ADR3-N's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[Ultimatum (NGUAC Finalists 2024)]

Loving all the modulations, synths chosen, FX and mixing decisions through this piece, with the exception of one. The bass should have some dedicated space! I can hear it, but it's pretty quiet throughout. My setup emphasizes these frequencies, so I know they will be near non-existent on other systems.

Are you using a pure sine for your sub? You may consider a slightly distorted waveform for it, or applying distortion.

The problem is less pronounced at 2:09, but I worry that stray reverb low frequencies or delays would stick out if you were to emphasize the low register much more. Something to think about in future mixes.

Overall great mix, good looking levels on the master, controlling for dynamic range, just a bit sibilant. I wonder if alternatively, you could roll off some highs OR take down your hi-hats and so on, adjust your master accordingly, and the perception of tinniness would go away.

I've been reading up on psychoacoustics, or the science of sound perception in layman's terms, and what I've discovered confirms my every day observation. The higher a sound is in pitch, to a certain extent, the louder it seems; the highest extremes of course suffer the opposite -- fading into silence like a YouTube hearing test for the partially deaf. Somewhere in the middle hi-hats and cymbals make their entrance, high-pitched and almost universally loud, such that they are easy to over-crisp and over-pump. A nice balanced EQ I've found for dealing with them is EZQ, a light touch in any direction will gently roll off the volcume of some of these offending frequencies for you, with minimal effort!

DefectiveSmile responds:

Thank you for the feedback! I appreciate the very direct and straightforward paths to make mixing just that much better. ♥️

[Eye of Evolution]

You really nailed that 80's vibe hard with the instrumentation, the artistic theme, the overall mix levels, and driving arrangement.

It does take a WHILE to develop, and I have gripes with some of the levelling and panning, but I'm really enjoying from 2:00 on. Feels like a song that never ends, in a good way.

I do think you can cut the silence off the end, take your hihats down a notch, bring your kick up slightly, your snare by about 1 dB, and potentially change out that crash cymbal.

Master sounds pretty good! Great work

[Way Back Home]

Great writing -- I think your piano might be a bit too wet in your intro. It feels quite spaced out, and not in a dreamy way. Check your tail lengths, your low frequencies, and so on. The shoe-gaze feel is hard to nail down; I hear the same issue with your pads and keys throughout.

The vocal is a bit boomy and plosive. This may have to do with distance to the mic, too high of a volume going into the interface, or saturation and compression in post. Experiment with pulling back from the mic a bit -- or singing at lower volume, particularly for such a laid back piece, and putting a filter or two between the mic and your mouth. Recording at a 45 degree angle from the mic is also an option.

It may simply be that the EQ is tilted toward the low mids as well, leading to the PA-system feeling I'm getting.

I also recommend a little less aggressive autotune. The attack on some more variable notes was noticeable.

Your breaths are not too distracting, but your S and T's across the board are quite loud. I recommend opening your vocal in another editor and manually de-essing, OR hand-ducking the volume. Once that is done, you can safely use an EQ like EZQ to gently shape the tone of the vocal to be a little tinnier, brighter, warmer -- whatever it is you feel is balanced.

There are some issues before the master. I think I hear clipping at 1:34, on though, show, find my, home, sure, fire, find my, oh, promise, strong, find, and so on. Take a look at your lyrics and follow along, keeping an eye out for these downbeats.

If you are not mixing in 32-bit floating point and the highest sample rates your PC will stand, I recommend switching to it.

If this causes latency issues for you as it did for me, a solution is to print your track to mp3, load up in audacity, and punch in your recordings on a new audio track. Mute newly recorded tracks as you go. After you have normalized the resulting takes and edited as you please, you can then export all your takes separately using Audacity's native functions. Life hack right there.

The master itself is also somewhat quiet and could theoretically be pushed harder, but I think the track was too hot going into the compressor.

Moving onto the instrument balance, the vocals are a bit loud relative to the rest of the track. Perhaps consider taking down by .3 dB. The hi-hats could stand to come down similarly, and the snare up by the same amount. I would reduce the volume of all wet FX by around 25% and shorten reverb and delay tails, hi-passing the wet signals up to 170 hz; you have a perfectly pleasant soft bass in the bottom register, which is hard to hear under the wash!

That's really all I have to say technically for this piece, mix and master being the primary things I look for critically.

As far as songwriting, it's intimate, warm, and there is not one single element I dislike. Your chords are good, your structure is very strong. Your transitions are simple and even abrupt, but they suit the composition totally.

I know I wrote a LOT of critique, but overall, I really enjoyed it and think you did a great job!

