midimachine's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[Hesperax's Pet]

so i like the iron maiden vibes on this, your rhythm guitar playing is really tight and the solos are fantastic. the way the song takes a journey through different tempos is neat. i don't think your vocals have quite the right sound for this kind of song but your tone of voice and inflection still have this cool garage rock feel, and the scream at the end is siiick.

the drum mixing is super weird! the kick and snare are perfect for the 80s fantasy hair metal sound but they dont pop out of the mix as much as they should. the cymbals disappear under the guitars and it sounds like the toms have been muted and we're only hearing the reverb bus. the guitar solos are great but the washy reverb makes the tone feel less vibrant and accentuates the midrange in a weird way. idk if you multi-tracked the vocals or not but they feel like they've been stretched out a bit, like there's been a really fast delay effect added to them. the vocals are also just not loud enough - they need to be as loud as that guitar solo because they are just as important!

as far as the composition goes there isn't too much to complain about. the intro is definitely bloated, could probably just start on the first drum hit at 0:50. the transition from the slower breakdown section is cool but takes way too long to get to the point - like ok i get it the tempo is getting faster haha. the payoff for all that building up is just a weird sounding tom fill straight into the solo and you probably could've gone straight into that 16 bars earlier without the gradual tempo thing. also the fadeout ending seems lazy but it seems like you know that already.

anyway despite the criticisms i think this is a cool song with a lot of potential, and i'm glad you were able to get something in even though you didn't have much time. keep it up!

MercyfulDeath responds:

Thank you for your response man. To start with the vocals, eh, well, I have an idea on how to sing it now, but I was stricken with strep throat for the past fucking week and my bro came to pick up his mic and interface so W E L P. I am going to get me an interface and mic soon, as this experiment has been wholly successful and the improvement over a shitty PC mic for vox recording has been jarring.

To tackle the iffy spots; man, I'll be honest, drum mixing is probably my most troublesome area, partly because EZdrummer doesn't make it easy sometimes. I see the cymbals needed to be boosted along with the snare and kick, cymbals a lot more though. Toms are a different matter entirely, for some godforsaken reason I can't get them to stop reverbrating like crazy. Eh man, idk bout that reverb on the leads, I thought it sounded cool and oldschool, but I'll experiment with different 'verbs to see if I can get a cooler sound, also I'll be honest, I'm very midrange biased, if something boosts the midrange, even if it's weird, I'll keep it, because mids are love, mids are life. The vocals had a very short delay put on 'em, maybe 20ms or 50ms, not sure, gotta check, but I got it once I was doing some vocals for some older song I made and it sounded stupid cool and like Ozzy on the first two Rhoads albums so I've kept it for the rest of my recordings, will note to boost the fuckers too.

As for the composition, well I wanted it to burn in at the start, maybe add some high heel clacks and mischevious female laughter but since I lack females for the latter then that was out of the question, wanted to create a foreboding 'hot' sounding atmosphere see. I'd argue the point of the speed up is for that "FASTER, FASTER, RIDE ME FASTER" kinda feeling, so that's why I put it in, idk my dude, I experimented with it being 16 bars shorter without the speed up and it kinda felt strange and jarring to suddenly shift into overdrive like that. Yes, the fadeout is lazy, I'm sorry, I really am. I thought it would sound 80's as fuck but goddamn yeah it's pretty fucking lazy.

Thank you very much for your input, I really appreciate it man.

[9-2-5 Routine]

sounds like u got some mastering tips from some idiot recently :^)
the octaved guitar sounds so hot! love this style

icantpronouncethis responds:

thanks so much for that. Still needs some tweaking for sure, like the kick seems a bit too loud and I want to emphasize the mids a bit more towards the end. Just had to finish up what I had before the deadline.

[Anthem For The Millenial]

big chemical brothers vibes!
low key favourite song in this ngadm round, worst title tho :')

RedSoul92 responds:

yeah sorry bout the title

[Puzzle]

great to see another vocal piece from you! i love the almost vocaloid quality that you get out of it - still nice and clear despite all the processing. this kind of vocal tone compliments the broken up melody line perfectly. the builds and quiet sections in this are pretty flawless, love the smokey feel of all the quiet drums and the epiano. the structure is really good, the track doesn't overstay its welcome and each section has enough time to provide the appropriate tension and release. the guitar sounds great too!

