midimachine's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[AD - Pure Energy]

hot

The sort of breakbeat based industrial I try to make, except this is a lot less orchestral and more atonal broodey stuff...

The excessive bitcrushing gives this a bit of generic "hey guys i'm using a bitcrusher" feel. Okay, that doesn't really make a lot of sense but if you're using ephonic lo-fi you could try pitchshifting and dirty-ing the signal after the crushing to make it sound a bit more unique in the tonality. Or just keep it straight crushed at the start and then do stuff to it when it gets used afterwards...

A little hypocritical of me seeing as I love me some generic daft punk style bitcrushed synth basses.

I love the power in the beat. The deep kicks are great, sounds like you have some peak based synth layered under them making them nice and gritty too. I dig this.

P.S. The people being all "oh my god it's industrial not hip hop" probably haven't heard Saul Williams, awesome rapper with dirty industrial beats produced by flippin' Trent Reznor of all people. Reznor's collaborated with flippin' Dr Dre too guys, it's not a sin to make "industrial hip hop". Open your ears a bit.

AeraDynamic responds:

Finally someone who understands me :333 I heart you, thanks for the bitcrushing advice, I'll give it a try next time I am doing this sort of HipHop / Industrial Sound. I know what you mean with its getting generic... I have to get some new Ideas for using bitcrushing and EQing it. And thank you for telling me about Reznor, I got to check that out asap :O

[I'm Gonna Kill Santa Claus]

very slick

This is dying for a lead guitar lick somewhere and a real drummer!

I thought the vocals were definitely the best part. Very nice early Blink/general early 90's punk tone. Love the harmonies, the timing could've been tighter on the double tracking but you still did really well.

Good stuff, good job on AP #1 :)

giftedbuttwisted responds:

Thanks!

[The Nintendo Concerto (Part 1)]

very meh.

Honestly it sounds like you slapped the scores from some MIDI files together and changed all the instruments to piano. It's definitely not been arranged properly for piano, some parts are flat out impossible to play on one piano in one performance. Maybe you transcribed this stuff yourself but it doesn't really sound like you did.

The song list is well thought out, I'll give you that much.

darphfluffy responds:

this was just the beginning. this is how i learned

[<Zanarkand>]

So... what's new?

It sounds as though you just added some spatial effects to a midi file you found on the internet and sped it up a bit. It's been done. To be fair, I think you have something going with the omitted right hand in the beginning. Having said that, it could only ever reach its potential in an original arrangement. On the GM piano it sounds so dull and lifeless. The reverb doesn't really do much for me (too wet imo). You should definitely automate sustain controls and maybe tempo fluctuations. Also try to offset the timing of some notes by a very small amount to make it sound more natural, espescially in chords.

After about 1m30s I don't really feel like I need to listen to it any further because I know already how it's going to pan out. If you do more VG tune covers in the future (and I think you should to get more practice) you should arrange them differently to give them your own personal touch and to keep the listener on their toes.

Keep it up.

Champius responds:

well,

thanks for your in depth review its appreciated!

and yes the omitted left hand i thought would fit better than the intro that the other 100 versions of this start with,

i see what you mean by dull and lifeless but, i sort of wanted that feel.......i tried making the song itself be as if it were background music in a temple in the game.....if you know what i mean....

i did also add quite a few of my own touches to the song, many of them after 1:30

as for everything else, i'd say that's more of a preference issue....

Anyways....

thanks for the review : ]

[Solus- Hardly Known, Yet Loved]

very nice

Gorgeous progression. I can rarely do sentimental and contemplative stuff anywhere near this good.

I do think you should sequence some very slight timing offsets on certain notes in chords to get rid of that ugly peakey attack when several notes play at the exact same time. They'll also sound way more natural if you offset them in certain ways. You probably already knew this but 'tever, just throwin' it out there.

Well done, as usual :)

SolusLunes responds:

You are exactly right. Normally I do exactly that.

