midimachine's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[Seltzer's...]

holy moly

that's an insane amount of reverb on the snare and cymbals. makes everything all washy sounding, it really should have a lot less delay.

most of the synths are overpowering the drums somehow but the composition is interesting.

Seltzer responds:

I'll have to agree with you there. I had meant to mess with some of the levels a bit, but I kind of got caught up in the whole "Holy crap, it's done." thing.

[Atmosphere 2239 [Demo]]

asasdfasfa

i love it wow

go on myspace and look up a guy called pillbug this reminds me of him a lot. a bit more intense in the percussion department but the pads are right there.

where can i get this ep and why don't i have it already?

S3C responds:

lol, you dont have this EP because it hasnt been released yet :P check this thread here:

http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1 096892/1

I didnt make the cut. There is some great tracks on the CD however and I'll probably purchase it myself.

anyways, glad you like this track, thanks for the review! i'll have to check out pillbug's stuff.

[Free Fall Artist >Feedback<]

weeee

I think the kick drum is dying for some more acoustic sounding click to get it to cut through the synth progressions. Which are pretty marvelous by the way! Try layering something like RD_Kick2 over the current kick at a low volume with all the bass taken out and with a shorter decay.

Every now and then I reckon you should throw in a bar of 2/4 or 4/4 now and then just to throw the timing a bit and give the piece a bit more of a feeling of urgency.

Synths sound nice and fat, are you using those dynamic process VSTs I recommended to you (endorphin and dominion)?

The piano comes in too strong from 2m47s onwards, the filtering is gorgeous though. It ends thoughtfully.

Solid work all around! :)

mr-jazzman responds:

Dude, thank you SO much! No, you don't even know -- I love you (no homo, of course =P). This is the exact type of feedback I've needed and will always need, and I'm so glad that you've provided. These are all good suggestions for sure.

For the kick drum, you're probably right. I did at one point try layering an acoustic drum on top, but for some reason it just didn't sound right to me. Perhaps with what you told me, it will appeal more.

As far as the 2/4 and 4/4 bars, I seriously thought about it, but realized this is exceptionally difficult to do -- especially in FL Studio. What it involves is changing the measure count in the General settings, as far as I can tell -- which is exceptionally gay, considering I've got so many ideas for guitar and so forth that switch up the time signature every npw and then. I don't know if it's possible to even switch between time signatures in a single project; it might involve two instances or something. I don't know, but if you find an easier way (like some automation clip or something), please let me know. Because I had the same idea, I just gave it up when I realized it would be extremely difficult if not nigh impossible.

Thank you for the comment on the sunths. Unfortunately, I haven't used those VSTs on this project yet ( =`( ) because this is the first project I did on my new laptop; I have to download those VSTs yet for this computer, but I have them on my desktop. They are pretty nice and handy, from what I can gather =) Thanks for the recommendation for those btw.

Yeah, I totally agree on the piano being too strong at the end. I'm listening to it right now and it kinda hurts my eardrum a little bit ( >( ). I'll just turn down its velocity a bit, and that should do the trick. I might even be able to put a clip of live piano in there if I can get one of my prodigious friends in high school to do it for/with me, which would be beyond awesome, but for now the soundfont will have to do.

Once again man, thank you so much for the suggestions. This is invaluable to me, and I hope you know that I'll have to credit you now in the final project. I was so afraid that since my song got 0-voted right off the bat, no one in their right mind would ever give me any real suggestions/criticisms (at least, not for a week or so =P). This is all good stuff, and I really look forward to what you've got in the future as well. Keep on rockin man!

Jazzman

[DJ Bossler - Hallotrance WIP]

cool

Not sure if you picked the absolute best chords (or at least, tonic notes) to sit under the melody but it's pretty interesting. I like the use of the flat fifth ;)

bossler13 responds:

Yea, I still have issues I'm trying to work out with it, but it's coming along. I'm glad you enjoyed it! thanks for the review

[Peril: Distant Star]

definite improvement

Oh man, I wish I posted a billion words about this one instead! I feel a bit silly now.

Mix is much nicer, again some parts that clip but that's down to just going through each channel and making sure there isn't any straight digital distortion happening anywhere in the signal chain ;)

mr-jazzman responds:

hey man thanks again for everything you've helped me with. i feel like my sound has improved so much because of your recommendations; i don't think i can thank you enough! =)

[Distant Star >feedback<]

wooooo :D

Okay, I loooooove the euphoric progressions and the bits and pieces of automated madness. I thought they meshed together quite nicely, myself :)

I've got a lot of feedback running through my head, let's hope that 4000 characters is enough :P

1) While I can tell this has been made using the FL engine, it doesn't really sound cheesy or "fruity", if you know what I mean. Still, the best way to get a unique sound out of fruity is to get some third-party dynamic processors, reverbs and synths. Google will help you out a lot here but if you want some good places to start for new VSTs, "xoxos", "digitalfishphones" and "smartelectronix" are all top notch developers with lots of excellent free gear, digitalfishphones in particular an excellent compressor called "endorphin" and a great analogue signal modeller called "dominion", both of which can take any fruity native sound and make it 100x warmer and fatter.

