S3C's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[Compressed Time]

Semi-generative pads....fully-generative visuals....it's as if I'm literally trapped in time watching the birth & death of stars above me. Great use of pads dude! A bit reminiscent of Boards of Canada. A real emotive harmonic progression too. A bit repetitive for a track that's 4 minutes, I feel like the tune could expand into a project that's a bit more full and changing...would work great as epic intro for some kind of climax point in any work of art. Even though it is somewhat on the sparse side, the tune is great as a standalone and works for sure for what it is!

[Sonder]

dude bombass tune n***a! I voted up there! glad to see you used my blog .gif as your icon that I recommended you use for your tunes back from several months ago, LoL! You could intertextually augment this fine work of art by including the official tumblr definition for the word sonder: the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk. Thanks for naming this tune with that word lol....I always appreciate broadening my vocabulary!

To me, this song is the definition of hip. It clearly exudes good qualities, while not being overly pretentious or too obscure to be considered hipster, LOL. my favorite aspect of this track is how you juxtaposed the swing drum rhythms with the simple yet effective melodic lines on the retro-esque synths. The tune starts off cold and fairly empty, with an underlying bittersweet tone throughout, the tune as a whole gets progressively more warm and refreshing until it reaches a complete, fulfilling finish; in essence: a sonder. Would work great with one of those new-age enlightenment-inspirational YouTube videos made by millennial college chaps. Keep up the great work!

SineRider responds:

Appreciate the review! Yeah I admit I got the name from that definition haha! Also I love the gifs you post, I really enjoy bokeh photography

[chrolspach123vox]

HOLY CRAP! after a 5 year absence, with classics such as "Bringing Saxy Back", "Heroe Worship", "linearcargo", "65% incomplete", "things snoball", the most creative musician on NG has returned!

not your best work IMO, a bit too sparse in the instrumentation department, and oddly structured for my tastes, but definitely a solid piece. Love the warbly, processed drums, great lyrics, and that gentle but evil saxophone line. The lush, reverberating, ominous instrumental section at 3:00 is like your signature sound...

please continue to post more, and if you leave again, let us know where you upload your music! I still have your stuff downloaded and listen to your old tracks!

11-8-20 EDIT: damn, updating a review 7 years and a day later...just hear to say awesome stuff. Profound message in weird times. And I still really like what you did with the drum sampling.

snoballandthmonyshot responds:

nice one chap. glad that someone has been listening to my notes. will have to trawl your stuff soon, I expect big tings. I don't have my tracks anywhere else mate.
Px

[A Curious Encounter Preview]

it's an interesting piece, that bodes well with the masquerade imagery, I'd agree with one of the reviewers who commented on it being reminiscent of Danny-Elfman's works; the piece has a playful, slightly mystical quality to it. I like the space you leave between the motives, and your usage of phrygian cadences (at :16 and the end of the piece). The contrast is nice between the lively string introduction and softer second half of the piece with the flutes and harps. My foremost suggestion would be to bolster up the instrumentation, the first half of the piece could use a contrabass to round out the opening string lines, some high-mid register orchestral percussion such as castanets and/or tambourines could accentuate the groove. Then you could mirror the part in A.) after the soft interlude by complimenting the strings with some brass and or woodwind instruments, IMO bassoon and clarinet sections would fit well with the theme of the piece. The intro could use more varied dynamics, but now I'm just nitpicking...

yeah, the strings are probably too loud in the second half of the piece, but I think it's partially due to the violins patch you are using, it's too aggressive. Maybe the lower velocities have a more delicate layer? If it's available in your library, try experimenting with another marcato or staccato patch. using a viola section (or even solo violin- since the second part is less thick in texture) may be slightly less abrasive. I'm not familiar with symphobia or what the deal with combinators is- but you should be able to manually turn down the volume for each patch within the kontakt plugin. if the combinator is the problem you could always open up a separate channel (or clone the same one) and send it through an individual mixer channel, and adjust the volume externally from there. although seeing as how you used Reason prior to FL Studio, if I'm remembering correctly- you're probably a master already and know all this lol. If you don't use midi controllers as your primary method for sequencing the notes and patterns like me, you're going to have a blast with FL lol

AshleyAlyse responds:

I want to add tambourines to this song so bad! However, I searched for hours and could never find a tambourines vst that you didn't have to pay a fortune for. :( Kinda broke at the moment, hehe. Also, I can't run too many instruments at once on this computer, the sound glitches like a mad man.
I opened the "tool" window for the symphobia plugin and my, oh my, I have no idea what in the world to do! Hahah! It's so confusing, it's probably going to take me a while to get used to this new software. I really don't know much of what I'm doing, I kinda just play with something until it sounds decent. :) Thank you so much for the suggestions! I will see if I can do a few of the things you suggested! I appreciate the time you took to review my piece, thank you. :)

[SR - Coffee Redux]

Pristine. I've had this on my computer for 4+ years.

