At 6/4/16 01:11 AM, Modnex wrote:
Not sure what you mean by poor notes. I've uploaded this particular track to a few places and most people like the melodies the most. I guess it just comes down to taste, really. Well, thanks for taking the time to review my track and give me some pointers, very appreciated!
Take care! ;)
Your comment about 'most people' liking the melodies within your track immediately made me think back to a period of my life during the summer of 2011 when I decided to gain a bit of YouTube popularity by uploading a "fanmade soundtrack" to an upcoming JRPG (Final Fantasy XIII-2, to be specific) simply because...well...I wanted hits.
This might seem initially off-topic or meandering, but I swear I'm going somewhere with this, so bear with me.
Listening to my old compositions now, I find almost all of them to be universally crap in justabout every regard. I'll link to one of the more popular examples just for reference -- the comments section here is really what made me think back to this video after reading your comment, because a lot of them were super positive/encouraging and, looking back years later, I can't help but chuckle because I'm the first person to admit that I had no earthly idea what I was doing.
Just about everything I hear in my old pieces I would absolutely tear to shreds from any sort of critical and objective standpoint. Mixing, mastering, rhythm (or the lack thereof; I'm 100% self-taught and, while my sense of rhythm has largely improved through practice, I honestly have no idea how people could bare to listen to my old stuff, which was all either lazily super quantized or just caution to the wind entirely), etcetera...though I have to admit that even now, I still, at the very least, like the ideas and -- sometimes -- even the melodies that I ended up producing. I like them not so much because they sound "good", per se, but because I remember what I was trying to achieve through the composition.
That being said, I'm also a bit biased, because I made the songs. It's a love/hate relationship, and, from discussions I've had with friends who also compose music, that seems to be very, very common. I mean, hell; if anything, I've become far more critical of my work over the last couple years. There are songs I composed a couple months back that I was very proud of that I listen to now with borderline disgust, haha. But I digress. Back to the topic at hand.
Let's say, for instance, that someone else had composed these FFXIII-2 tracks and I just stumbled across them on my own today. Here's exactly what I would think in analyzing the track I linked from a purely objective standpoint.
- The rhythm's so...jittery.
- ...what's with the prominent, gated percussion? Are they suddenly in the 80s?
- Definitely a little too much repetitive marimba action going on.
- The mix sucks.
- The mix SUCKSSS.
- These marimbas are driving me insane now.
- Is there any interesting variation here at all? No? Okay then.
And then I'd stop listening.
As of right now, I'm fortunate to be in a position where I've started to get a couple of paying music gigs -- nothing too fancy, but it's something I'm very proud of nonetheless. I don't say this with the intent of bragging, because what I want to stress is the following.
The only reason I even managed to do so was through pushing myself and being my own worst critic. This all took place over a rather obsessive period of a few months starting around late January/early February when I first got back into music composition/production after a hiatus of sorts. I'd been focusing solely on voiceover work during the interim, and, in the process, ended up learning more about the specifics of audio production than I ever actually bothered to learn back when I was actively composing. I used that knowledge as a foundation when I got back into the swing of music making, hit the ground running, and I've since spent hundreds of hours devoted to the production side of things in addition to the time I've devoted to brushing up on my composing.
Properly produced music, quite frankly, is every bit as important to modern composing as anything else, and once you've spent countless hours in front of your monitors listening critically to the details of your own mixes and everyone else's, things really start to pop out like never before.
Turning my ears to your track, for instance --
You definitely need to tame the low end frequencies in the composition. As it stands, there's FAR too much noisy low end resonance that does nothing but distract from and muddy other elements of the mix. Specifically somewhere between...I dunno...I wanna say 80 to 200Hz due to how resonant it is.
Also - consider the inspiration for the track, as cited in your description; it's a cute story (not being sarcastic or patronizing - I genuinely mean that), but the bass is, from a thematic standpoint, not at all appropriate for a theme dedicated to a pet mouse. Generally, speaking at least. For a theme like this, if you're serious about wanting to compose for games/shows/short films, it's paramount that you tailor your tracks accordingly. That goes for the drums, too.
That's something I never used to do, and that's another reason why I believe so much of my older work doesn't hold up. There's no variation. I pretty much just did what I wanted, and that led to a lot of very same-y sounding compositions.
Speaking of; repetition is another area where your track struggles. Beyond the way the piece is actually set up, a lot of that really just comes down to how sequenced the notes sound. It's really, really noticeable when the piano comes in at the beginning - it sounds very robotic. Some of this can be remedied by altering the velocity for each individual note. If you're quantizing, I'd recommend using a much lighter quantization percentage or none at all. There also needs to be more of a sense of dynamic range and dynamic contract in general throughout the track as a whole. The dynamics here are too squashed. I'm guessing you pushed this track all the way to 0db and/or beyond, which, despite what you may hear elsewhere, isn't inherently bad...IF you do it right. Like I said, this sounds too squashed.
I'd recommend downloading Voxengo's free SPAN plugin and using it to monitor the frequency and RMS response of your next project. As a general rule, I try not to let my RMS value dip below -14 or -13 even when I'm pushing 0db. If I have a track that absolutely NEEDS to be both loud and super bass and/or drum heavy sometimes I'll go as high as -12db, but that's where I try to cut myself off. My ears start telling me to turn it down once I hit -14.
I'd wager that this track is venturing into single digit territory (-9 RMS and above).
Anyway...I could go on and on, but the point I'm trying to illustrate here is that these are the things I hear that other people might not. These are (some) of the reasons that many of the musicians here might find fault with your track where other people won't.
I genuinely hope you find this post valuable -- especially since I accidentally wound up writing a novel-length response -- because my intent isn't dissuade you. Your track is by no means terrible; I like it, and I think it has a certain potential, but I also think the way it's currently structured and many of the above listed issues with the mixing/mastering prevent it from being as satisfying as it could be.
There IS a certain 'average' sort of sound to it...but that's not actually a bad thing, necessarily. With tighter production values and some more variation to it, I could easily see this being used in some sort of commercial context, for instance.
TL;DR
- More thematic relevance
- Cut down on the low end
- More variation
- More dynamic range/contrast
Good luck!