I quite enjoy the voice! Your sister is spot-on with vocals, and has a very lovely timber to her singing.
My issue here is that it felt like she blindly sang into the mic without any music behind her thinking that it might be a dance tune, and then you implemented it into a completely different genre. This makes the singing sound like it doesn’t belong in the piece at all – rather, it could be a standalone with maybe one or two instruments. A backing piano to her wonderful melody might be an interesting take.
As for the music, I have to say that I’m not sure what you were going for, and from your song description, you weren’t quite sure either. The rhythm changes with every beat, and the only constant is the guitar VST in the background that drives the song reluctantly forward.
It seems like you had a really good idea, but you had SEVERAL good ideas, and put them all together in one piece and they unfortunately don’t seem to mesh.
The flute that comes in at 1:39 in particular might have been better not being in the track. It sounds like someone who quite literally just picked up a flute for the first time began to record with it. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, as sometimes it can add a world music flair, but you went to so many different places with this instrument, including flat notes and trills that went to different keys, that I felt you might have misrepresented what you personally can really do with a flute. I would love to hear a piece from you that emphasizes your capabilities, as this flute performance ended up sounding aimless.
There was also the issue of the same progression being drilled throughout the piece. You never changed the chords, and this makes the song suffer in that there’s nothing breath-taking about it – it just continues in that same vein, with a couple random instruments here and there.
I did like how you kept the beat (albeit a very awkward rhythm) throughout, but it was ever-changing, and it sounded like you included a marimba, more than one hi-hat, a calliope, and some synthetic percussion, and they didn’t quite work that well together.
Overall, the piece felt jumbled. You had so many things going on at once, and it made the listening a little difficult because I wasn’t sure in what direction you were headed. I like the instruments that you chose here, but you wrote the song in such a way that these instruments all collided head-on with each other and argued about who was going to get the melody.
NGADM Round One Score: 4