This may be my favorite NGADM piece I've heard yet. It moves through so many emotions so effortlessly. The piano playing is complex but never unnecessarily so. There is such good counterplay between the different instruments. I love how the part at 1:20 is such a nice contrast to the earlier stuff, and yet it fits so well. And oh my god, your ending is sooo well done. There is some sort of melodic inevitability to it - it feels like the ending starts as far back as 1:43 and builds gracefully to that awesome descent at 2:02.
Critique? I don't even know. That one glissando at :47 sounds off, but that seems more like the problem of your sample then a problem with the composition itself. The phrase at :27 could be extended a little bit (I feel like the resolution comes a little too early).
This is between a 9 and a 10 for me. And I feel like it's mostly my fault for not giving it a 10, since I almost never listen to classical music and sometimes have trouble understanding it. (I need to listen to it more!) Regardless though, very, very well done!
Wow... I'm very honored you speak so highly of it. I've read a lot of your reviews and you're very candid about your opinions, so... I'm kinda blushing right now. Thanks, johnfn! :)
Ah dang. I was listening to this one and then I was going to click away from the page but then I accidentally clicked to vote 3 instead, which is not what I intended to do at all! And I took it down from it's perfect 5.00 average so I felt double bad. So I'm going to write a quick review to make it up. And vote 5 on it once the day rolls back around so I can sort of cancel out the damage...
Anyway I really like this one. The violin playing is really expressive and beautiful, and the melody is very nice too. On top of that, I really enjoyed the subtle incorporation of money into the percussion of the song. The whole piece has a really interesting vibe to it - it feels light and mysterious. Subtle flourishes with the harp and pizzicato strings in the background add a lot.
My biggest complaint - and I'm sure you saw this coming - is that the piece is very short, and of that length, it takes even less time to develop its theme. I found myself wishing that it would explore the melodic space a little more and perhaps go somewhere else.
Aside from that though, I liked it a lot. Keep it up.
Oh, how could you!?
Haha, it's alright! Thank you for the review. I definitely saw that coming - I have been working on this piece for a while, and I can't figure out how to extend it. I decided it was time to move on to a new piece.
I am thinking about studying music theory when I go to college. I really have no idea what I am doing!
The main theme of this song is really, really good. Like, seriously, it's one of the better melodies I've heard in a while on Newgrounds.
There are a few minor issues with it though. First, and definitely the biggest, is that the production is a little poor - instruments sound muddled in the climaxes. Second, the piano at 2:10 sounds a tiny bit clumsy (those repeated notes shouldn't be there). And as a minor nitpick, the ending left me feeling a little unresolved.
But this song is wonderful and the melody is, like I said, seriously awesome. So keep up the good work there. :-)
The mixing was a huge issue with this piece, as I was trying to squeeze a little too much out of the instruments I had. Trying to get any countermelodies in at all was hard, as anytime I changed the volume on a track something else went wonky. Course it might be that the countermelodies themselves are a bit wonky.
Alright, well Step left this absolutely massive review on my piece a while back, and I would embarrass myself if I just let this piece go by without at least saying something on it. Plus he has this ability to pick up on tons of details, so I thought I'd give that a try too. I don't have a lot of critique because the song is REALLY good, so I'll just walk through the song and point out my thoughts at the time.
But before that, can I just say that I never hand out 10s? Or rather, it's incredibly rare... Some people just hand them out like candy. I just checked - in my last 50 reviews I gave exactly two other 10s. And it was a real beast of a song. (I feel like people take down the songs that I vote 10 on, because they're too good to be here or something.) So...
So yeah this is a really awesome song. Unlike you guys I had no doubts this was going to take first place. It was head and shoulders above the rest. Don't let all my compliments get to your head though. :D OK down to the nitty gritty.
This song is really based off of two really beautiful parts, the acoustic guitar section at 1:20 and the buildup/vocal climax at 2:50. The rest of the song moves through ambience and filters. Although you listed it as an Ambient piece I'm not totally sure I buy that - it seems a little too explosive to be ambient. Cinematic is probably the best bet. But this is just a total nitpick!