AveragePhoe responds:

Hi, so, there's a lot here. Thank you so so much for taking the time to analyze the song so thoroughly and provide such priceless feedback! Mixing is always the hardest step for me in music production (you might notice that if you listen to some of my other songs), and this was only worsened by the tight deadline. While I had more time to work on it, I chose to stop the moment I felt it was good enough to be submitted. The alternative was endlessly obsessing over every detail, and probably going a few nights without sleep. This way, I can go back to it with a clear mind and calmly work on a Spotify release. Still, I'm proud of the song I submitted, and I'm really happy you enjoyed it! Constructive criticism is one of the greatest gifts a creative can receive, so again, thank you so much!

[AndrewCR × Upcoda - Glee]

With more time to refine the mix prior to the final drop, I think this song would be an instant classic. I'm hearing composition elements that remind me of the best YouTuber let's plays I've ever seen, and Calvin-Harris-esque rhythm sections -- think This Is What You Came For.

I don't mean that in the sense of plagiarism. Rather, I think it's a sign of great technical ability on both of your parts. The compositional elements work in a technical sense, and all the instruments sound good in context. It really inspires me to learn these styles.

Where this song suffers is in dynamics and a few somewhat heavy-handed hard-ish panning decisions. Those take time to get used to and might be items to revisit, should you ever touch this piece again.

Regarding compression and dynamics, look at the waveform. Only in the final chorus are we feeling full throttle, in genres which are known for being unapologetically loud and high energy for each individual drop, utilizing heavy sidechain to compensate for squashed dynamics -- OTT, soundgoodizing.

The compression between parts is not entirely uniform, nor would I say the input level being fed into the master compressor is adequate at all times. For instance, on the intro, I can see some very dynamic peaks.

Another concern is the overall level of kick and snare specifically throughout. At times they are hard to discern -- both transient and note body.

This is in part due to their frequency profile and in part due to relying on sidechain and silence to make them cut through across sections. Yes, by all means use these things, but be mindful that your snare does need a little bit of bite to sound connected in the context of the song -- it should always cut through, excepting for transitions, where hi-lo pass asssist in motion.

I'd have liked to hear the high end of the snare emphasized a bit more and a slight .2 to .5 dB pump on it in particular; by 1:00, it's lost in the mix. Side chain around there also might use an adjustment to the ms used. The gap is slightly more noticeable than I would usually expect for the context.

At 1:39, there is a fizzy layer, probably a ride or hat playing on top of the snare and the percussion there rather than being muffled takes a turn for tinny. As a transition, this is definitely something I noticed as development but was unsure how to feel about it

Moving to 1:50, I think comparing to a gain-matched reference, perhaps the one I name dropped, This Is What You Came For, would have helped bring this portion in balance.

Let me explain what I hear. The ride cymbals due to their frequency feel like the lead instrument in this section and are clearly audible through the drop. Backing them off and going with a 808 or 909 fizzy cymbal underneath may have helped give them some more context (so as not to stand out), while allowing you to turn them down or pan them out. They just feel disconnected somehow.

I appreciate the sample at 2:01 and want to know what it is -- reminds me of the "Infinite One" Goldeneye OST sample I'm so very fond of.

The sub to me almost completely drops out, and quite early for the build into the final drop. I feel it should have been very present from 1:50, growing at 2:11, and only begin to fade around 2:20.

There's not much feeling of crescendo in this portion due to input into the compressor being quite low already, then being squeezed again via hi-pass/band-pass. I have some gripes about the overall instrument balance. The rides are rides up too high, colorized textures sit a bit over top of other elements, glitches and hats lie over top, and of course the rhythm section (i.e. bass and rhyhtm synths) is not delineated enough to form a driving foundation.

As I said, the levels of the drop are pretty great, as is the composition. I still think the bass is not standing out much as in should, in a way that will be noticable in other spaces, on other devices.

Having a handy reference for all these mix issues, as well as ample time to work on a piece, will fix all of the issues I mentioned.

Otherwise, the composition is super banging. At the intro I was a little unsure, partly influenced by your description of things being dragged out, but realistically, you could have cut the drop portion past 36 seconds off and gotten by fine; I didn't really feel that was necessary, but just a response to your notion that it was too long. I think it's fine.

Was a real pleasure to listen to, as evidenced by the amount of time it took going back and forth with this review. Great work!

AndrewCr responds:

Thanks for the feedback and criticism!

One thing to take note of that we each use a different DAW, so we had to send each other .waw files and such. Meaning, we each mixed and mastered the song on our own, hence the difference in compression levels.

Regarding drowned drums - I'm not too familiar with glitch hop. I just went for whatever sounded good to me, not any industry standards. One of those things was the focus on melodic elements instead of percussion, so the quieter snare is actually intentional

Again, thanks so much for the review :)

[Finale]

When I first heard the intro I thought I might be heading into a hiphop beat, but I held my breath. I think this might fit somewhere in lo-fi hip-hop for the intro.

