ADR3-N's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[Alone]

Nice intro here. I'm not sure what SFX we have going on at 0:08 -- can't tell if it's pigeon cooing, horse hooves, just some crumpled paper sounds or w/e. If you want that heard, I would bring it up in the mix, or bring everything else down somewhat, like you've done with your cinematic percussion. Otherwise I would just not have it there. My band director always said, even if you make a mistake, make it loudly, and no one will assume you're ashamed of it. The brain will interpret quiet as somehow worse.

Writing wise, I like this.

By 1:20 we're getting distortion from pure loudness, which continues with every transition. The track sounds overly compressed and mixed at absolute red lining headroom levels. I'm also not a fan of such a deep and long sidechain, especially the double drop-outs.

Writing wise, no complaints. Structure is good, works well. You could probably take those stick click cinematic percussions and drop them by .5 dB

I'm amazed on quieter sections such as before 3:45 we're already getting distortion again. Take time when you get the chance and see what is going on here in all your transitions. It sounds like the track itself should come down about 6 dB before it hits the master channel. Without the distortion I'd give a full star higher tbh.

Anyway, despite some shortcomings, I enjoyed the piece. With more practice and keeping in this style, you show a LOT of potential, so don't get yourself down. Once this part of the competition is over, it's as simple as go back, reopen your project, and take the levels down. Then re-render and run your track through mastering (leave -6 dB of headroom is a pretty good rule of thumb) and this track is playlist ready. Great work on the composition itself.

Thanks for coming out to NGUAC!

[Dakota Rineer-Bloom]

Chord progression is nice and smooth. Transition noise is just a little loud.

Nice work with portamento here. I would take down your saws by about 1 to 2 dB, cut off an sidechain the sibilant frequencies more, and take down the reverb sends on everything by a lot. Low cutting them to 250 hz also helps a lot in making room for everything to lay in with the bass. As is, it's really hard to hear the bass and percussion.

Hi-hats and or shakers, I can't tell, are very sibilant and could use much less reverb. They create a high wash that makes the track a bit hard to listen to. Harsh sounding. If you want to keep the same reverb, I'd gate it pretty hard. There's just so much sibilance in this track, it's hard to listen to your drops.

I may have mentioned already, but the accompaniment -- non-melody -- synths are covering up your other elements, especially the bass. It's a tendency I suffer from a lot too in trying to make massive sounds. Try just spacing them out more. It'll help. Your percussion should be the loudest part of your mix -- kick and snare. Those carry you through. Those massive sides, they can be up there, but here they're probably 1 to 2, maybe even 3 dB too loud.

Writing wise, this piece was pretty repetitive, but nothing offensive. I would recommend taking a minute to study transitions -- there's a great video, the rule of pairs, by Kush After Hours, that I think you should watch, and I say this because nothing was inherently wrong with anything you wrote, or boring, but it felt like a lot of the same. I think you may benefit from less is more -- rule of pairs, take away two elements, add or change two elements transitions. Because by the end, even though we had a big wall of sound, I felt like we had been sitting at the height of your piece for basically the whole track after the intro. There were no real peaks and valleys, not a lot of tension. Feel me?

Still good work pulling through to this stage of the competition, and thanks for coming out to NGUAC!

Drak02 responds:

Thanks for the feedback. I'm not surprised by a lot of your comments, especially about mixing, as thats something i'm still very, very much learning. I had a lot of fun participating in the NGUAC, and I'm glad I joined.

[Winter Fall (NGUAC2020)]

Nice atmospheric touch in the beginning. For a second I thought I had muted the track by accident until I heard some more crackles.

Now, I would recommend turning your reverbs down by a lot and doing a low cut to 250 hz on each wet send. Throughout, it's pretty muddy in that range, especially on your pianos, where I hear more reverb sound than the actual piano itself. I would even recommend a different instrument choice speaking of, honestly.

Now for your intro sections, I think the bass should be on different notes of the chord. It comes off sounding a little congested. The bassline you have at 2:21 sounds not so bad in comparison. Perhaps the first iteration could be used as a changeup or something but having it repeated doesn't sound great to me.

It sounds like you're doubling low thirds and fifths rather than root notes of chords -- so chunky chord writing. You may want to look up some music arrangement tutorials on YouTube to combat that. There are plenty of great free ones out there.

Otherwise, the mixing is pretty clean. Your leads are a bit buried under the accompanying synths you've written, but I can pretty clearly hear percussion. I don't have a lot of complaints.

Good job coming up with this track in the time limit, and thanks for coming out to NGUAC!

[Blooming]

There seems to be some kind of clipping on your kick in the intro.

Overall, nice, quirky sound going on here, very interesting, sometimes cheesy lead synth choices. I like your hook throughout.

You could do with a lot less reverb on your synths. I'd take it down half again. Or at least modulate it.

Percussion elements on bigger sections are pretty buried in the mix. I would turn everything else down and compress the individual instruments harder. At 3:01 they're almost totally buried until those chorus synths fall off the top.

Transitioning here is a lot cleaner than last time around, and you bring an interesting presentation all around, with lots of little sparkling touches. I would probably recommend staying away from some of the more preset-y sounding synths and taking more time to design your own sounds, or modulate or apply FX to taste. That's really my biggest gripe. Some transitions with FX felt a little clumsy, but you're getting the hang of things, and this is great for only having two weeks to work on a piece. Starting out, I know I'd take forever.

I don't have any critique for writing as per the notes themselves. You handled that very well, and I really enjoyed your presentation throughout. The instruments, modulation, etc, are really my only gripes.

Thanks for coming out to NGUAC!

