Voltus's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[Spicy tuna]

Nice to see you develop your skillset :D It's nice but a little too short and monotone to justify 5 stars.

It's a cool thing though!

GO LEMON :P

lemon42 responds:

Glad you liked it! I agree with the fact it's a bit monotone, even with the little changes included midway, it still lacks a bit of variety. I didn't want to spend too much time on this song as I want to keep moving on to new things as much as possible. I couldn't really find anything that I really wanted to add to it, so I just decided to wrap it all up!

This was definitely something new for me, I've started as an electronic composer, started going towards orchestral a lot, and finally managed to somehow get back to electronic. Let's hope I can make more! Either way, thanks! c:

[Acoustica]

I love the tits tag!

Only 4.5 stars because I didn't get that WOW I never heard such awesome music feel. It ends a bit too abrupt for my taste.
It's a great Song though!

Bad-Man-Incorporated responds:

Cool man. Glad you dig. Tits are the TITS! ( * )( * ) ( o )( o )

[The Portal]

The start is quite nice, is it a movie sample or something?

Then your intro. It sounds quite dry and unmodified, you could have presented some more atmosphere there, create it with reverb or a pad sound in the background to just fill it right from the get go a little more, that way it would have fit a lot nicer with the beginning.
Your drums don't grab me as something awesome, they sound plain and the rhythm pattern is not special or attention grabbing. You could have layered them here and there and make them stand out a bit more. Same thing with the other sounds, they all sound a bit 1 dimentional so you should make them fatter somehow, use layering compression whatever you think sounds best in the specific scenario.
It's nicely mixed however and not a lot of cluttering is going on as far as i noticed. nothing stands out either so it's unfortunately by no means perfect, try a little more on the mixing front, be bolder and a little more aggressive.
The arrangement is good, although you could have maybe gotten a little more creative with your chord progression and swiched it up a bit. It's all the way the same progression so a little variation would have worked wonders IMHO.

Overall a nice track with some things that you could have made a lot better.

3.5/5

Chemiqals responds:

Thanks for the feedback! Much appreciated.

[On & On & On [Remastered]]

hey there here shall be your feedback!

Your sounds are very wide and open, even the bass at times which lets it seem washed under all the mid range frequencys you got going on here. Compared to the original though everything is way tighter and punchier. Your hats and claps are quite sharp to my ear. From a compositioning point of view i thing you could have done a bit more with your drums. The sounds you choose for them are pretty plane and boring. Also your groove isn't the grooviest one, sounds a bit stupid but when you think about it. You have all those wide synths in there which don't really punch in the rhythmical sense so you could really have gone all out of your way to make some crazy drum grooves, but again that's all to taste. The mixing overall is, as far as I'm concerned, quite good just a bit sharp and a little muddy in the high bass to low mid frequencys (i guess around 150 - 300hz).

Overall a nice but not perfect track.
3.5/5

Chemiqals responds:

Thanks for the feedback, again! =)

[Aberration]

I could definitely imagine this in a videogame. It would fit in a castlevania type setting or something.

Mixing wise your sounds seem neatly put together, everything has its place in the frequency spectrum, sounds relatively professional and so on. The song has a nice overall tone, it gives of a good aggressive, actiony vibe and I like that. You also have nice variation in the middle and the surprising ending funnily enough didn't bother me at all, it fits right in. The Arpeggio might be a little to much in the mid part around 1:15 but i gues thats just taste.
Comercially howerver, this song might be a bit too much. It doen't have that catchy thing those kind of songs have, be it a specific reocurring melody or riff.

So overall a really good and IMHO very good put together song, which just needs that one moment for the listener so say oh "WOW I LOVE THAT PART", the sparkle. Unfortunately I can't describe exactely to you what that part would be.

Very good song nonetheless, Rock on!

4/5

[Terminal]

Hey, sweet sounds!

I just think this song is a tad long. You could have cut back on the length of some parts here. Also in the beginning you could have used a bit more monotony (something you won't hear me say very often!). Just stay on the root note for 1 phrase longer or something, your sounds would have carried it really well, they sound unique. Your mixing is solid, this track might need some more bass though, and your kick doesnt really stand out up front. The end is kind of unexpected, you should have lead up to that more by thining out the sounds with for example some hp or lp filters.

Overall a good track, keep going! 4/5

TheComet responds:

Yeah I can kinda see what you mean with the intro, never really considered simplifying my intros, I usually go for a more full single lead for the intro and build onto it.