Completely slipped my mind this time. :p

Goddamn I can be retarded sometimes.

[All We Want [WIP]]

a very good start :)

I enjoyed the quirks in your melody and progression. I like how the pan pipe sample goes down in pitch slightly when it decays at the end but I'm not sure if that's because you're using a reverb effect for the decay or because you just intentionally shifted the pitch at the particular moment.

As a general rule for mixing down unmastered versions of stuff I try to keep the master peak at -10 and then use an excellent free VST compressor called endorphin to raise the volume, since that plugin was designed from the start to never clip.

What you have now is rather nice, keep it up :D

ErikMcClure responds:

I actually did deliberately decrease the pitch.

The problem being I should probably figure out how to properly master my songs first.

[Farther]

I see what you did there...

Thought I'd check some of your stuff out :)

As soon as I heard the intro I was like "oh hey that title is rather clever". You've got that beat down, I love the whitenoise-y backbeat!

I would only suggest some soft analog hum running in the same channel as the kick drum with a compressor so you get that subtle hissing sound sweeping in before the backbeat like in Closer. Nicely done!

Dj-Fanta5t1c responds:

;-)

[Shadow Symphony V4]

Lovely!

This should be adventure game music for sure. It's the sort of energetic and emotive piece that the Dark Cloud games were missing. I especially like the kinetic string stabs, though I think the pizzicato arpeggios are a little bit forward and may sound better on a piano or harp even.

I thought that this could have used more dynamic variation before that amusing and smoothly initiated change at around 3m19s. The levels of individual instruments were fluctuating a fair amount but I felt that the overall level of the piece stayed in the same region.

Speaking of that change... Makes this feel a lot like ending credits music hehe.

Very well done :D

shadow6nothing9 responds:

Yeah I got to work on my dynamics throughout the main piece alot more and 'thinning' it out. Hey? and harps, wish I thought of that before and that would cool. I'll be sure to add that in this song later.

[DXM - Stop Making Sense]

Nice

Intro totally reminds me of Kraftwerk's modern stuff mixed with some chilled out Infusion track. Very cool and very sassy.

I don't mind the beat that comes in around 2 minutes but there's a lot panned low frequency reverb which is uncomfortable to listen to, If you're using a fruity reverb (or any other reverb) I'd suggest setting the low cut value to about 400Hz and then rolling off <80Hz on the channel's main 3 band EQ. If you have any effects that convert the signal from stereo to mono put them in and then maybe use a send with a panned effect to widen the stereo image.

I don't like the 4x4 kick and I think the backbeat snare is too strong. I think if you had that kick sound with more decay on an offbeat rhythm it'd be quite interesting and more ambient sounding.

As a side note, I think it's cool that you're really going in depth with FL. A lot of people who use it never really bother with all the more advanced and ultimately more powerful features. Great to see someone squeezing the most juice from the fruit ;)

tijnn responds:

Hehe well i'll tell you, i'm no star in mastering at all, i have only been doing this for...

Well probably since 7 months ago.
And to be completely honest with you, I was astonished to see a submission í made on the frontpage, since, well, someone like you can already tell the difference from a pro-quality produced song.

Anyways thanks for the useful tip! i'll try and see what i can do with it for sure.

-DXM

[Solus- Through the Club Haze]

Ohhhhh yes.

Compositionally I think this is top notch. The sax is nicely articulated and the piano feel and solo is great, if a little too straight but it's easy enough to sequence some intentional timing and velocity "errors" ;)

Drum arrangement is quite nice but that hi-hat sounds like modulated whitenoise, the open hat is especially painful. All the other cymbals seem a little bit too toppy too. I also felt that some of the reverb on the saxophone was unnecessary but at the same time it wasn't really detrimental to the experience like the god-awful hi-hat was.

Again, this is just 100% superb compositionally but the hi-hats and cymbals are a pain :(

SolusLunes responds:

Man, why do my hats suck so much :(

I'll really have to fix it.