[Kitchen Appliance Auditorium (NGUAC Knockout Round)]

I would firstly modulate or apply some kind of fx to that intro piano dirge.

Spicy chords in the intro. You could also probably apply some kind of filtering, chorus to make those stand out. I find myself wanting more of them when our drop comes in.

Percussion could use to come out a lot more in the mix. Mostly the kick. The snare seems to do fine. It seems like there's some kind of rubbery flange effect going on with it.

Overall this piece has good elements, some strange instrumentation, and a polka feel I think could probably use more switchups. It ends up feeling like a slapstick horror chase through a Scooby Doo episode or something, with not a lot of overarching melody. What it does have is hidden down low. Those hoovery leads through 1:29, I'd like those split into two lines and panned something like 40 percent right and left

But overall, good use of piano without making it too cheesy, piece holds cohesively together, and for being forced to create this on a time crunch, I'm impressed. Good work :)

Thanks for coming out to NGUAC!

[Journey]

Nice intro going on here.

Some comments, I really like your chords, but the bass is too high up. The chords end up sounding very chunky and congested in the low mid range, which hurts your very pretty writing.

Percussion is also hiding in the mix on your big sections. I would rather than turn it up, turn everything else down until it is clearly heard, strongly -- apply compression to the percussion itself, possibly space out your hihats more.

2:20, I'm not sure if it sounds better, or if I'm getting used to the congested writing.

I'm just not liking bar 7 and 8 of that progression where the bass note is so close to the chord itself. It also sounds like going up and down in a perfect fifth or perfect fourth or just going back up to a note we've heard before. Either change the chord inversion maybe.... change the chord... Something's going on there. It's hard to hear what because it's so tightly wound and muddy. It may even be that the bassline is too busy.

I would also suggest checking out the rule of pairs -- it's a video by Kush After Hours explaining best practices for transitioning. Basically, for every transition, you take away two elements and then add or change two new ones. A lot of problems I have with this track are simple add one element transitions, and that can lead us to cluttering, which happens here.

Mixing wise the piece sounds like it has almost no highs. That could be because the hihats are so far down in the mix, transition sweeps aren't really used, the snare doesn't have any high or white noise frequencies. I will say good job not overcompensating for space by getting that effect with high end reverb.

On your sustained instruments you may try a sidechain to the kick and snare to get more movement out of them.

Thanks for coming out to NGUAC!

[Displacement]

Right off the bat, liking your chord here. It's unusual. I'd like maybe some filter on that bit crushed whole note synth.

Interesting, spacy vibes going on. I would take that bassline you have and take it down about half a dB or more, and bring the drums out. They're bit crushed so they're going to have a harder time cutting through the mix.

Overall, I'm not really sure what's going on, if we're ever coming to a chorus. Saying this as we've gone about halfway through without moving away from the tonic note of A and the run of A, G, C, to say, F, E, G and back to A. There just seems to be no B section to your A section, figuratively speaking... and literally speaking. That's really the only thing keeping me from jiving to this piece. Otherwise it's not offensively mixed, and the instrumentation isn't bad at all. Just lays there is my thing.

I'd love to hear you experiment outside the box with some chord progressions.

Thanks for coming out to NGUAC!

BrandonTurner responds:

I definitely agree with you, I should've had more of a chord progression to make it more interesting. You're right about it needing a B section as well, a more unique verse in the middle to cut down on the repetition would have been a good idea.

Thanks so much for the critique! I appreciate it!

[Is That the One We Have To Fight?]

I have to say I agree with @ChrisisD. But it's not that you don't have good ideas going on here at all. You have a pretty solid chord progression. What you're lacking is strong transitions.

I actually found a talk on this the other day you may enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MADvn8apYlQ

It's five minutes, but if you don't have time, it's called the rule of pairs. For every transition, you take out two elements and add or change two elements. That way the song keeps sounding fresh. The reason this sounds like a lot of buildups is because nothing really changes. We build and build, and then we never get to a big chorus, with cymbals and new chords. For instance I would do... and let me just try to write the notes.

G half note, F half note, A half note, C half note. And you could just octave that on your sustained high strings, have a big section, continue with F, E, G, A. That's 8 bars, or 16 in half time. And that be a lead line.

Overall that's what I really feel the piece was lacking. Dynamics between the instruments weren't too wonky -- I especially liked those little plucks. Spicy. Maybe had some loudness issues on entrances, but you can easily learn to tweak those by popping back and forth between reference tracks you like.

Not bad at all for just learning your way around mixing and mastering. Good work!

Thanks for coming out to NGUAC!

[Chilling With my Megadrive]

1:04 or so with those very disjointed -- I forget the word I'm looking for, thanks, Russian language -- rhythms almost kills the song for me.

Otherwise, I really enjoyed this tune.

Question, did you mean for the bass to mostly sit in the left channel? I think it'd sound better centered.

Overall I like the sounds going on here. I'm a huge fan of VGM. Some things for the mix, the piece sounds either over compressed, or just like everything is much louder than the drums, which don't stick out a ton anyway on their own right just as lofi drums in general. I'm not able to clearly hear them throughout either way.

Bass as mentioned is in the left channel. At times the leads sound about 1 dB too loud. There may be reverb or other FX muddying up and covering up the percussive elements in the piece I wasn't able to hear clearly. The mix in general sounds like it's just sort of there. You may want to go in individual instances of instruments and clean up the frequencies below 250 hz, to try and make room for the bass and kick. None of them should really be that low anyway.

But great piece. Love your lead writing. Rest of anything I could possibly say has been stated in @trunotfals's review. Though, not sure if he meant to leave half a star?

Anyway thanks for coming out to NGUAC!