I'll give it a shot in my next project, see how it goes :)

[Electroscape]

well here you go:

first of all, please don't jump on me because I'll kinda destroy your track right now, I don't mean no harm:

but first things first: the good

you have a nice upliftng melody which you change up nicely through out the song. some cool uplifting sounds and white noize and all that good stuff, nice use of reverb and so on.

the bad

your melody is fine and all, but your chord progression is just flat out boring to me at least. you dont even change it up once in those nearly two minutes. I mean ok, avicii (which I think is some kind of inspitation for you in this piece due to your tags) doesn't do that aswell, but he is just mixing and mastering and producing overall on a commercial level. Also your drumtrack is lacking in variety. sure you might want it all to be like that but to me it's boring to listen to. try some highhats or even just sidechained whitenoize. oh yeah sidechaining, learn that, do that! It will bring you forward a lot.
your mixing seems to have some problems. sometimes (when your bass-hits come in just before your downsection) I can hear your compressor ducking all other frequencys away pretty clearly, most of the time you don't want that and i found it annoying to listen too. your eq'ing needs some work too, your sounds have too many frequencys in common so they just mash a lot of the time. The bass is also kind of weak, but i guess that comes from your rather poor mixing job. So my recomandation for you: learn as much as you can about mixing!

Also your synths sound plain, flat and mostly boring. try to create a unique sound when designing your stuff, so you don't sound like anyone else who wanted to make electronic music. It sounds like 0's and 1's. change it up!

Conclusion: Work on your skills, mostly your mixing skills, you have got great catchy melody Ideas with which you can work with. learn to design sounds and mix them together. there are a lot of tutorials on youtube and everywhere else on the internet, so just gain knowledge and move on from what you got!

pretty lenghty but well you asked for it!

I hope I didn't upset you too much and you can improve from what I wrote. Just so you know I'm making electronic music for over 5 years now so I kind of know some shit about all this stuff.

move on. improve!

cya

EctiBot responds:

Thx for the feedback :) I'm glad you liked the melody :D.
It's actually true that Avicii is my inspiration though ofc I cant even make music close to his.
As for the chord progression I understand what you mean but I simply liked it better with simple 4 bar chord progression.
I totally agree with the broing drumtrack. I tried adding some drum variety too my next song and it really made a huge difference so thanks for the tip :).

I also noticed the mixing problems. I somehow didn't even notice it when working on it so I'll fix it right away.
I actually did the stuff with the eq'in on purpose. I'm working on creating my own music style so i guess my first attempt just came out bad :3.

The bass is actually not weak it's just that there is no proper bass at all. What was meant to be the bass ended up just sounding like a part of the lead becuase I liked how it sounded.

It's true that the synths are plain. pretty much because I just used presets. I'll work on trying to make my own synths too :).

And don't worry you didn't upset. Your review was very helpful and I think your tips will make my music better.

Thx again :)

-enochcity

[Yunica]

Hi there.

So here's my review for you:

The good:

I like the sounds you created. You have a nice 8bit vibe going on. The bass synth fulfills its purpose rather well and the only thing that kind of gets on my nerves after some time is the high pitched sound that just plays those 2 notes. The song is changing things up wich i quite like. You dont just have one chord progression and leave it with that. The middle bridge part switches things up nicely.

The Bad:

You could have used more effects. Maybe reverb or something like that. The song appears rather dry. Also you could have used single note velocities, so not every note, the lead for example played is as loud as the other. But then again it's 8bit so I dont know if you did that intentionally.

Overall quite good but not perfect.

3.5/5

BassMZero responds:

Thanks for the input! I tried to keep it simple as simple tunes are what I'm into. :)

[Poo smells good]

So here we go:

I didn't like it much. I'm going to say that right off the bat. Maybe it's just not my kind of music but I just can't imagine someone who would actually listen to stuff like this over and over again.
First off, your drums. they are panned way too extreme for my taste, you could have played around with that a little more, for example let them pan against each other with an lfo or something so the snare doesn't always sit on the left and the bass and crash (which sounds rather awfull and has no dynamic range what so ever) on the right. The other sounds are rather good the bass that you introduce right after the sirens at the start was the sound that I liked the most. You unfortunately didn't use it that much later on or you just didn't mix it in very well, which gets me to the next point.

The mixing:
It all sounds very mashed together, try to give every instrument room in the frequencyspectrum to work in. Your mix is mainly a pile of mud. The whole thing doesn't really sound pleasantly compressed so you should probably look into compression for your sounds aswell. Also you should try to sidechain some of your stuff in this too to give the instruments room in terms of loudness. So yeah try to improve that and you might get something decent out of this.

Musicality:

I did not like the composition. It's all over the place. You dont really know what you have to think of it as the listener. It's quite as confusing as the title, so well I guess you were going for that all along. Try to streamline a bit more in future productions maybe.

Overall a pretty awful track, I hope I didn't just hate on your track and gave some constructive criticism to improve your skills.

1.5/5

TacoMilagroIII responds:

Noted.