Voltus's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[New Beginning]

phew. this let my ears bleed a little. you know what this sounds like? a robot. plain and simple. you write an indie track and let a soulless robot play it.

Change some velocitys, play the guitar yourself or, if you can not, let it be played by somebody who can. Every element in this tune sounds like a broken vinylrecord looping itself. you seem to have just taken samples and used them as is to build your melody and structure. But notevalues are not everything. you need some life in your music. change velocitys dont let everything be "quantized" at least not in rock music. dont use the same sample for the same note. Rock lives by the fact that it sounds "organic". the composition was ok. pretty standard melodys sticking to the pentatonic. just for the love of music make it more organic. this really hurt itself by not being lifelike at all. this tune had next to no dynamics. change that and then it will be worth listening to. as it is now i'm afraid I'll have to rate it very poorly.

2/5
Change it! ;)

Angelsosa responds:

We made it with Guitar Pro 6. Recording is hard you know? We just write the partitures in guitar pro for practice, and make ta wav file with the soundbanks and stuff. We worked in sound as hard as we can, but maybe, the limitations of the program are too much. By the way, thank you for your opinion, the opinions for this kind of song are really variated and goes from 2 stars to 5 stars, and we understand that, not everyone receives the guitar pro sounds in the same way.

[XODUS]

Nice track! I dig your flows. nothing to complain about the rap parts. the sounddesign is at times a little rough and sounds too uninspiring. try to beef up your drum loop a little make it stand out, put some stank on it! the chordsound especially sounds really dull in my opinion. I think you could have mixed everything a bit clearer it clutters a little in the low mid frequencys. also your choise of effects and the "paranoia sample" seem kind of odd and unproffesional to my ears but I don't dwelve in rap a lot so keep that in mind. also the ending is just a cut in my opinion which you could have executed better probably with a reverb tail or a builddown or something like that.

overall nice track make the sounddesign a little more diverse and change things up a bit more and you got yourself a killer tune.

4/5

[Noise - InfernoZN]

mixed really well but it's far from jazzy, I think what this is lacking most is soul. you need to give way more thaught to stuff like your velocities for every note timing and making things sound real! your track gives me the feel of a rather uninspiring midi loop. try to work on your sounddesign or just use what's always worked in this genre rhodes, live bass and live drums for example. I dont particularly like the sound you came up with here but it reminded me of the newer pokemon soundtracks.

so if you go for jazz go full on or I'm not really satisfied. you mixed it well though!

3.5/5

Free2Play responds:

Haha thanks! I'm still iffy about the mix, I think specifically because it doesn't work as jazz.

This song was a weird departure from what I usually do (more dance, electronic, hip-hopish stuff), and I completely agree with you. There's a lot of weaknesses to music production I have, and not noticing little details like velocities of specific notes, or doing very different styles of writing. At this point I still really can only write basic pop things, nothing too complex. And I agree this track really wasn't that interesting, but I knew I wanted to get this out to learn something so mission accomplished! lol.

If you have any recommendations on how to improve the finer details of composition and writing different styles I would love to hear it. I think the best mark of a musician is understanding and being able to control how they make music. I've certainly gained more, but I'm still no where near where I want to be.

Thanks alot, very helpful review!

[CLOAK]

you wanted a review so here you go,

first of all the track is nicely mixed nothing too unusual there, you blip sound sometimes seems a bit loud so you might improve on that.
overall your sounddesign seems rather bland i liked the synth sound that came in around 1:30 though. the blip sound is a bit annoying imho. your drums are also nothing special and you hadn't any noticable variation in your drum patterns which didnt help the song.

overall your arrangement is boring nothing really exciting happens in this track you don't build up any tention and you also dont bring it down, also it feels pretty emotionless. but you know music lives from emotion so you should work on that. the melody and sounds also got pretty tiering after a while because you dont even change it up once in your track (exept from 1:30 maybe).

so explore a bit more and you'll get better your mixing skills seem promising but I'd like to hear more from you before I scout you.