Something is going on with the high end. Though those scratches sound great in isolation, they're a few dB high in the mix. As the only thing in that sonic space, it's especially noticable.

The vocal sample also caught me off guard as quite clean, however, it served to break us up for the final section. I think for the final chorus, the snare drum is a bit loud and dry, and the kick would be better served to have some more bottom.

In short, pretty much the only thing wrong with this track is balance. But I give props for making something entirely different to what I've heard from you so far, as well as a hook that stuck with me long after it was over. Great work!

[Glitch - Music from Alan Becker's 'Influencer Arc Ep. 1]

It's only been half and hour, and 9 listens is not enough! Thank you for sending this to me! I have yet to open up the animation, but after hearing this, I certainly will. You should add it to the description as an embed so folks can find it easily.

Also, I would kill to have some of these patches in my library to study. I'm just coming around to doing wavetable stuff, and this, this is what I'm aiming for uwu

I only have one point of critique, after listening on both headphones and speakers, the low mid could translate a bit better to the latter, and at 1:56, the bass jumps out just a bit on the high octave. It's just slightly sibilant. Perhaps back off the compression very slightly overall.

2:52 is my favorite section. Reminds me of Borderlands 2 OST in a good way.

3:36 was unexpected and a very pleasant modulation.

That's really all I got though, a couple minor gripes, but the piece is 100% serviceable for its intended use, as a commission for an animation!

AvenzaMusic responds:

Thank you so much for taking the time to listen, for your support, and for your thoughts, I really appreciate it! Great idea to add a link to the description on yt, just added it in now :)
Ohh this is excellent feedback, thank you! Will defo look over the compression twice in the future and think a bit more about highs in the basses, actually didn't think about that myself but you have a good point.

Thanks again!!

[Flesh and Bone]

The transitions in this song are ALL great (I've come to expect this from you :)). Vocal performance is unusual for the genres, but combined with the lyrics, they set the mood well. With refinement of mix and master, I could listen to this on repeat for days on end.

The mix is pretty subby, which is not too bad of a thing, but it sounds like the sub might be spread a bit? Reverb is also quite shoe-gazy and I think it could be tamed via hi-pass.

There are a few instances I can hear your mouth opening and closing it sounds like in your dubs. I might recommend recording closer to the mic if you'll be singing at a quiet volume, somewhat off axis and of course with a suitable pop filter. Try finding some references of what sounds like a nice, professional vocal recording for your range and articulations, and compare your recordings to that. Do the same for your FX and compare back and forth.

The same goes with your mix and master. It sounds like the highs have been rolled off quite a bit via EQ and the bass boosted. This can happen pre or post master and is hard to fight against.

But anyway, great work!

IrisStar responds:

Wow! Getting five stars from you feels like such an achievement, and your criticism is so focused and specific! Thank you for this review it helps a lot especially in terms of improving the vocal! <333

[Face Your Fears]

Each piece I hear from you is better than the last in terms of mix, master, arrangement, and libraries used. This is not only indistinguishable from a lot of the highest quality film score work I've heard. It's ... better! The only thing I could suggest is to make that brass feel like it's on as big of a sound stage as the choir and percs. It feels just a bit thin in the lower bone register on larger sections.

CloakedSoup responds:

Thanks for the kind words. I felt the mixing was okay/passable in this; if I had more time before I left for vacation, I would have done a proper mix and fixed up things section by section. There are definitely parts here and there where one moment, instrument, or section doesn't have as much clarity or the correct balance. Regardless, I still think it sounded decent and thank you again for the review!

[Travelling Where My Eyes Deceive Me]

The overall volume balance on this is good, but the mix is somewhat flat and sibilant, like the bass below 80 hz has been sucked out from the floor and spread out via chorus. I recommend monoing bass below such freqs. The snare is a bit hard to hear but it's a frantic break so this can be forgiven. Some stereo spread on the snare is permissable and desired.

The mix overall is quite sibilant.

But great arranging and writing!

[No Man's Land (Demo)]

I think with taming the reverb a bit, adjusting compression throughout (where you want more dynamic range and where you want less), and some minor bumps on the EQ would make this track flawless.

Great sound design!

Could do with some more panning and instrument layers on your strings, cello -- they sound a bit resonant as well, perhaps overly reverbed. I do wish there were more bass in the low and sub range to drive the track. But overall you took the mood, tackled and pummeled it to a bloody pulp. Nailed it.

8.4/10

Snikio responds:

thank you so much!!!
woah, our review is so specific, detailed and encouraging. thank you for making me HEAR things that was actually problem but I didn't realized when making it. I'll fix it😄 And if possible, can I ask your opinion again when I finish this track?? I would love to hear it!

I heard your condition isn't good now. Wish you the best ADR3-N!