midimachine's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[Heavy Metal Attempt]

hmmm okay then

i'm not going out of my way to be an asshole but i think i should let you know now that this is going to be a pretty harsh review.

the tune seems to just be random notes from the chromatic scale thrown together haphazardly. dischordance can be wonderful in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing with it but to me this sounds as if you need to take a step back and sit down with some music theory books and start learning from square one. maybe that's not the case. maybe you have a pattern of intervals and you were going for a number of slight key changes in relatively quick succession. or you were going for something else entirely. whatever you were going for with that

there's no real concrete rhythmic pattern here. its just bland chugging with no accented beats or syncopation until like 23 seconds in and even then its like you clicked notes in at random times and thought "that sounds good enough i can't be bothered trying harder to make this sound coherant".

do you play guitar irl? if so you should record that instead of using fl slayer. if not, idk try making a really thin, wirey synth without any detuning and pass that through a lot of distortion and then a combo simulator. it won't sound anything like/as good as a real guitar but it'll be better than fl slayer by a factor of 1000.

now with the drums. uhh... i mean drum... come on man, you put absolutely 0 effort in for that doof-ing kick drum and you know it. i don't even know where to begin with this... i guess the first thing you need to do is listen to some heavy metal and analyze the drum playing and try emulating those patterns in fl. in fact analyze everything and emulate it before attempting to do anything original.

sorry for the length of the review. i'm also sorry i couldn't find any redeeming qualities in this whatsoever. nothing personal but this is really just bog standard listening.

GoldbloodedDragon responds:

How can the person below me find redeeming qualities, and you can't?
Asshole.

Also, have I made Heavy Metal before?
NO.
This is my first time.
Don't expect to hear a masterpiece.
Asshole.

[Malamsabtu]

i like this

very relaxed and easy going. the guitar sound is almost hawaiian sounding, hehe. guitar is played very smoothly and timed well too :)

your vocal tone is nice, the melody suits it well.

i thought this could've benefited with a bit more variation in the chord progression and dynamics. i also noticed a lot of hiss in the recording so i don't know what's up with that.

quite nice :)

fredfrod responds:

yeah hi. its been soo long sine i checked the site. SO i tried to clear some noise and hisses from the recording. how is it. thanks for the comments btw.

[Frequency Overload]

that flippin' piano...

I really think the piano should be far more dynamically varied, especially when it does that fast pedal point melody from 1m03s onwards. It becomes a really ugly wall of sound in that section.

It also sounds like you added a compressor to the piano after the reverb. Do not want! In fact, I would never compress a piano at all unless I was after a really grimey, old radio sound or something.

If you used cheesier, old school analogue drum sounds I would accept this as new wave.

SessileNomad responds:

lol look at my comments i put it in new wave simply because i didnt know where to put it, but since i wish not to get more shyte about it, im changing this to dnb

um, i did not compress the piano...sooooo...

alot of your lingo isnt makin sense to me, but i will try to decifer as best i can

peace and thx for honest review

[Super Loop]

ehhh...

that main arpeggiating synth lead is obnoxiously loud, it should sit somewhere halfway between the volume it starts at and where it fades in to now. yeah, you might want to fix the timing on the doubling lead it completely kills this.

percussion and stuff is nice. that "Soft and louder" sound could be achieved by eq-ing a wide, sweeping dip of around 3 or 4 dB between 1.5Khz and 3Khz on the kick drum, followed by some sidechain compression. if you use FL Studio put a fruity send plugin right after the eq and put your compressor on one of the inserts, that way you can add another compressor (meaning a different plugin) after the fruity send, so you have the characteristics of both compressors at once.

this is pretty clearly not new wave, btw. probably more trance than anything.

LK412 responds:

How the hell did this get in new wave it was probably my stupid brother. Anyways thanks for the suggestions and when i figure out what they mean ill definitley edit this song. and whats a doubling lead you mean the arp? Thanks for the review!

