midimachine's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[Cosmos traveler]

lots of confusing rhythms for a trancey breakbeat thing. take fruity limiter off while you're mixing cause there are clearly some instruments that are too loud and end up taking precedence in the compressed mix. like it just sounds really messy compared to a more the sound design is ok but feels very preset, that string progression is not super interesting either. i do like that soft rolling piano sound and the rough bass. duck the bass synth under the kick so the low frequencies aren't slopping all other each other, though.

CrisTheGamer responds:

Thank you, I will take your advice and I will adjust the volume for my next song.

[~SW~ Annar]

you say you focused more on melody (which pays off in a lot of aspects btw) but this still feels technical and unrelenting like most of your other stuff and has plenty of atmosphere to boot. the breakdown is definitely my favourite part.

the drum programming and polymetric counterpoint make for a challenging listen in all the right ways, yet everything has a really well defined place in the track despite the mixing caveats. i think the sound design is a bit weaker than your usual output, but the crunchy pad and pseudo-guitar lead are totally on point. really nice work!

SkyeWint responds:

sup.

I guess it is pretty unrelentingly technical. Honestly, I was slightly worried I was overdoing it with some of the runs since I was slightly emulating PirateCrab and Kor-Rune in the pseudo-guitar work (definitely Kor-Rune with the drums). Half of me wishes I had an actual guitar and the other half of me is like "lol no way I could play that well".

The drum programming was easily some of the hardest stuff in this - I really wanted a rhythmic counterpoint going along with the melodies and similar. A lot of the time it mirrors the melody's rhythms and even plays along with the toms a few times.

Funny thing about the mixing btw: When I started mastering, I found that I had mixed it almost completely consistent with an even frequency distribution: white noise almost perfectly mirrored it, with the one caveat of the bass being slightly heavier (as normal). Normally the treble of my tracks are slightly lacking or the mids are. One of the two. So this made it super easy to master it with ridiculously high amounts of limiting, hence why it's loud as all hell without really being muddy much at all.

[-DOWN PROWN 1.02-]

it's kinda just a bunch of random default FL sounds thrown together innit? haha

there's a certain quirky lo-fi charm to it and that constant 808 kick gives it some consistency - if you boosted that kick and made the tail shorter so that some of the other instruments ducked behind the beat you'd be able to make a pretty interesting deep/future house track out of this. i also liked the way you used the pitched snare on top of the melody, got a real pc music vibe about it.

work on your intro, builds and outro though cause those parts were kinda random and shitty in this song. the percussion is also kinda dry and doesn't really fit with that supersaw melody which is drowning in reverb - gradually drowning all your percs in reverb and then cutting the reverb entirely just before a drop is a actually a cool thing to do for buildups!

IPSBLT responds:

Haha,not really ;D But you can say your random feeling starts from my idea.In this song i used stuffs i've never used before,like Sakura or Toxic Biohazard;and also toms,industrial snares and hits.
To be honest,i dont really think my work here is that random and shitty...But yeah,i'll try to improve on the next song because this song is just an experiment anyway!!!
Thanks! (definitely try future house next :)

[~SW~ Thurm ins_wa_]

get fucked! this is really fantastic. rockin that 7/4 so hard

SkyeWint responds:

<3 7/4 dnb for the win, friend

[~Echo~ Understated (Instrumental WIP)]

haha, my jams! i really like the way the prog house chord stabs sit against the trap beat.
snare needed a bit more tone and less snap, feels kinda harsh as it is. lead is too harsh at its peaks as well imo, but i love the pitchbends and vibrato. would've been great to hear a fully structured piece with a real ending n buildups and stuff :(

aliaspharow responds:

i nose v.v
wow i updated it at midnight and forgot to press submit... well enjoy the slightly better mix for what its worth

[A New Future]

i feel like the timing stuff sam mentioned isn't so much about tempo as it is single beats or steps in bar having a bunch of different things kinda flamming on top of them. it can just sound "natural" but a few times in this piece it sounds sloppy. the trills and grace notes on recorder are especially bad sounding when they don't sync up properly. you can tell a story about confusion, but you don't have to play sloppily to do that.

i actually though your stereo was ok, the ping pong delay on the backmasked guitar was a nice touch. simple but not distracting which is fine by me. lots of good ideas and nice standalone melodies, but there are a few moments (1m05s in particular) when the guitar and recorders don't really counterpoint well together. the tail of reverb on the recorder sounds great, sounds like there's an early reflection accentuating those hard high-mids though. might be worth just scooping that out a little, or carving some dynamics into the high notes (through playing or automation, doesn't matter). actually if you scooped high-mids and lightly compressed the recorders seperately they'd probably come out really nice.

[In Gods Mournful Design]

would've been good to have more breaks from the stormdrum, it's this unrelenting, uncomfortable wall of sound. the choir patch is kinda cloudy, would be good for it to be a bit clearer so that the lyrics were actually intelligible without reading them (also it's "could have saved" hehe) - actually it felt like the phrasing of the lyrics was super stiff at times too. crotchets 4 dayzzzz!

tbh it was kinda hard to get a sense of melodic theme. it feels like you write in a very stream-of-consciousness way which isn't always bad, especially when you tie stuff together well in terms of instrumentation. but it should still be anchored to a strong motif imo - the first 90 seconds or so are really good at this, maybe too repetitious but i've never found repetition to be inherently bad. honestly i don't really like how the melodies interact with the underlying chords - sometimes it feels like you accidentally wrote polymodal music without thinking about it. maybe that's just a preference thing from me though

anything i didn't mention was really good though. great work!

Lich responds:

I record alot of my patterns live from my MIDI Controller and just quantize them accordingly which is why it's most probably very stream-of-conscious sounding. EWQL Symphonic Choirs does sound pretty dated though I agree. It's pretty difficult to get it to sound clear but at least I tried haha. I'll be sure to tone down on the Big Drums in future submissions, I did go abit overboard on this one.

gl in Round 2 <3