the main saw stack synth is very ehhhhhhhh which is unfortunate since that's where the meat of the instrumentation lies in the chorus sections. it has this weird midrange presence and lacks top end air so it doesn't sit nicely over the bass. and yeah as TL said the bass is too quiet but with a more deftly shaped tone for the main synth it probably wouldn't be as much of an issue. it's also just too loud! the kick and snare should be as loud as your saw stack is, and your saw stack should be where the kick and snare currently sit. it sounds like you have a ton of headroom so just do that volume swap, crank that master limiter with a slow-ish release time (like 100-120ms) and the whole song will sound much fatter already. the filter sweep on the main chord on the last drop is a great idea but you need some unaffected layers in the saw stack to keep pushing the high end energy while the hihats take a break. also the stack feels pretty narrow in a stereo sense, so a couple layers on either side of the center will help a lot to fill out the sound as well. also there's a lot of sections where hats and cymbals are kinda just totally missing? idk just feels underproduced overall - throw in some 2nd snares and extra percussion stabs/fills here and there!

just one little thing with the vocals: i do love the tone but the little breath and mouth noises that still come through break the vocaloidy illusion. i don't know if you used a noise gate or not, but just slice the breaths out completely and use a noise gate with a really low threshold to force a very slight attack (2 to 4ms is plenty), just in case there's clicking or popping when the voice clips come in because you might not be able to zero-cross every cut for every breath.

anyway this is a really solid basis for a track, it's absolutely dripping with potential in terms of mixing and production and i'd be really excited to listen again if you did anything with it down the line!

icantpronouncethis responds:

This is an amazing analysis. Thank you for the clear feedback. I've been trying to find a way to get a decent saw stack sounds with what I have currently own, and this lets me know that I still need more work on it. Thank you for some tips about the saw stacks. I was wondering why it felt weak at certain parts. There were a lot of moments where I was stuck and didn't know what to do. I guess I need to listen to a lot more music. Just for the future reference, what exactly do you mean by headroom? Thank you once again

[Forever Jazz]

i think it's really cute how kwing is like "omg this is MIDI music??!" - like how do they think DAWs work lmfao

anyway this is cool. in a weird way it feels kinda repetitive even though every instrument does a lot of noodling. the big slow down into the last section and the 90s-sitcom-scene-transition ending were really dope though!

please use less reverb - simulating a hall with a close-mic'd drum, bass and sax sound is kinda unintuitive. the particular reverb algorithm used emphasizes the mids in a weird way so i think bringing the wet mix down a little on that one and mixing it with a tighter and brighter small room sound would help make the mix sound less like a .mid file played out of a karaoke machine.

great work, congrats on your 3rd place finish :)

AzulJazz responds:

thx for the review, the tips and the congrats!

[To The Clouds]

stop flexing on NGUAC lmao

etherealwinds responds:

soz m8

[illbefine]

yesss this is my jam. getting big toro y moi vibes from this

main criticisms:
- drums are a bit too dry and cheap sounding even by chillwave standards. that clicky kick could be more rounded and i think damper hihat/cymbal sounds would fit better than the brittle 606/808 style ones used at the moment

- as sleepfacingwest said, the vox have been too aggressively de-essed. would've liked a little 1/4-note delay on the vox just to give them extra some sparkle. some more of those cool pitch/dubdelay effects like at 1:17 sprinkled throughout the 2nd verse/prechorus would've been good too because...

- the 2nd half of the song feels too similar to the 1st and really needs some variation or extra layering to beef it up and make it feel more climactic. really feels like it wants to end big like on that chord at 3:57, with the "fine" just continuing to get lower and lower as everything fades out.

overall i love this and from a purely personal/subjective standpoint it's definitely one of my favourites from the competition. sounds better than some of the commercially released stuff in my chillwave playlist on spotify tbh, make of that what you will :)

icantpronouncethis responds:

Thank you for the review. I think this was my first attempt at a vocal centered song, I was kinda taking the safe route. Now that I listen to it again, I should've vary it up a bit on the second half. Compression has always been an issue and I'm still trying to get used to it. I also shouldve created two different version of the drum track and pick the best one. I got so used to it hard hitting beats, that I didnt even consider the other option.

[You'll Get Yours]

this is a cool grungey song and i like the single-climax structure. the guitars and bass are played well, the tone is lacking presence and the guitars are too centered and don't fill out the stereo image very much, resulting in a kinda claustrophobic mix. would be good to hold right back on the volume of the drums and bass in the intro and ramp it up gradually into the buildup so that when the drums kick in properly at 1:40 they REALLY kick in and have all the impact they should have. it's the only climax in the song, so you need to make it count!

vocal is a bit too boomy and fades away into the bass guitar once that comes in. the pitch correction is a bit too "strict" and the lack of vibrato sucks a lot of the life out of your vocal performance - plus it turns all your sss and shh sounds into buzzy Z sounds haha. i actually think the overall level is fine, maybe just a little loud at the beginning. also record with a pop filter or off-axis/across the microphone next time, the plosives are killing me! the big chorusey vocal tone at the end is really great, big alice in chains vibes there. would've been good to put some more layers under it though, like one an octave lower + a higher harmony maybe? at the moment it seems kinda barren.

