midimachine's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[9-2-5 Routine]

sounds like u got some mastering tips from some idiot recently :^)
the octaved guitar sounds so hot! love this style

icantpronouncethis responds:

thanks so much for that. Still needs some tweaking for sure, like the kick seems a bit too loud and I want to emphasize the mids a bit more towards the end. Just had to finish up what I had before the deadline.

[Anthem For The Millenial]

big chemical brothers vibes!
low key favourite song in this ngadm round, worst title tho :')

RedSoul92 responds:

yeah sorry bout the title

[Obelisk]

this is music for ppl who like undertale too much

but it slaps <3

[Puzzle]

great to see another vocal piece from you! i love the almost vocaloid quality that you get out of it - still nice and clear despite all the processing. this kind of vocal tone compliments the broken up melody line perfectly. the builds and quiet sections in this are pretty flawless, love the smokey feel of all the quiet drums and the epiano. the structure is really good, the track doesn't overstay its welcome and each section has enough time to provide the appropriate tension and release. the guitar sounds great too!

the main saw stack synth is very ehhhhhhhh which is unfortunate since that's where the meat of the instrumentation lies in the chorus sections. it has this weird midrange presence and lacks top end air so it doesn't sit nicely over the bass. and yeah as TL said the bass is too quiet but with a more deftly shaped tone for the main synth it probably wouldn't be as much of an issue. it's also just too loud! the kick and snare should be as loud as your saw stack is, and your saw stack should be where the kick and snare currently sit. it sounds like you have a ton of headroom so just do that volume swap, crank that master limiter with a slow-ish release time (like 100-120ms) and the whole song will sound much fatter already. the filter sweep on the main chord on the last drop is a great idea but you need some unaffected layers in the saw stack to keep pushing the high end energy while the hihats take a break. also the stack feels pretty narrow in a stereo sense, so a couple layers on either side of the center will help a lot to fill out the sound as well. also there's a lot of sections where hats and cymbals are kinda just totally missing? idk just feels underproduced overall - throw in some 2nd snares and extra percussion stabs/fills here and there!

just one little thing with the vocals: i do love the tone but the little breath and mouth noises that still come through break the vocaloidy illusion. i don't know if you used a noise gate or not, but just slice the breaths out completely and use a noise gate with a really low threshold to force a very slight attack (2 to 4ms is plenty), just in case there's clicking or popping when the voice clips come in because you might not be able to zero-cross every cut for every breath.

anyway this is a really solid basis for a track, it's absolutely dripping with potential in terms of mixing and production and i'd be really excited to listen again if you did anything with it down the line!

icantpronouncethis responds:

This is an amazing analysis. Thank you for the clear feedback. I've been trying to find a way to get a decent saw stack sounds with what I have currently own, and this lets me know that I still need more work on it. Thank you for some tips about the saw stacks. I was wondering why it felt weak at certain parts. There were a lot of moments where I was stuck and didn't know what to do. I guess I need to listen to a lot more music. Just for the future reference, what exactly do you mean by headroom? Thank you once again

[Prismatic Skies]

yo! there's definitely a sense of vastness and adventure in this. there's a lot of well thought out development and movement, with clever use of ostinatos in the back end of the piece. the main theme is a great emotional hook and the climaxes are satisfying and epic.

it takes quite a long time to get anywhere, and when it does there's a serious lack of depth to the mix - feels like all the bass has been phased out to another dimension! for the most part, the drums have little impact, like the transients have all been trimmed with a chainsaw. the cymbals are far too distant - their placement relative to the listener is fine for filling in the top end of the mix but they need to be more accented when they first come in with each big drum hit. when the fast, high piano part comes in at 1:23-ish the hammer noise is unbearably loud and carries more low end energy than everything else in the song. the drums need to be pushing that part of the mix forward but honestly it sounds like i'm listening to them through a 100% wet reverb bus. even with the drums so far back there are still a lot of string lines that get lost at the end.

finally, and this is just a lil' nitpick and not a critical failure on your part: there's a highpass filter sweep (or reverb wet->dry sweep, hard to say) on the female vox from 1:45 to 1:47 and i think it just pulls in a little too much into the lower harmonics of the voice, losing all of the nice airy quality that they start with - i think the idea is fine though but just needs a slight adjustment so that it doesn't push the loudness so much.

i dunno, the song is already pretty well realised but is completely spoiled for me by bizarre mixing decisions. in spite of that, this was still one of the best pro-am entries from this round of NGUAC. when i listen to this on my phone speaker i can imagine what it's supposed to sound like and it's honestly unreal. please make more stuff like this but don't suck all the energy out of the bottom end next time haha <3

