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Losin' It (feat. Emily Callen)

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Author Comments

NGADM'14 Round 1
Made in FL Studio at 100bpm. Featuring my sister Emily singing the vocals and me playing flute. Please enjoy and tell me what you think!

Also: Genre suggestions?

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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

This is an NGADM Round 1 Review.

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First off, props for incorporating vocals into your submission, and pretty good ones at that! Your sister's got a decent singing voice and intonation issues aside, she offered a fairly solid performance for this track. You have some great composition to accompany and play alongside those vocals, played by a very wide variety of instruments. I can't say that after hearing this track I didn't feel at least somewhat inspired by your avant-garde approach. Unfortunately, the good qualities that this track has are all heavily put down by its primary fault. This is terribly mixed. Apart from the dead obvious over-compression present here, there are pretty serious levelling issues, namely in the percussion which drowns out everything else mercilessly.

I also feel like the track is suffering from a lack of... identity, for lack of a better word. I question your use of a lot of elements in this track, such as the flute, guiro and guitar giving the track an odd and unfitting ethnic flair, and the vocals sounding like they came out of a pop song. I'm all for genre experimentation if it works out, but in a track with heavy drums, aggressive bass and blaring hypersaw, I can't see how those other elements can possibly fit in there and still sound at home. Maybe they can in some form or other, but over here they just feel awkward near each other. My point is, the track has potential but the way it's presented, with the huge mixing issues and confusing instrumentation, leaves it with loads of room to improve.

So, in conclusion, it's an interesting experiment, but in my opinion it's neither a successful nor well-executed one. Thanks for taking part!

SCORE: 5.4/10

Industrial perhaps? I don't know what genre it is either haha.
Regardless, this is a very chill, enjoyable song. Not sure if anyone I know will appreciated it for that, but I certainly do!

Cimba responds:

Thanks!!

Credits & Info

Artist

Listens
1,112
Faves:
2
Downloads
19
Score
Waiting for 1 more vote

Uploaded
Aug 16, 2014
11:52 PM EDT
Genre
Industrial
File Info
Song
3.4 MB
2 min 59 sec

Licensing Terms

Please contact me if you would like to use this in a project. We can discuss the details.