johnfn's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[Wheres Your Soul?]

Holy crap. If you're still ticked off by NGADM, take some solace that you're an amazing musician.

I haven't given more than one 5/5 in like 50 reviews, I hold out for the songs that are worth it. Well, I found it. You remind me of The Black Keys, but better. And I like The Black Keys. Love the ending, despite what Sequenced says.

That scream at 2:53... Incredible.

VaudevilleFreud responds:

Funny that you say that, because my music is hugely influenced by the things that I listen to at the time when I write them. At the time of this recording I was listening to a lot of Black Keys and Weezer, I'm glad to hear that it showed through well in the music :)

[The Door - Storm]

Ha! I recognized the FL plucked instantly. Makes me nostalgic for FL... good times.

Here come a lot of suggestions. Before that though I should say that overall this is a pretty good piece, and I think you definitely achieved your goal of capturing loss from a storm. I especially like how the strings come in at :58.

Alright here we go!

My first suggestion is that the plucked melody feels very mechanical. I don't hear much in the way of varied velocities. It's pretty simple to do and will make your pluck sound a lot better instantly. Honestly I'm not the hugest fan of plucked - it might be better to find some other VST - but that could be just because I've heard it so many times.

The kick is a bit of a shock with the pluck, I'm not sure if they traditionally go together. Suggestion is to put some reverb on a snare or something and see how that fits in. Unlike the last guy I don't think it's off beat. However you are probably confusing your listeners because there's not much in way of other percussion to guide you through the song. Some subtle hi hats could do wonders to keep your listeners grounded.

I hear the strings pushing on the limiter at 1:29. A really important tip is that you should just throw out the limiter entirely, and ensure by hand that your song never goes into the red. This single tip has done more for my mixing than anything else.

Melodies need some work. At first I thought they were totally random. But when I focused really hard, i realized I was wrong. This is good! But if I'm zoning out then I can't follow them at all, which is bad. Try to simplify your melodies and cut them down. This will make them easier to understand.

Alright, that's all I've got! Good luck! And don't be too down by all my criticism. It's not as bad as the review makes it sound xD

TaintedLogic responds:

Thank you so much, Johnfn! :D What a detailed and thoughtful review! ^^ I've been thinking for a while now of making a track where I really focus on using the mixer and on the quality of the sound more than the notes themselves, and I think I just got some motivation! :D Thanks again for the continuous support! :)

[Aphelion]

I really liked this one. The "ocean splashes" really add some nice depth. It reminds me of that first scene in Inception where the old guy is standing on a beach. Dark, brooding, thoughtful, mysterious. And of course there were wave noises. ;-)

There are some really subtle noises buried under the big sweeping synths that add a lot to the sound too.

If you've never heard of the band Biosphere you should check them out, particularly the album Substrata and definitely the song Poa Alpina, which, while it doesn't sound the same, gives me the exact same mysterious and creepy feel as your song.

This is a really high compliment btw, I love that song.

I think this shows some of the flaws of NG's rating system. I usually reserve 10/10 for pieces that really knock me out of my seat. This one didn't do that, but the atmosphere is perfect. If you coupled it with a few more songs of equal quality and made it into an EP or something, it could be stellar, and even better than your conventional explosive 10/10 song.

Maybe I just need to rethink my rating system... meh oh well.

Mich responds:

I think I can kinda see the connection to that Inception scene, yeah. :P

Most of those subtle noises were all done with the same synthesizer instance, just did a lot of modulation on noise and filters, which makes for interesting effects if they're not done at the same frequency.

Just listening to Poa Alpha by Biosphere right now, and loving it. I'll probably look into getting Substrata, this is good stuff. So thanks for the compliment there! I can really pick up some things from this, particularly the well-executed low-end.

I wouldn't worry too much about your rating system; as long as it's paired with useful criticism / commentary, scores couldn't matter less. :-)

I am in fact planning to make a little EP out of this, exploring the theme a bit further. It'll probably be just 3 tracks or so, but at this kind of length per track I think that's fine.

Thanks a lot for the review, and glad you liked it!

[~SW~ City of the Clouds]

Haha...yeah this song is really awesome.

I really like the violin (or something, I'm not good with instruments) at 0:20. It reminds me of the intro music of the show Firefly if you're familiar with it - it was a space themed show with some sweet violin going.

Call me weird but one of my favorite parts of the song is the industry section, mainly because of that big snare. I felt like it worked really well to create the ambience you were going for.

I also like the Starlight City sections - I mean, that's the point of the song right, I would hope those would be the best parts. The grooving organ section is really sweet.

However the mixing is very odd. Let me explain. Normally in a chorus section I would expect the lead melody to be a bit louder than the rest of the song, so it stands out. (Classic example is vocals, which are always mixed pretty loud vs the rest of the song.) However the groovy organ doesn't stand out at all, and so the first time I listened through I almost missed it(!).

My other point of critique is that the volume levels throughout the whole song seem pretty flat. I would suggest to make the chorus a bit louder than the rest, which would make it stand out a little more. Having the calming sections be as loud as the chorus doesn't work for me because they aren't actually calming if they continue to be as loud as the other sections.