[dragonforce 8bit]

a little disappointing...

the 32 bit drums and spatial effects (reverb and shit) were a big let down since i was expecting a bit of raw 8 bit goodness in its true form. despite that, this is pretty cool. it stays fairly true to the original.

dragonforce solos are a bastard to transpose because its just li or totman fucking around on the fretboard and not thinking things through properly. my advice would be to just take it one bar at a time and maybe even timestretch the original song so you can hear the notes played slowly.

[Loop1 {SKOX}]

fun

the loop does flow you tard, albigs. it skips a little because flash is shit at syncing sound properly.

fun little loop. quite good for what it is.

[(E-E) Locked Submission]

none too shabby

you should whack the default compressor on the master bus and pull the value on the fader to a little under 79% cause there's some mad clipping when you start to lowpass filter everything.

I very rarely use reverb on bass drums or bassey instruments in general, but if you leave it on here then i'd suggest pulling the low cut value to somewhere like 500Hz. reverbing low frequencies can make an otherwise clean mix start to get very messy.

did you had extra treble to those hats? they seem extra thin and toppy.

i really like the warm pads and the wide bassline. could use a fair bit more variation on the whole but this is some nice ambient tech backing music at the moment.

keep it up :)

Everlasting-Elements responds:

Yeah, true.
The hats were a special pack and I added a special FX to them and stuff. A stereo enhancer. Some sort of EQ, I'm sure. I dunno. I toy around with it a lot.
I'm glad you enjoyed it, though.

[Emergenct Room]

hey now

1.62 is a bastard score for this.

the intro is a bit simplistic and almost cheesy sounding with that fl default vocal sound. once that snare fill comes in though it gets consistently better from there. pitched 808 snare fills are HOT.

i think the choir sound is a bit loud. those 808 toms are right on the money... oh synth arrangement is in full force now and this is tre nice. i like it muchly! it makes me feel like uploading some of my hip hop beats... maybe.

S3C responds:

well its 1.95 now, I cant complain :P, hopefully it will get a little higher once (if) it recieves more votes.

i completely agree with you there on your first point, the stock vocal sound at the beginning is pretty lame by itself, but it was just thrown in more or less for filler. I got lazy with the track here and didnt make more usage out of it.

Glad you like the 808 sounds, when I used to make hip hop beats all the time, I always try to throw in a pitched snare fill :P

As for the choir sound, that is a valid criticism, however since theres no vocals or dominant melody in the piece, I dont think its that big of a deal.

Thanks for another review man! And yes, DO upload your hip hop beats, I am interesting in hearing them :)

[In Saturn's Ring]

hrmmmm

interesting composition. intro sounds like it was recorded with a microphone in a different room to all the instruments.

1m12s-ish: i like the dueling guitars and filtering herein. the piece consistently builds interest from this point. little voicey synths and dischordant organs remind me a lot of kwwrr.

sounds like the kickdrum is slightly off center. it starts panning a lot in the outro... very odd but it makes for an interesting listen since it's not painful like hard panned low frequencies can be...

DonaldFletcher responds:

Thanks for the great review. The original version of this had a rougher kick (a 909 drum sample if I remember correctly) that I kept more in the center. For this runthrough I managed to get a better, cleaner one going, so I was able to leave it at least a little off center to help balance out the bass guitar and piano as well as the other drums, plus do its own thing when appropriate. I was actually a little iffy on that, so I ran an EQ over it just in case anyone had the bass up too high on their headphones!

I'm glad you noticed what I was doing with that intro - I pulled an old trick out of my ass for that one. That process actually runs through the whole song but it sounds best there due to the soloed guitar and otherwise minimal instruments. That guitar got the most attention in this regard. I wanted to give the listener the impression that they were standing in a room with the live instruments playing on a stage in front, with the processed sounds coming from speakers sitting 90 degrees to either side. Lots of work, but I think it paid off.

And I'm really happy you liked the 1:12 part. That was probably the most fun to write out of everything in this track. I'm looking for an excuse to do that again. Maybe two tracks from now!

[Snakewalk]

bouncey

i like the way the strings set the scene and then get swept up by the rhythm. sweet beat.

No-SideBoy responds:

Thnx 4 ur comment.