2) The kick really needs to peak out over the rest of the mix, needs to really pierce the 3Khz area and pound between 80 and 120Hz. At the moment it seems to rumble under the rest of the mix. Something I do is layer a pitched-down 808 snare with a very short decay time over the top, put it through one compressor in it's own fx bus and then send it to the kick's compressor and another compressor on a send channel. If you use a different compression plugin on the send it gives the snap of the new kick sound a nice airy character.

3) Another thing that might be dampening the impact of the kick is the number of instruments with a presence in the low area. If you want a track to sound more bassy it's always better to remove bass from instruments that don't need it than to boost, so roll off the low frequencies of all instruments at 180Hz except the kick and one sub bassline. Then roll off <50Hz on the kick. If you put a little boost on the kick at ~80-120Hz you get all the punch you need without any low frequency dissonance.

4)With low, detuned growling synths, I'll generally HP filter the growl at like 250Hz and throw a pure sine wave bass underneath it, then compress them together. Again, it's just to avoid low frequency dissonance.

5) While the master track doesn't clip, individual elements are quite clearly clipping. Unless you have a compressor plugin with some kind of waveshaping/saturation (i.e. all the digitalfishphones dynamic plugins :D) on every channel then this is something you need to avoid. There are lots of little things in the background that I thought could have been lower in volume or more seperated in the stereo field and stereo seperation goes a long way to avoiding clipping.

Okay, anything else I had to say I've forgotten. Overall it's a good song that needs a little more work on the mix I think :)

mr-jazzman responds:

whooa, wow thanks for all the great tips!!! =) lol why can't there be more NG users like you out there? you're the EXACT kinda person i needed! thx bro =)

[SR - Binary Flowers]

lovely

Very nice texture! The progression is really nice, my only complaint is the lack of some gradual changes in the timbre... the middle section also feels a little bit too inhuman. Maybe some slight timing offsets would help that, I dunno.

Overall I really liked this. Well done!

SineRider responds:

I see what you're getting at. It does sound a bit unnatural. It is a little too late to fix this one up, because my EP with this on it comes out tomorrow. Maybe I can do a human mix of this though and but it on NG.
Glad you liked it and thanks for the review :)

[Dream Kingdom Trilogy E!09]

alrighty then.

Definitely mastered too heavily. At first anyway. The second section has much more headroom and is nicer to listen to but the vocals in the third seem to suck all the headroom right out of the mix again.

The percussion feels awfully thin, the kick and snare are especially weak and GM sounding and fall well below the volume of the string sections and vocals when the attack should be well above them. There's no stereo imaging either so they feel even more flat and inhuman.

It sounds and feels like you've taken three different audio files and crossfaded them instead of taking the three pieces and creating thoughtful transitions. Compositionally the three are good and they're thematically similar but they need something more to tie them together. In fact if you got these three audio files which were already mastered and then put them together and mastered them all over again that would make for a pretty bad lack of headroom.

As three seperate tracks the composition and arrangement in each is fairly good. The way you've attempted to turn them into one track isn't working for me and there's a lot of things I don't like about the mix in general, some of which might just come down to a difference in how we work.

Emuzin responds:

Isn't it great what an old-fashioned tape-recorder and aux cord direct to the computer audio import can achieve.

[HeaXaM0rph]

*bops head*

I like this overall. It has a very stiff 1-2 feel of mid 90s dance music along some trippy atonal synth you'd expect from new school electro house.

Really needs a stronger backbeat, that tiny little clap doesn't cut it past the 8th bar so I guess you should throw down a crunchy, filtered noise or something on the 2 and 4 once that choked synth comes in at 0m14s

I think the sidechained whitenoise sweep is a bit loud. maybe a bit of lowpass sweep on it would smooth it out a little and give it a bit more depth.

I'm thinking at 1m37s you could drop the beat and everything else completely and suddenly introduce a 2 bar shrill lead with a good portion of reverb and delay, with the 2nd bar silent for now (to give the effects room to ring out). Build the track back up, then when the beat comes back in you can throw both bars of lead down with much less reverb and delay (still a little bit though). Maybe layer a lower octave with less harsh tones as well.

Mans0n responds:

haha thanks for the advice, ill look into some of this, but for now i gotta go so peace, and if ya got anything you want reviewed leave me a msg.

[Solus- Sunset]

awwwww isn't that nice

needs a lot more of those dynamic and timing offsets i keep telling people to put in...

but then the pads come in and it doesn't seem as inhuman for some reason. the chord progression is just darling.

still... the intro seems really stiff. even the sustain pedal keeps releasing at the exact same time each bar, haha.

really nice composition and arrangement. simplicity is the bomb.

SolusLunes responds:

I really need to get back into tweaking each individual note...