We start off with this one leitmotif (I was going to write riff, but that would make me look unintelligent) that we'll hear again later (at 1:57). I thought this was a very clever way to unify a song that, without it, might sound a little disjointed. It also introduces a little bit of tension into the song. And can I say that the attention to detail with the effects is really well done. One thing that really intrigued me about the first almost-minute of the song is that it's not particularly melodically interesting (this is totally fine btw, it happens a lot in ambient music), but it doesn't get boring. I think this is accomplished though a lot of great attention to detail - adding effects here and there, having little echoing taps in the background, etc.
We only really start getting some melodic stuff around :55 with a really nice sounding muted instrument (what is it?) on top of some nice filtered panning percussion. Again this isn't saying anything melodically profound but I think that it establishes a really nice atmosphere. And the percussion is just awesome!
Running up to the guitar solo we have this tiny white noise build up (1:17) that IMO was really tastefully done. I've started to dislike white noise cause it heralds bad edm (I am a particularly egregious violator) but I was impressed by how in this case it makes the song feel very airy and atmospheric.
Something I didn't even realize until I listened to the song closer is that the guitar solo at 1:33 is actually the same melody as the vocal stuff that comes later at 2:50. It really says a lot about production and instrument choice that the first solo sounds chill and the second one sounds like the most epic and beautiful thing ever.
I really like the acoustic guitar solo. It's the first hint that the song is going somewhere special. It has some really nice attention to detail with the slides. There's a nice filtered arpeggio in the background too. Something I didn't even notice until like the 6th listen is that there's also a really subtle countermelody on top - sounds like some sort of plucked instrument/synth. This gives it a lot of depth - and can I just applaud your mixing at this point for fitting all that stuff in. But what makes it particularly special is the beats! It sounds to me like there are two layers - a normal layer and a filtered layer. The filtered stuff gives this great mysterious/open/techy feel to the whole solo while the normal layer drives it forward.
Alright, moving on. Oh God, this review is getting long. I have to say though, applying the Step Review Process (TM) has given me a lot of appreciation for details.
I'm really loving the techy beats at 2:20... the little synth in the lower registers really adds a lot to the feel there. And then suddenly brass! Your handling of the orchestra is great. The brass adds a lot of tension, asking to be resolved in some giant explosion, which it is.
Dissecting the climax at 2:50 is really hard - so much is going on! The vocals are just amazing, first of all. (What are they saying?) I'm crazy jealous of the speaking choir. The melody is matched with what sounds like an entire orchestra. The beats are strong without being overpowering. One of my favorite bits is the little "drop drop drop" in the high registers. It's a subtle idea that adds a lot of atmosphere.
One of my favorite bits of the climax is how it's presented - we drop into it suddenly with almost no warning (besides the brass). In a world where your average edm song has a 1 minute build up to a lame climax, this decision was probably my favorite of the entire track.
One minor critique at this point - it sounds like the bass in the climax has been totally drowned out by the rest of the sounds.
One thing that I would like to bring up is that I feel like the post-climax section of the song drops away from 'epic' too suddenly. I hear this a lot in Step's songs actually, because I feel like he's scared to make you get bored of the great melody - a valid concern! My suggestion is that you can pad it out just a little bit by dropping almost everything and then playing the same melody on a single flute or something. This idea comes from the song Olsen Olsen by Sigur Ros - they have this epic melody, and then once it's all done, they have some silence, and then a single flute plays the melody. It's a really great idea, makes it sound like the melody will live on even after the battle is over, or whatever. Something to think about!
Like I said, I don't hand out 10/10s. I try to reserve them for songs that either knock me off my feet or inspire me in some way. This one did both. Keep up the work you two.
SWEET JESUS. I saw "1 New" written down near my reviews count on my projects page and I thought "oh cool a new review". I reached for the mouse and went to check out my reviews feed and BAM I nearly fell off my chair.
This is insanely detailed, even more so than my reviews usually are. It must be the second largest review I have ever received. I have hypothesised that you have either bribed Echo for the project file, or have invented a device that can read my mind, because you pointed out details and things that I had previously thought only I knew about (hell, some things I had to cross-check with my project file to verify since I wasn't even sure myself!).
