Ooooh boy, this is a fun one. I love the harmonies and aand it's so video game that my nastolgic brain gets transported. This is another track where you play with a more airy sound on the drums which just gives me a gigantic brain boner... Too much? HARD 5

I just want to talk about melody, so that's what I'm going to do. THE REVIEW SYSTEM WON'T HOLD ME BACK!!!

One thing that's important is that most melodic phrases are legato, which means that if you're writing a melody, and it's a coherent idea, and it's played on an instrument that can manage it (not e.g. guitar) there shouldn't be any gaps of silence in it, in general. Just listen to a singer in your favorite pop song - they slur all their words together so that the phrases are legatoed properly. I was hearing a lot of gaps in your melodies, which is really jarring and might make people think that they're disjointed.

But even still, that won't help you get much better at melodies, it just fixes some minor issues. Now I'm going to tell you how to actually write good melodies:

Go and take ye favorite instrument (I seem to remember you being a fan of the cello, though I can't figure out why I think that lol). Bring it near your computer and play some of your favorite songs on the computer, and see if you can play the melody on your instrument as the song plays. DON'T try to get it perfect, just keep going on to new songs.

In this way you'll start to build a subconscious understanding of how melodies work. This is important because writing melodies isn't a conscious skill. afaik great musicians don't sit down and think about music theory in order to write good melodies - they just sorta feel it out subconsciously to see how the melody wants to go. It is this skill that you're developing.

It will take you a very long time to master this skill (I'm still practicing every day) but you will probably notice differences in your melodic approach almost immediately (I did).

Aside from that, I have one other very simple tip (which I even fail to follow a lot.. lol). MAKE YOUR MELODIES MORE REPETITIVE. It sounds crazy because a lot of the time people are like "zomg musical repetition is the root of all evil!!!" However, if you listen to some pop song you like, you'll realize almost immediately that the melodies are REALLY repetitive. Not only do they repeat entire phrases over and over, but the phrases themselves are really repetitive - like they may play some notes, and then play them again slightly lower or something.

Seriously, sit down one day and listen, really listen and analyze the melodies in some of your favorite tracks. You'd be amazed how repetitive they are - and yet how successful that makes them!

Last, I have a challenge for you, which kinda ties into what I've been saying up above. I want you to do a song with theme and variation. Take some melodic theme - it can be as short as a couple of notes - and then then make a bigger melody out of reusing it, modulating it up or down, or playing it under different chords. Not only is there a ton of space to explore here (you're basically looking at the foundation of classical music here), but it'll teach you to make your melodies more coherent.

Anyway... I kinda 100% disregarded your song here but I hope this is more helpful than a piecewise dissection of your track (LSD, BO and LE kinda got that in the bag anyways).

Final thing - melody writing is HARD and you shouldn't let this get you down. You're doing pretty great for being 16. Go listen to my tracks when I was 16 (in 2007) if you want to feel much better about yourself hahahahahah

Well, Since LunacyEcho already made such a thorough review, I'll try to focus on some other things, in order to be more helpful.

To begin with, I do agree with LunacyEcho about the reverb that could have been added. On the other hand, I really enjoyed the fact that this song was so spacious. The previous song I listened to (not from you) had too much reverb in my opinion, so this is a nice change from that :p

While the melodies are good, I personally think that there still is room for improvement. I'm sorry I can't pinpoint exactly what it is, but it feels like there could be something more. Also, I think you could've had slightly more breaks within the melodies themselves. What I mean is that it at some points seems like one melody continues directly upon the previous one, so you don't get time to think about the first of the melodies, but are distracted by the new one. That is probably only a personal thing that only affects me, so don't take my critique on this too serioulsy. In some songs it works well not to leave any breaks between the melodies, and you did have some breaks (1:18 for instance).

You said you didn't aim for depth, but for coherency. I think that you in many regards, succeeded with this. This song is the same genre all the way through, and the melodies complement eachother to the extent that this definitely feels like just one song, and not many. You're probably better than me when it comes to being coherent ;)

While I realize that you have several different instruments, and that you tried to keep to the chiptune genre, I think you could've used more instruments that don't seem so similar to eachother. I know you already did this to an extent, but for a casual listener they might not even notice that you're using many instruments for the stuff that's going on. However, since I know your goal was to keep this coherent, I understand why you mostly used 3xOsc :)

I have to say that I like many of the cool effects produced by DrumPad. They add a little extra to the song, at many fitting places, so I think you did a good job there.

I also liked the ending.

I will definitely be looking forward to new stuff from you as well :D

For a first chiptune song, this is pretty nice. First impressions after hearing it were: It's got nice melodies and sound effects, but needs more depth.

When I say depth, I mean that you could possibly add more sustained notes. It seems very spacious right now, since you don't really have any instruments that are playing through each bar, just a bunch of instruments that play really short notes, nothing longer. Not saying that this is a bad thing, but it does make listening to it a little more confusing and jagged-y (if you can understand what that means).

I also think your drum noises could use a bit of work. While the other instruments are pretty good, your drums lack the 8-bit-ish quality that makes chiptune to endearing to so many people. I think there's an effect you can add to them called 'Bitcrusher' (not sure exactly how FL works). Even if it's not called 'Bitcrusher', there's a method of making things sound more 8-bit in most music-making softwares. I think.

Onto the good stuff! I think your melodies were great. They were a little spread out, but a few of them really stuck in my head. Funnily enough, the catchiest one for me was the base melody that kept repeating, maybe because it didn't just appear in one place; it stayed for the remainder of the song. I think the essence to a catchy melody is one that people enjoy and isn't blasted in people's faces, but one that appears pretty prevalently through a song so that people are satisfied with it.

My favorite part of this song was the effects you used. For instance, the 'broken' white noise sweeps. I loved that. In fact, i didn't even notice that it was happening so often until a replay, when I heard them a lot more. If you can do quarter breaks in them, why not try eighth breaks? Sixteenth breaks? Cool stuff like that really captures an audience. Also, there were the background effects that sounded great with the song, the little blips and boops. And that little detail you had at the end of the melody at 2:54 was unexpected but hit home as well.

Anyways, good job on your first chiptune song! Obviously, it wouldn't be perfect, but it's still really good. Looking forward to seeing more stuff from you, TheDoor!