[Forever Jazz]

i think it's really cute how kwing is like "omg this is MIDI music??!" - like how do they think DAWs work lmfao

anyway this is cool. in a weird way it feels kinda repetitive even though every instrument does a lot of noodling. the big slow down into the last section and the 90s-sitcom-scene-transition ending were really dope though!

please use less reverb - simulating a hall with a close-mic'd drum, bass and sax sound is kinda unintuitive. the particular reverb algorithm used emphasizes the mids in a weird way so i think bringing the wet mix down a little on that one and mixing it with a tighter and brighter small room sound would help make the mix sound less like a .mid file played out of a karaoke machine.

great work, congrats on your 3rd place finish :)

AzulJazz responds:

thx for the review, the tips and the congrats!

[To The Clouds]

stop flexing on NGUAC lmao

etherealwinds responds:

soz m8

[illbefine]

yesss this is my jam. getting big toro y moi vibes from this

main criticisms:
- drums are a bit too dry and cheap sounding even by chillwave standards. that clicky kick could be more rounded and i think damper hihat/cymbal sounds would fit better than the brittle 606/808 style ones used at the moment

- as sleepfacingwest said, the vox have been too aggressively de-essed. would've liked a little 1/4-note delay on the vox just to give them extra some sparkle. some more of those cool pitch/dubdelay effects like at 1:17 sprinkled throughout the 2nd verse/prechorus would've been good too because...

- the 2nd half of the song feels too similar to the 1st and really needs some variation or extra layering to beef it up and make it feel more climactic. really feels like it wants to end big like on that chord at 3:57, with the "fine" just continuing to get lower and lower as everything fades out.

overall i love this and from a purely personal/subjective standpoint it's definitely one of my favourites from the competition. sounds better than some of the commercially released stuff in my chillwave playlist on spotify tbh, make of that what you will :)

icantpronouncethis responds:

Thank you for the review. I think this was my first attempt at a vocal centered song, I was kinda taking the safe route. Now that I listen to it again, I should've vary it up a bit on the second half. Compression has always been an issue and I'm still trying to get used to it. I also shouldve created two different version of the drum track and pick the best one. I got so used to it hard hitting beats, that I didnt even consider the other option.

[You'll Get Yours]

this is a cool grungey song and i like the single-climax structure. the guitars and bass are played well, the tone is lacking presence and the guitars are too centered and don't fill out the stereo image very much, resulting in a kinda claustrophobic mix. would be good to hold right back on the volume of the drums and bass in the intro and ramp it up gradually into the buildup so that when the drums kick in properly at 1:40 they REALLY kick in and have all the impact they should have. it's the only climax in the song, so you need to make it count!

vocal is a bit too boomy and fades away into the bass guitar once that comes in. the pitch correction is a bit too "strict" and the lack of vibrato sucks a lot of the life out of your vocal performance - plus it turns all your sss and shh sounds into buzzy Z sounds haha. i actually think the overall level is fine, maybe just a little loud at the beginning. also record with a pop filter or off-axis/across the microphone next time, the plosives are killing me! the big chorusey vocal tone at the end is really great, big alice in chains vibes there. would've been good to put some more layers under it though, like one an octave lower + a higher harmony maybe? at the moment it seems kinda barren.

drums sounds like ez drummer. not the most "human" programming but it does what you need it to. i think the kick sound is probably too aggressive for this kind of song though, very big and in your face like a metal track but the track wants something more rounded and easy going - plus there's some kinda bass boost or something on it? it just woofs out in this weird way that i don't really like. the tom toms sounds like a bunch of wet noodles but they have nice stereo spread. something i like to do is to boost the frequency of each tom's first or second harmonic a bit and then run them through separate compressors with a fairly long attack to get a nice clear punch on each of them. mixing toms is hard! the snare sounds great though

anyway yea, mix and production needs a little more attention but this was pretty good! keep it up!

dude2312 responds:

Thank you so much for making this detailed comment. I'll make sure I take into consideration all of the feedback provided. I did struggle a lot with this song while finding the right bass tone for me. I thought about adding more vibrato but, I don't know why I didn't use that much. Drums are definitely EZ Drummer, although they could be better, they do the job just fine. Midimachine, thanks once again for reviewing my amateur song.

[Fight for the truth]

yea basically this was really good and the other guys mentioned every issue i had (esp. the lack of cymbals). missing a bit of high end presence from the woodwinds, the breathy passages don't really breathe enough for my liking y'know? also i feel like it hung on the same chords too much for the first couple minutes but the development coming into the climax was magical. almost every aspect of this is absolutely dripping with intent and subtlety. enjoyed this one a lot!