This review is too big to do my quote-respond procedure so I'll just quote a few important bits off your review and respond to them separately.
"But before that, can I just say that I never hand out 10s? Or rather, it's incredibly rare..."
Damn, now I feel special. To be honest I give out 10s like candy on free candy day (unless it's NGADM reviewing, in which case it's much harder to get a 10 out of me because that's srs bsns), generally because firstly if I can't find anything to critique in a track (which is rare) I'd unquestionably give out a 10, and secondly because it takes a pretty major issue to bring my score down from 10 (I start from 10 and stay bringing it down with each major issue I find). I'm thinking of becoming harsher with my scores in the near future though.
"This song is really based off of two really beautiful parts, the acoustic guitar section at 1:20 and the buildup/vocal climax at 2:50."
I'm glad you noticed that; those are, so to speak, the two "main" sections that most everything else builds up to. However, I tried to make the section at 0:56 a little important too since I use it to end the track.
"Although you listed it as an Ambient piece I'm not totally sure I buy that - it seems a little too explosive to be ambient. Cinematic is probably the best bet. But this is just a total nitpick!"
Yeah I guess you're right. I just wanted to pretend I made ambient for once because I secretly suck horribly at ambient. c: This was actually supposed to be an ambient attempt at first but that quickly started to change with the introduction of the guitar section, and was shot out of sheer existence with the 2:50 climax haha.
"I thought this was a very clever way to unify a song that, without it, might sound a little disjointed."
Yeah, definitely got to thank Echo for that idea. I tried to put in a lot of effort to avoid making the song sounding disjointed. I even repeated the 0:23 motif at 3:12 in some sort of lame attempt to send the track around a full circle :3.
"One thing that really intrigued me about the first almost-minute of the song is that it's not particularly melodically interesting"
Yeah, I agree. I just put in some simple chords to build up an atmosphere; I'm relieved you don't think it was boring!
"We only really start getting some melodic stuff around :55 with a really nice sounding muted instrument (what is it?)"
That's a patch in Omnisphere called "Old Distant Piano". I loved its atmospheric sound and I'm glad I chose it over a typical piano, although it was absolute hell to mix because its "distant" sound has a habit of clashing and muddying itself up.
"I've started to dislike white noise cause it heralds bad edm (I am a particularly egregious violator) but I was impressed by how in this case it makes the song feel very airy and atmospheric."
I know exactly what you mean; some people just throw in white noise sweeps all the time in their tracks and it really makes them sound unclean, although I used it for the exact reason of giving the track an airy sound. (Read: I don't know how to make any other effects :3)
"Something I didn't even realize until I listened to the song closer is that the guitar solo at 1:33 is actually the same melody as the vocal stuff that comes later at 2:50. It really says a lot about production and instrument choice that the first solo sounds chill and the second one sounds like the most epic and beautiful thing ever."
Aw shucks, thanks!
"It has some really nice attention to detail with the slides."
Credit goes to Omnisphere; in a lot of its guitars, when you hit a note at highest velocity, it'll do some cool effect like a tremolo or in this case a slide. Really brings the guitar to the next level I think.
"Something I didn't even notice until like the 6th listen is that there's also a really subtle countermelody on top - sounds like some sort of plucked instrument/synth."
Yeah, over here I thought to myself "what the hell is he talking about", I opened up the project file and was like "oh yeah, he's right, apparently I DID put a counter melody over there D:". That's actually the Old Distant Piano patch used to play the passage before, except this time playing short high notes in the background.
"It sounds to me like there are two layers - a normal layer and a filtered layer. The filtered stuff gives this great mysterious/open/techy feel to the whole solo while the normal layer drives it forward."
Another thing that makes me think you took a few peeks inside the project file. That is indeed how I set up my drums for this track.
"I'm really loving the techy beats at 2:20... the little synth in the lower registers really adds a lot to the feel there. And then suddenly brass! Your handling of the orchestra is great. The brass adds a lot of tension, asking to be resolved in some giant explosion, which it is."
