Dutonic's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[Shockful Haste - Sci-Jewel OST]

The Bejewled 2 OST is one of my favorite albums of all time. Awesome to see some modern composers still inspired by those games. In my humble opinion, the third game's soundtrack just isn't on the same level as Bejewled 2.

For this song in particular, I felt that the bass stabs may be out of tune? Some of them sound a bit like hitting the low end of a piano with your elbow haha. But it's drowned out by the more melodic stuff in the mid/high range.

I do think you could sharpen up the track a lot simply by removing elements. Sometimes, less is more. This is something I also struggle with as a composer. Wanting to capture an intense feeling without creating clutter and too much overlap.

Cheeming-Bepis responds:

Thanks!
Will def go ahead and fix it once i get the chance! :P

EDIT: ok tysm for pointing this out! because i found out by checking that the bass was completely discordant, whoops, ty for the feedback or else i wouldn't have genuinely found that xP

Edit 2: so yes after checking... yes you were 100% correct on those bass stabs!; there was a certain note causing clashing in those chords, so i decided to fix that... also removed the bleps that were causing clashing to make the song overall cleaner, tysm :]

[Ruby - Gold]

Honestly, while the variety of instrumentation was nice, you just play the same 4 chords on loop for the entire song without even changing the melody. And its a boring melody at that. You're just spamming the root note of the chord. Granted there are some moments where you slightly change it up, but even then, it still feels exactly the same as everything else.

In summary, the production quality was great, but the arrangement itself was obnoxiously basic. I would place this in the same category as Darude - Sandstorm. If that's what you were going for, you definitely succeeded. Perhaps my review is unfairly biased by my distaste for repetition to this degree.

PokeMusicRuby70 responds:

I understand where you're coming from. The problem with me is that it's so hard for me to make songs without making them too repetitive, and I can't think of any way to differentiate the chord progressions. Thank you for the feedback though, and I'm gonna release my next song in a little bit so hopefully it's better than this one in your opinion. But yeah, I'm sorry if my stuff is too basic. It's just so dang hard coming up with new ideas for songs. :|

[Lordant - A Star Like Me]

I'm not a fan of the delay on the flute in the intro. It just sounds kind of squeaky. Personally, I don't like seeing extended lengths of background ambience in music either (I also think the ambience could benefit from being farther back in the mix).

Overall, a well made song as usual. These are just some minor tweaks I'd make.

Lordant responds:

Thanks a lot!
I'm not sure what to do with delay, I kinda like that squeaky feedback. I will try to make it more subtle or create a delay mix automation, I think it may help a bit. As for ambience, again, its length is fine for my taste, but I agree with your point about the mix.

[The Way Home]

Fucking beautiful

HollandAlbright responds:

Thank you so much! ♫

["Trancefusion Dreams" :3]

*Motivates very hard*

G2961 responds:

hahahaha. yes. bad google translator

[Far Away]

Hey! I'm an orchestral composer and video game soundtrack designer. Wanted to leave some thoughts. I'm not sure how to rate this song as its intended purpose is lost on me. From what I can gather in your description this is just an "idk whats going on but I'm having fun" piece. It makes me feel like you were just discovering what sounds cool as you went along (the composer equivalent of "discovery writing). I often compose this way as well, but utilizing this method generally means you need to have a rough idea of what the track is going to be ahead of time. Even a framework as simple as "action packed", "emotionally evocative", "background ambient", or "symphonic movement" can be a total game changer for how we think about the song as we're writing it and ultimately shape the end result into a cohesive musical experience. Which I think this song lacks.

I rescind this feedback if this is meant to score to picture. That would change things since the purpose of the track is to enhance the sometimes very dynamic scene/mood changes and not to be a standalone musical experience.

By the way. These samples are super clean. Very high quality. The mix is great. You definitely know what you're doing as a composer.

sorohanro responds:

Thanks for the review, very detailed and insightful.
Sometimes I go with a framework, but there are times when my inspiration decides to go a very different way, and next day I look back at what I've done and I'm like "??? how??? why??? when???".

There is a list of samples and instruments used in one of my responses.
I also discovered a new effect (it was with discount), which is not a reverb, but one of it's presets works great as a send reverb for orchestra. (Finisher FLUXX by ujam, on "Man Cave" preset).

I feared that Kontakt default orchestral instruments won't blend with EWQL or Sunset Strings, but that plugin did a great job.