the reverb in the bass and pan the orchestral instruments more to widen the mix without relying so much on reverb overall.

- Secondly! I hate fadeout endi- okay, right it's a loop, fair enough! Thank you for clarifying that in the description, haha! That said, I want to look at the composition of this, because there are a few particular details that I think could make this track so much more engaging to listen to. First of all, somewhat because of all the bassy reverb, the constant steady banging of the low orchestral bass drum really starts getting grating after listening for awhile. Similarly, you have some really neat (albeit repetitive) glitchy percussion before the loop point. Having a bit more of a break without the drum and bringing in different percussion to really enjoy those higher frequency bits of "ear candy" and vary the loop some more would make the loop itself so much better - many loops do still have A and B sections with variation that helps reduce fatigue of listening for [some unspecified amount of time].

Compliment:

- Man, okay, where do I even begin. I might have said a lot for critique but simultaneously this is really really good. I absolutely *adore* the bits of glitch percussion and just want MORE of that kind of stuff. The little string runs at the start of the loop feel wonderful, and I do love the steady hits in the bass drum, I just want a bit of a break sometimes, haha! I look forward to hearing some of your modern stuff, nearly five YEARS (what) after this track was made!

Cheers, friend!

ForgottenDawn responds:

Man, look at this comment section! What is this, the Newgrounds Hall of Fame? You love to see it. Yeah, I agree with pretty much everything you said. It's pretty wild how it's been FIVE years, indeed. I was less experienced overall and without as many mastering tools as I now more or less habitually utilize. None of the fancy names like Ozone or Neutron, for starters.

This piece brings back some memories, back when I could still afford to compose entire soundtracks and mind school at the same time. This was actually one of the last gigs I was specifically directed towards an "all or nothing" sort of vibe, just very bombastic and intense. If there's such a thing as over-delivering, this might as well be a candidate though it's better than packing anything at all, haha.

About the percussion, fun trivia. I remember to have used 8Dio orchestral percussion from, I believe, the Majestica kit, and for some reason those samples were natively muddy. I couldn't really strip away that annoying reverb because it was embedded in the recorded samples. I still liked how the bass drum sounded, so I ended up adding a truckload of extra reverb in an attempt to boost some of its presence in the mix. Youth happy accidents, I suppose.

Either way, it was a fun project and I'm glad you took your good time to listen and dissect this old relic from way-back-when. Cheers!

[Circutronics - NGADM]

I promised a review explaining things - time to share. Also, another person who has a similar weirdness and difficulty to review is dem0lecule, if that helps at all.

Stuff that's great:
- Your instrumentation is actually really neat with this and the sound palatte is fascinating to analyze.
- I really like the sound you use for the bass at 0:40.
- The passage at 2:19 is one of the best passages in the piece, and has a really awesome sound with the chords.

Stuff that can be improved:
- I'm actually not really a fan of the chord progression at the start, which is a shame considering how much it's used.
- All of the chord-based melodies end up sounding a bit *too* chaotic imo, they tend to not make much sense even if they are easy to follow.
- Ending is a bit too sudden.
- The drum samples are, eh. Kinda really bad, sadly. They sound like vanilla FL samples without any processing. The kick is particularly bad.

So, this piece. I think the best word I can use to describe it is "awkward" - it has some really neat sounds, I can hear the arrangement in there, I can hear the echoes from previous sections, but it just doesn't fit together in a way that really WORKS. I'm not sure how to really express this in the above two categories, so I'm putting it here. You have everything that you need in the technical details, but there's something about the ideas and the instruments and everything that just don't quite fit together properly.

8.4/10

Spadezer responds:

Hmmm... more woes of the bad percussion samples.

You note the ending, which was hard to conclude the A theme without sounding "awkward."

Again the feedback is much appreciated and at least I got above an 8 lol. Thanks

[Starry Sky]

Time for your review, Techmo. Open wide!

Stuff that's great:
- The Distant patch on sytrus is great, isn't it?
- Your overall atmosphere in this piece is actually really fantastic, I think that with some work on the composition it would end up being quite good.
- The melody in the piece, while simple, is actually really nice - the arpeggios in the melody could be better, but they aren't too bad until they're used to excess in the second half of your melody pattern.
- Massively amused by the use of the "go" sample from FL Studio, hahaha.