That's all Echo's work (except the drums), so he deserves credit for that haha.
"Dissecting the climax at 2:50 is really hard - so much is going on!"
I know, what was I thinking x_x. I just checked now; there are up to 21 instruments/sounds playing at that point, plus 3 drum layers. Echo gave me a bigger buildup than I could've ever asked for and like I said to the reviewer below I needed to put in any and every instrument humanely possible in that part. Needless to say my CPU and RAM weren't very happy with me.
"The vocals are just amazing, first of all. (What are they saying?)"
At this point I would love to come off as deep and sophisticated and say something like "those choirs are actually singing a Latin proverb about the direction of our species as a whole" or whatnot... but they're just singing the phrase (translated into Latin by Google Translate) "I like to eat candy floss naked on the beach" two times over x_x.
Naw I'm joking haha. Pretty sure they're just random Wordbuilder phrases. I'd have to ask Echo to verify though, since he's the one who took care of those voices (which I also share your jealousy of since I don't have fancy choir VSTs :c). I can give you the choir on its own though, maybe you can hear what's being said more, if you're curious: http://instaud.io/7v
"One of my favorite bits of the climax is how it's presented - we drop into it suddenly with almost no warning (besides the brass). In a world where your average edm song has a 1 minute build up to a lame climax, this decision was probably my favorite of the entire track."
Haha thanks, I'm genuinely glad you liked it!
"One minor critique at this point - it sounds like the bass in the climax has been totally drowned out by the rest of the sounds."
Whoops, very good point. I think that there are so many sounds over there that most of them are drowned out haha.
"One thing that I would like to bring up is that I feel like the post-climax section of the song drops away from 'epic' too suddenly. I hear this a lot in Step's songs actually, because I feel like he's scared to make you get bored of the great melody - a valid concern!"
Yuuup this is where I think you're reading my mind. That is precisely correct. It's a bad habit of mine, and in this song in particular even PeterSatera mentioned that I got out of the climax too early.
"This idea comes from the song Olsen Olsen by Sigur Ros - they have this epic melody, and then once it's all done, they have some silence, and then a single flute plays the melody."
I just heard that track now and heard exactly what you're talking about. That IS a nice idea. And damn what a nice track that was.
"Like I said, I don't hand out 10/10s. I try to reserve them for songs that either knock me off my feet or inspire me in some way. This one did both. Keep up the work you two."
That's crazy high praise. I'm still psyched by this review and your incredible attention to detail. I can't thank you enough! But I can at least try:
Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you.
...Nope that wasn't enough. Ah well. THANKS ONCE AGAIN.
Great! I really liked Links Awakening as a kid and this gives me some definite nostalgia. I liked the vocals a lot and I felt like they added a bit to the song. Although I doubt you did this intentionally, I liked how they weren't in my native tongue. Whenever someone adds vocals to a song that didn't have vocals before I usually end up thinking the lyrics are really dumb. You sidestepped that issue nicely. :-)
I always was a little conflicted about the wind waker melody. The first bits of the melody (the 2 lines that start 'Je sommeille') I always really liked, but the part at 1:14 never made any melodic sense to me (at least if you're keeping the first half of the melody in mind). You do as good as you could, but it's still weird.
One thing you might want to think about is that the volume levels for this song are kind of all over the place. The volume difference between, say, :15 and 2:00 is quite a lot - I turned up my headphones pretty loud at first, but later had to turn them back down. Maybe you did this on purpose, but you should just keep it in mind.
I thought the mixing of the song was well done. At points like 2:00 it feels very well developed.
I found myself really hoping for a section - maybe just a small one - where everything really bursted though. The whole song sorta felt like a build up to a climax that didn't come. The point at 2:00 was closest to what I wanted, but I felt like it needed more somehow. (Or perhaps it should just have come at the end of the song?) I don't know.
This is somewhere between an 8 and a 9. Really awesome work - a reinvention of a classic!
1) I imagined the climactic finish was in Section II, around 2:59. This is, quite literally, where all the instruments I've used come in (except for the ocarina). My original idea for the video (which is no longer in place) was to have the Instruments of the Sirens show up at various points in the piece depending on which instruments actually played in the song.