drums sounds like ez drummer. not the most "human" programming but it does what you need it to. i think the kick sound is probably too aggressive for this kind of song though, very big and in your face like a metal track but the track wants something more rounded and easy going - plus there's some kinda bass boost or something on it? it just woofs out in this weird way that i don't really like. the tom toms sounds like a bunch of wet noodles but they have nice stereo spread. something i like to do is to boost the frequency of each tom's first or second harmonic a bit and then run them through separate compressors with a fairly long attack to get a nice clear punch on each of them. mixing toms is hard! the snare sounds great though

anyway yea, mix and production needs a little more attention but this was pretty good! keep it up!

dude2312 responds:

Thank you so much for making this detailed comment. I'll make sure I take into consideration all of the feedback provided. I did struggle a lot with this song while finding the right bass tone for me. I thought about adding more vibrato but, I don't know why I didn't use that much. Drums are definitely EZ Drummer, although they could be better, they do the job just fine. Midimachine, thanks once again for reviewing my amateur song.

[At The Speed Of Light (Deathmix) Rough version]

there's a lot of stuff going on here but i don't feel like the electronic elements sit very nicely over the orchestral parts at all - it's like there are two different tracks of very different quality playing on top of one another. the kick drums get completely lost under everything, the drum sounds are all really thin and play really samey rhythms except for the little trap-ish section towards the start. the eurobeat style synths are cool in isolation but feel very messy on top of the strings.

the orchestral parts are really good imo, very lush mix of strings and choirs. the celesta sits really nicely on top of the piano in those little refrains, these are by far the best sounding parts of the track imo. the mixing is a little dense and stereo-centered, it'd be a great idea to pan out your string sections and choirs to fill out the stereo field - you can use this to give the instruments more separation and make things sound "bigger" without making them too loud.

while i understand that you've put a lot of time and effort into doing a note-perfect transcription of the original, as a listening experience it offers nothing that the original doesn't already. it would've been really cool to hear you double down on the orchestral aspects, which is definitely where your strengths lie. keep it up!

death2go responds:

thanks for the review! ive been told about it should be an orchestral thing a bit by my friends, while i may replace this one to be orchestral i might make an alternate version thats more orchestral. and i wasnt trying to add too much new stuff due to it being amazing to start with, but perhaps i might be able to look at it differently considering i havent messed with it in a couple months.

Thanks for your review man, i really appreciate it!

[Closer]

everything sounds beautiful and crisp until all these dull squarewave leads and arps start fading into the drop. if you want to keep those more "chiptune" kinda sounds i think just lowering the pulsewidth on those square synths to match the main melody tone would help brighten them up a lot without altering the feel you're going for.

the piano sound is also a bit thumpy and unnatural. adjusting the timing so that notes aren't all perfectly in time and move the note velocities around so the important beats in the melody are accented will help this. none of the melodies in this track are very memorable but they're also not really "bad" - they just kinda plod along and don't touch on any of the big emotional ideas that the chord progression hints at. the melody synth is also not what i'd personally use for something so bittersweet sounding - a little vibrato might help it to sound more emotive?

the guitar playing through the drop sucks a lot of the tension out of the first wave of that chord stack, just cut it off with that last finger snap. once the beat comes in it sounds like the transients of the reversed kicks overlap those of the regular kicks? sounds kinda messy! i like how the 2nd half of each chorus has this little refrain leading into it. i'd like the little percussive part on the melody here to be the dominant though.

middle section is cool, i like the soft vinyl crackle and piano EQ after the house section but the piano feels muddy as it plays over the rest of the buildup so i'd either cut it or alter the EQ on it coming into this section. little disappointing that this last chorus doesn't feel any different to the first except for some minor changes in the refrain - would be good to cut all the pads and the melody out under that snare @ 2:51 and then slam them all back in when the chord stack drops back in, just to maximise the tension coming into that final run through of the melody.

the ending felt very awkward and honestly sounds unfinished, at least drop one last kick and crash down if you want to end suddenly like that. it really feels like it wants to drop straight into that middle vocal section again and then end on that.

very solid production and mixing overall. it's mainly sound design and structural issues that hold this back for me, as well as not really finding the melodies particularly interesting personally. i definitely see a lot of potential in this and i'm looking forward to hearing what you can bring to the table in the future!

N1NJA-Official responds:

Thanks for the feedback. I appreciate it!