midimachine's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[Rowdy]

not a fan of that guitar vst (or any other tbh), sounds very fake and rubbery. the voicing isn't particularly guitar-like either so you could probably replace it with some other instrument without much trouble. it already sounds more like a harpsichord already so that might be an option.

the percussion is neat! might be cool to cut out the lows frequencies from the higher-pitched rolling kicks in the second rhythm and layer it over the first rhythm? basically i just want more stuff to happen cause the bad guitar sound only occupies a narrow range of tones for the entire piece and there's a lot of space to fill.

really not liking how the piece develops beyond 1:13, the chromatic modulations don't really make any sense and the guitar sustain gives horrendous dissonance between chords. nothing wrong with dissonance per se, but that dynamically flat sustain and harmonic movement which isn't even tangentially related to the rest of the piece make it seem like you kinda ran out of ideas and threw some random notes together.

keep at it tho - as boring as it might be i think you should write some more consonant music (i.e. stick to 1 scale and use conventional chord progressions) before embarking on more compositionally experimental endeavours.

[Lighthouse]

lush af! love the bass pitchbends, actually everything is layered really nicely. i kept wanting this to develop into something more musical but it works well as a standalone soundscape piece.

one thing: the field recording is very noisy, not sure if this is because of sub-par hardware, a very quiet source or a very "blatant" dither. if it's because of normalising/compression then this is the kind of thing where recording at 24/48 is super useful! that said, the noise is worked into the rest of the textures once everything gets into gear. though it would be good to lowpass it and then automate the cutoff in and out in time with that spooky midrange pad; right now it's the only element of the soundscape that has no dynamic movement (which would be fine if it had a strong tonal center to base the track around)

anyway this is neat!

SierraRising responds:

I´ve been hoping to hear from you again, your reviews are always very detailed and useful! I would have liked for there to have been more variation, but I mainly wanted to try out an ambient atmosphere this time.
I have yet to learn about mixing my own recordings into tracks. I use a Tascam DR-05, and it´s fairly good, in my opinion, though I´m open to suggestions for possible upgrades in the future, if you have any. I have another similar ambient piece scheduled for tomorrow or the day after, so I´ll try using the cutoff technique you mentioned.
In the meantime, thank you very much for the review! Very helpful, as always!

[Pixel Demolition]

ok let me elaborate on what tweedledum has mentioned below:

after about 10 seconds in there's a lot of different melody parts and riffs playing at the same time without many breaks and it goes for the whole song like that. that's difficult to listen to because our brains are dumb, and it also creates dissonance at certain parts because the riffs aren't designed with counterpoint or obligato in mind. individually, each of the parts are decent - why not spread them out across the track more and give the song some more definite structure? the part at 1:21 is really well done and sounds great cause there's one cool melody with a subtle counterpoint and simple arpeggios and it works! wish it was longer tho.

also the drums don't sound very good cause the synths are too loud so when everything hits the master limiter (or 0dB if ur a dum dum and don't have a master limiter) the attack of the kick and snare gets squished under all the crunchy synth stuff.

Edman520 responds:

Yea I noticed those things especially with the drums. Thanks for the feedback!

[Sierra Rising - Mara]

hats are suuuuuper loud! i thought it was weird the way they sway at first but i ended up enjoying that a lot, though if they sat under the kick/snare instead of on top it'd be better. i don't think the piano reverb is an issue, actually it kinda blurs the notes out and makes them sit really nicely with the pad sound. the kick could do with some boosting, just to bring it a little bit below the snare (which is perfect btw).

the main thing with your melody is that you have very few repeated phrases at all within it, and since it's a really long melody it makes it hard to remember. you also use some strange voice leadings which clash with the underlying chords (e.g. 3m14s). my rule of thumb is if you can sing or hum it out loud it's probably a good melody. honestly if your melody and chord progression was half as long and you just repeated it twice it'd already improve things quite a lot!

overall your sound design is pretty interesting, and you've identified melodies as a weakness already. keep it up!

SierraRising responds:

I´ll be sure to lower the hats next time. Actually the high end in general could have probably been lower, come to think of it.
I never thought of singing or humming my melodies out, that´s really cool. The melody actually does repeat twice, and I probably should have left a bit more memorable repetition, it´s just that repetition has been a huge problem for me and I wanted to end that.

Thank you very much for the review, it means a lot to me!