That being said, the mixing follows that sequence. If I'm not mistaken, it may be the order in which the instruments appear in a circle on Mt Tamaranch. Panning in a circle was quite tricky, admittedly, and since the first time I handled a sequencer (Logic Pro 8 it was back then), I had never panned in a circle... until recently.
2) Volume levels, you're quite right. The volume starts bursting out at 2:00, I see it in the waveform on Audacity. This is something I must tend to.
3) I wholeheartedly agree about the melody. The last few lines of it, I was thinking, 'Totaka, WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?'
4) The thing about the melody is that if we were to go on a purely speechlike basis, English stresses the first syllables in words most of the time, while French stresses either the second or last syllables in words. Given how the melody actually goes in this piece, I thought, French would fit. When I first thought of singing to the melody of the Ballad of the Wind Fish, literally the first line that came to me was "Je sommeille, je sommeille dans cet espace". It wouldn't have fit in English, I doubt it would've, if I were to go with a rough translation of the lyrics at hand.
Dang I love the last bits. It alternates between this energetic/sneaky music and flat-out triumphant. This is fabulous. Mixing is really well done too. I love those boomy hits that I assume are coming from Stormdrum, and they fit in the mix really well. There is a lot of excellent detail work on the percussion - the tambourines, the claps etc all fit together really well. I really like the thing at 1:55 (what is it?) - it's a classic grassland sound.
One thing I noticed is that there's not a lot happening in the bass, besides those hits. An idea that you might be interested in is to toss in a bass guitar to play something funky down in the low end. Yasunori Mitsuda, my favorite vg music composer ever, used this all the time (check out "Dream of the Shore Near Another World" if you haven't heard it before). I'm not sure it would work in this piece because it's so big and spacious, but it might be a fun idea for the future.
That's great to hear. A friend of mine didn't like them very much so I keep thinking there's something wrong with them haha. To each his own.
"It alternates between this energetic/sneaky music and flat-out triumphant."
And don't forget majestic and pretty at the beginning :3.
"This is fabulous. Mixing is really well done too. I love those boomy hits that I assume are coming from Stormdrum, and they fit in the mix really well."
Thank you! Those are indeed from Stormdrum 2. That particular boomy drum is called the daiko. I just love that bassy hit and I even EQ'd it to give it even more boom, because seriously who the hell doesn't like boom.
"There is a lot of excellent detail work on the percussion - the tambourines, the claps etc all fit together really well."
Thanks, I always try to put that little extra effort into the percussion!
"I really like the thing at 1:55 (what is it?) - it's a classic grassland sound."
That is a guiro! Only recently did I decide that I like guiros after hearing this: http://goo.gl/pbjnzv
"One thing I noticed is that there's not a lot happening in the bass, besides those hits. An idea that you might be interested in is to toss in a bass guitar to play something funky down in the low end. Yasunori Mitsuda, my favorite vg music composer ever, used this all the time (check out "Dream of the Shore Near Another World" if you haven't heard it before). I'm not sure it would work in this piece because it's so big and spacious, but it might be a fun idea for the future."
Good catch. As you said I actually tried to avoid putting in more bass instruments than the percussive hits, to keep things sounding roomy. That VG song is lovely though, and the bass really does fit! Definitely something to keep in mind.
"Spectacular melodies. Really nice work!"
Thank you for the great review. I was very uninspired when making this (hence my venting in the Audio Forum Lounge haha) so I'm glad I managed to finally get it done, and it's a relief to hear that it isn't as bad as I was expecting it to be.
I think my biggest problems were the melodies and the transitions. Melodies first. Like, the first 15 seconds is a melody that seems like it doesn't really go anywhere for me. It's hard to explain exactly how to write a good melody - it's one of those things you sort of learn subconsciously. But the initial one has all these jumps all over the place, and that usually doesn't work (unless you're doing arpeggios I guess...), you usually have stepwise movement (like C-D-E) with a few occasional jumps.