Cheers keep on going and merry christmas!

[Taming Sleep]

hey there. Nice concept.

the song is really well structured. you have a great sense of when to do what to keep the flow interesting. I like the composition. your sounds seem kind of odd but i guess you were going for a owl city vibe which you achieved. so you got yourself a nice popsong here.

the thing is I think you didn't execute it very well. you mixing is not as clear as I would have liked. the squaresaw sound after your areal intro sounds rather dull and has no edge. you should probably eq it differently it sounds too harsh in my opinion. your pianosound is also kind of weak try to improve that somehow in the future through eqing, reverb, nore velocityvariance or other "enhancers". the thing with pianos is if you dont have a good sounding piano in the first place it's kind of hard to make it sound nice.
then there are your drums. they are way too static and synthetical. you should use way more velocityvariance in you programming for them. they also sound dull (especially the kick) and low-mid heavy as far as i can hear. the cymbals dont have the shine i would expect in a mix like this. try to boost them in the high frequencys (I'd try 8khz upwards).
I also miss some thickness in your sounds. your bassfrequencys seem to be way separated from the rest like you have a notch filter there or something.

well I wrote a lot of things to improve but overall the song is nice and I really like the concept you produced.

Improve your mixing and you'll get 5/5 scores :D

3.5/5 great song not so great production.

merry christmas! :)

[Snowfall]

really moving song you made here! I like the small dissonances and kind of odd sounding harmonics of your chime sound. generally the whole thing sounds a little odd but in a good way. it also helps that it is really well mixed as far as i'm concerned. nice subby bass which has a nice slow reese movement which counters the fast glichy sounds of you percussive elements. great depth as well. also nice melody/progression whatever. It's not catchy but it sounds awesome and a catchy melody probably wouldnt have fit the athmosphere created in this song.

the only nitpick I have with it is, it is too short. could have build up everything a bit more. sure it would have draged on a little too much for some but I like the art of long tracks. a track of this quality i could have listened easily 10 minutes :D so yea thats why you dont get 5 stars.

very good keep going! 4.5/5

Pandasticality responds:

about the catchy melody, yeah i tried making different melodies for this and it just wouldnt sit tight, i didnt feel like it would fit anywhere :c thank you for the review n__n !

Merry Christmas and happy holidays.
- Pandasticality

[We Are]

poof

[Reflection]

funny that the harmonys and progressions in this piece kind of reflect your description of the story behind it. It really gives me a mellow sort of depressed and if you will ashamed feeling, so in my oppinion this would have had something to be successful in the ngadm. Then again I don't know that much about how you would have been recieved by the judges and so on. I think it's nice. Not perfect and your mixing could have been a little more expressive and open but the accentuation of the low mid still suits the vibe of the tune. Very emotional in my oppinion! You might have a talent for this kind of stuff.

Keep on going and stop being so hard on your self, this could have been great! (and it still is in some respect)

Chemiqals responds:

Thanks! I figured that the judges of the NGADM would like to hear something a little more layered and "interesting", so I made Swan Lullaby instead. Not that I don't think they can appreciate a more simple and toned down piece. I just wanted to push myself!

[Noises]

Nice even soundscape, it is just too repetitive for my taste, you don't change up your progression and you don't bring in/ take away alot of your sounds to build up or break down. I think the growl squelch whatever sounds in the first part are great. The second part could have a little more pronounced mid rangey type sounds.

this song is nicely produced howerver and you got some cool sounds, I just dont like the arrangement and your repetitive choice of chord progression

3.5/5

[Falcon Punch]

This is nicely produced and everything, its just not consistent enough for my taste, theres way too much happening all the time imho. And your leadsound gets really annoying at least for me after some time. I mean sure it's not going to be a chilly background song, but it is just too much distortion and melody information in here.

But still nicely produced just a bit too much imho!

keep em coming! :P