Apart from that this song is ballin. The mixing is really well done like you said, and apart from my points up above I can't find any problems with it. The grooving sections are awesome. The attention to detail is pretty crazy, with the birds chirping and the great synth lines at :37. Awesome work!

SkyeWint responds:

Hey man! Glad you like it! :D

First off, the violin thing is actually an Erhu - it's a pretty sweet eastern instrument.

The giant snare is honestly the same snare as in the faster-paced sections but with some reverb on it. I actually had to make two versions of the snare for it to work properly. Probably inefficient but whatever.

When it comes to the mixing, I guess I can definitely understand your point. Definitely something to work on. I'll see if I can work with that in the future, though for the organ at least it was a tad bit of trouble because if I increased the volume of that much more, the mix would get muddy. :(

The volume levels also makes sense, though I really work more with the mood of the piece. It's worth noting, however. I'll definitely try to work on a bit more dynamic variation.

As for attention to detail, I work extremely hard on that - bit of a perfectionist when it comes to music to be honest. :P All those things are just some nice little tidbits I thought would be cool.

Thanks for the review! I'll definitely remember your comments and consider them in the future. Fantastic. If you have a skype, feel free to add me - I'd love to communicate with you!

[The Door - Embedded]

This is pretty cool.

My main complaint is that it feels very disjointed at the chorus (for instance 1:08). The instruments are kind of crazy and clash a little when they're combined. I also think that the lead (electric piano sounding instrument) is a tad loud, and occasionally sounds like it's hitting atonal or incorrect notes.

Agree with the last guy though. It has a fun jazzy feel. Nice job finishing it up and frontpage! :-)

TaintedLogic responds:

Thank you so much, Johnfn! :D That was actually my main concern when I uploaded this, that people would complain about the harmonies. To be perfectly honest, this piece is actually my attempt to mesh together three different riffs I made a long time ago: the melody ( :20), the bass ( :00), and the dark harmonies at :48. It turned out better than I thought, so I uploaded it! I still have no idea how it got on the front page! XD I understand your complaints, though. Thanks again! ;)

[Afternoon Blues (Improv)]

This is really nice. So chill and carefree.

I really have to know, though: when you improv this, did you really do the whole song in one go? Aside from quantization, did you change the result at all?

Cuz if not, I really need to practice piano more D: D:

Thanks for the lovely song though.

BlazingDragon responds:

I really did the whole thing in one go (and then heavily quantized my terrible timings! XD). I also might have deleted a note or two that I accidentally bumped.

I used to practice improving very slowly with a metronome, making sure not to stutter or stop for mistakes. Now, I've got an array of go to chord progressions that I don't have to think about, so it is easy to improvise over the top. If I was doing something more harmonically daring, I'd have a lot more mistakes. But this progression is one that I know my way around quite well. :)

Thanks for the review!

(Edit: The above was referring to the piano part. The bass took a couple of tries, as did the strings)

(Edit 2: Forgot to mention something important. While I did record this in one take, I spent probably 15 minutes playing around with ideas before hitting record. I like to warm up and get in the groove of a progression before recording an improv, so it wasn't done completely cold)

[Hero Of The Stars]

Suggestion: some of the high pitched glitchyness might have been better a little lower down.

The orchestration and beats for this one make it feel like an army marching off to war or something. :-)

Glad to see you again BTW. Mostly my fault because I don't use Youtube... I'm trying to move to Soundcloud actually, you should get on and then just delete your old stuff ;-P

ArcaneSoul responds:

Well the only issue with soundcloud is limit of downloads and upload limit. I like newgrounds alot due to the fact they have a glorious amount of upload limit.

I'm not sure i'll move back to soundcloud. I'll consider it though.

[TheDoor- Lily's Theme RMX]

(Note - I review pretty harshly, so don't take a low score personally! I don't vote harshly.)

First, a pro tip - definitely find some better strings! Those strings sound like cheesy 80s film background strings. I'm sorry to be so blunt, but it's crucial that you improve them. Newgrounds has this great thread with 3.5gb of orchestral soundfonts (search for it), so there's really no excuse :-)

Other than that, it's hard for me to think of anything particularly insightful to say, since a cover hinges almost entirely on the quality of the instruments that you're using. I'd be cool if you could add a little more to the song in terms of personal ideas.

I just went and listened to the source material and it has a really beautiful female vocal (I see what you're talking about in the comments). You should give a little better voice to that vocal - perhaps with a violin or some sort of filtered synth.

Anyway keep it up. Let me know when you've improved the instrumental noises.

P.S.: The one time I feel like fadeouts are appropriate is when it's in the middle of a jam - indicating that the jam goes on and on forever, and you, as the observer, have merely left in the middle.

TaintedLogic responds:

Thank you so much! :D I agree that I should've found something better to use for the strings. I'm working on getting Sakura for FL 10, but all the Imageline plugins are SO expensive! Anyway, thanks again for reviewing me back, man. I really appreciate it! ;)