The other thing that you can think about is transitions between the different sections. Like, right now it's pretty hard to tell that all the different sections (that you mentioned in your reply to BlueOceans) exist, and that could be because there isn't much that differentiate the sections. It's as easy as changing the instruments, or adding in a crash when the new stuff comes in, but it is very important because otherwise your song feels directionless.
Other than that I liked it. I thought it had a nice chill aesthetic to it, and it was pretty enjoyable to play in the background while I did stuff. Keep it up!
Thank you very much, Johnfn! :D I never think about these kinds of things when I make my tracks! Usually how I marked the main transitions in this track is with bass slides (e.x. 2:02) or with a fade-in with the instrument I used for the chords (e.x. 2:44). As for the melodies, I usually just base them entirely off of the chords, which is pathetically lazy, I know. In fact, for months I only had the first 26 seconds of this song in its final state, and so the melodies for pretty much the rest of the song are largely based on those melodies, especially the one at 1:23. I definitely understand your criticisms, and I agree that the directionless nature of the song is its main weakness. Thank you for all the advice you've given me over the past few months! I really appreciate it! :D
Gorgeous singing, great arrangement, great production, great mood. But I have to ask. I'm hearing little imperfections in the singing here and there (like 'the' at :56, 'of' at 1:03, 'fell' at 1:14 etc.). Are those autotune artifacts? Or something else? I'm just curious.
Regardless, this song is seriously impressive and I don't envy your competitor ;-)
Thank you! I appreciate that. They're actually how I intended to perform them. My technical knowledge isn't too good, but I guess they'd be termed as a short 'riff'. For example Fe-e-el sang going from G to F to D#. Similar to trills or ornaments. I haven't used any pitch correction or autotune effects, only reverb, noise removal and equalisation on the main vocals (same for harmonies except panning too). Hope that clears it up :)
Nice job being the first one to finish the first round of NGADM ;-)
I like this, it fits your comments perfectly. It's like I'm going on an adventure! I feel like Link! Or something.
I like the choice of instruments. I really enjoy the reeds that sit on top of the mix and add this soaring feel to the song.
The percussion is subtle and well done.
Anyways, I have a few suggestions for improvement.
The mixing is generally good, but I would suggest to make the 'most important' instruments (in this case, the violin(?) that carries the lead melody) louder than the others. Right now everything is about equal volume, which makes it harder to understand the song without listening closely.
There's a minor mixing problem where you have the french horn at the same frequency level as the strings. I can tell you panned because otherwise they would clash, but I think that you should just remove it - or move it out of the clashing range. Same thing with the oboe(? I'm bad with instruments.) at 1:00.
The dynamic (volume) level of the whole song is pretty flat. I'd suggest to make the parts where you have transitions a little louder (with crashes or what have you). Like, you modulate up a key or two at the end, but the listener could almost miss it entirely because there's nothing in there to indicate a change is coming.
Last, it feels a little repetitive. I think if you fix the dynamic levels like I said before this will clear up a little bit because the song will feel like it's constantly changing. However, I don't think it'll fix all of the problems because I think the song is just too long for the number of ideas you have. This is an easy fix - just make the song shorter. I always believe that it's better to make the song a tad too short and have the listener press replay than have it be a bit too long and have the listener get bored.
That's all the criticism I have! It's a lot, but it's mostly easy to fix stuff, which is good. Nice work on the song, I liked it!
Yes, that is a lot of information to process, but I really appreciate the time and effort that you put into your review. You make a lot of excellent suggestions, and of course I want this piece to be as good as it can possibly be. At least I've managed to gain a bit of a deadline buffer zone somehow, so I should be able to expend a bit more time on this one.
I've also started on my next submission, but that can temporarily go on the back burner. Hopefully I'll receive more reviews with yet more feedback, even as I'm working on your suggestions. This could get interesting, but I'll just have to make sure I don't lose track of the next piece in the process. Thanks again for the phenomenally informational review! I truly appreciate it. ^_^
A Storm Over Lavender Lane 
Coin and Haggle 
Utopia - NGADM '13 Entry 
Encapsulation 
Chant de l'Eveil 
The Festival 
The Door - Luke's Island 
Blind Maiden 