Stuff that can be improved:
- The second arpeggio that comes in at the start doesn't work well with the first one at all - this continues throughout the piece.
- Careful with big reverby bass drum hits, they can really mess up a mix. Try using EQ before and after the reverb.
- The mix kinda eats itself around 3 minutes in, and falls apart even more around 3:20. Wall of indistinct noise is not the best route to a good mix.
- Some variation and less raw sound of your snare would be excellent in the snare rolls. Try varying the velocity.
- Repetition. Try using more patterns and tweaking them slightly - there's an option in FL called "make unique" when you click the options for a pattern. It's super helpful and lets you create variation with similar patterns without needing to rewrite the whole thing.

This piece is pretty nice, but suffers from some serious mixing issues and compositional mishaps which bring it down a lot more than it really should be. I think with a bit of work on covering up the current issues in the piece, this would be really excellent.

7.6/10

Teckmo-X responds:

Thank you for the review SkyeWint. I understand what you meant about the added reverb on the drums. It did give a slight switch off of the main track of the song. I did however use the Equalizer on the drums but I guess it came out wrong. Any advice through getting some better drums via PM would be nice. I'm not very familiar with importing VST plug-ins but it could be an experience. Either way thank you for reviewing my song.

[g o o d t h i n g]

Stuff that's great:
- I wonder what it is with people and fake slap basses recently. Slap basses tho, awesome.
- All the little vocal clips and the vocal 'pop' thing towards the end. Those were great!
- You have a lot of really neat little melodic phrases throughout this.
- Very good sound palatte, solid arrangement throughout.

Stuff that can be improved:
- Mix. So like, you know how I mentioned there are a lot of neat melodic phrases through this? It would be phenomenal to be able to hear them without focusing quite hard on the mix - I tested it on multiple speakers, and the melodies are almost completely buried behind the bass, chords, and generally ALL THE OTHER STUFF in the climactic sections. In other words, mix does not have distortion, but it's not actually clean and the background is significantly louder than the melodies.
- The sudden unexpected and awkward chord thing at 2:40.
- The fact that significant portions of the song are literally copy/pasted from before, such as almost the entire climax, minus some sound effects adding into the overcompression - barely any variation in these. (0:10 & 1:17, 0:20 and 1:58 for two examples - only small additions in the background)

So, this has a lot of really neat melodic ideas in it which sound great, and a generally cool atmosphere with some good ear candy. Main issues are the mix being a bit too full and a significant portion of the song being copy/pasted.

9/10

midimachine responds:

これは良いこと！

[Invisible Magic]

It's your turn for a review, Finn. Open wide!

Stuff that's great:
- Acoustic instruments, of course.
- The neat time signatures are awesome.
- Honestly, the intro is great.
- The quickfire singing starting at 1:47 is SUPER awesome and has a great feeling.
- Mix is solid and clean.

Stuff that can be improved:
- So the intro is great, and it's also nearly a third of the song. I think it's awesome, just too long.
- The minor melody there is, is barely there.
- Ending is too soon and doesn't really conclude the awesome main section.
- I feel the bass around 1 minute sticks out a bit too much, and could be pushed back in the mix.

Basically, this feels unfinished as heck. It comes together cohesively, just falls short on actually being 'complete'. If it were longer, it would be super incredible.

9/10

FinnMK responds:

Thanks for the comments. I largely agree, and as I've said to a few other reviewers it ultimately is more of an unfinished idea than anything else. Such are the constraints of a two-week period, and especially for this one where I had to be away from home for a few days. I'm sorta surprised it got me through actually! But thanks again; I'll keep the tips in mind for the quarter finals.

[My Firefly]

Your turn, Grant! Enjoy the review - open wide!

Stuff that's great:
- Oh my god the solos in this song. They're so good holy shit. At least the ones in the first half are nuts.
- Literally everything the xylophone does.
- Excellent intro and overall arrangement of sections.

Stuff that can be improved:
- Chorus melody is pretty not good. Mainly stems from two things - the diverging endings of the first two phrases, and the last phrase being out of place compared to the rest.
- Out of breath singing lol (2:11)
- The really weird glitch section at the end after what really should have been the outro, chopping the vocals into stuff that sounds like "cyberhand" multiple times somehow. Good glitches, but super not in the right place.

Mixing (quickfire round!):
- Bass is fairly buried and weak. Careful with mids for the tone.
- 1:24 Percussion background.
- Careful when spitting your automation back out (1:00)
- Things punch a bit too much - reign in your compression and limiting a bit, it practically causes bruises atm.
- 3:08 section percussion and bass. Volume seems to increase through this section and starts punching harder as it gets further.

So like. This is really good and has some of the best solos I've heard from you. It also has some of the most overcompressed mixing I've heard from you, and a weirdly really bad chorus, definitely compared to the rest of the piece. Odd combo of issues and good things.

9.4/10

johnfn responds:

"open wide!"

ew