SineRider responds:

thanks dude, I think this is one of my better older tunes... man I can't believe it's been four years since I made this :O

[Beyond the Coast]

I thought I was on the front page for a sec...because I have a song on Newgrounds with the exact same name O_o anyhow, this is way better than my piece.

seriously, it fuckin rocks. Nice latin 6/8 groove, the overall piece could use more variations for being 5 minutes long, but other than that this piece of music is fucking amazing. Tremolo plucked string riffs, jazzy chord progression, deep reverby ambient atmosphere (did you use timestretching?), exotic hand percussion, mixing is crisp and well placed. Reminds me a little of one of the more recent Paul Desmond Quartet albums. I like DustyPeach's review, to me the whole piece is quite airy, ghostly, yet very calming. As if I died but afterlife is paradise at a tropical island.

[==(Serene Submersion)==]

one of my favorite techniques. not sure if you noticed, but you are contrasting between parallel major/minor keys moving down in seconds (Gmajor-Gminor(Eb Lydian)->Fmajor-Fminor->Eb major->Eb/D# Minor and so forth). it also sounds to good to employ the respective minor pentatonic scale over each two set of chords (Gminor pentatonic on top of both Gmajor and Gminor for example).

yeah its very nice tho. would be cool if you found someway to cleverly loop all 12 keys instead of the fade.

[Artisan Land]

You hit the nail on the head

I'm a HUGE fan of Copeland's score for the Spyro PSX games. The cartoony thematic material, light, eccentric drums, organ and mallet/bell percussion, ambient padding is very reminiscent of the music in the Spyro games. Definitely would fit perfectly with the soundtrack for Spyro 2-3 where Copeland expanded the instrumentation palette in his pieces. It could be a replacement for one of the home-world tracks in Spyro 3 (which I found to be lacking in energy).

The composition is perfect. Catchy, good use of repetition, and development and sequencing of patterns. To me it invokes feelings of playfulness, lightheartedness, and comic mischief (flame those sheep!) It even loops seamlessly. I love the meshing of the acoustic guitar and vibraphone melodies. The breakdown with the rotary B3 organ was awesome, and the rhythmic chord stabs after was a great touch leading back into the introduction. The bassline is funky and produces a great groove and the electric piano has some interesting riffing over the top. I like the varied and well layered shaker percussion lines.

DAT INSTRUMENTATION. Lovely rhodes piano, sweet ethnic percussion, nice bubbly synth bass, again DAT B3 ORGAN. The release on the vibraphones is perfectly modeled. And the background ambiance....not only does it sound authentic, it actually develops and changes along with the music!

The mixing/levels are very clear. All the instruments are well distinguishable, good use of stereo and panning, creates a good contrast. I also like how the piece isn't overly compressed and over-saturated in effects.

So I can't find anything wrong with this piece honestly, but I still give it a 9 because it doesnt exactly have that killer melody (like the frozen altars level) or an extra-exotic instrumentation (like Sheila's lair). Perhaps the section after the break could be extended an extra 8-16 bars to make it more symmetrical to the intro-first verse area; but like I mentioned above, since it loops into the intro unoticeably it doesnt really matter. It may be able to use more variation in overall dynamics. Another technique worth exploring (not necessarily in this piece) is simply transposing all your instruments up or down for a good 8 bars or so. Copeland would use this technique quite a bit in his Spyro tracks to elongate them while not actually changing much.

Very good job, I'm interesting in hearing more from you for sure!

Emma responds:

Thank you very much for your well-thought out response! I really appreciate the detailed critique :)! I think Copeland is a musical genius when it comes to simple pieces. I'm extremely fond of his use of metal and electric guitars, but, I highly doubt anyone could match his perfect usage of them in the songs. I may attempt more similar pieces (hopefully longer) in the future! I recently received Apple Logic Pro for Christmas, so once I get more used to it's interface - which is much different from FL Studio - I will make another attempt and hope you will critique that one as well!

Thanks again :)

- Emma