Voltus's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[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!

[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

[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!

[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! =)

[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. :)