dude, this song is better than anything i could ever hope to do! I am a person just starting out as a 'song writer/maker' and i really find this inspirational! This is so full of emotions, full of life, that several millions of people will connect to it! Keep at it man, one day, i hope you will look back at the review/comment section and think to yourself, "I have reached out to so many people, touched their hearts.... no, touched their very souls, and changed them for the better." Don't give up on yourself, keep pushing on, and become the best song writer that we know!
Reviews for "Threnody for Innocence"
LucidShadowDreamer responds:
I listened to some of your stuff. It's pretty good! And you're a pianist too, which is nice, and you're already quite good. We're honored that you enjoy the piece. But I am also certain that if you keep on playing with passion, and really assign some meaning to the compositions you make, you'll be able to make something just as good. As many people know, there comes a point where something isn't really "better" than something else. Especially not when there is an honest intention behind the music. Sure, production and such can always be improved. And some pieces may be more complex. But what is really important, especially in a recorded perfomance, is the spirit behind it.
But once again, thank you so much for the heartwarming review. We both very much appreciate your words.
Both of you outdid yourselves in my opinion. This is truly a good work of art and rather or not you win some dinky little contest it seems to me you have won something much more wonderful.. The admiration of your fans. Talent shows, contests and any other form of the like in my opinion are popularity contests. When people enter them and win it's most likely that the judges know the contestant. You both are very talented and this music is beautiful. It brings out so emotion in me. I will even download this for a better nights rest, thank you. Thank you so much for putting this awesome song together.
LucidShadowDreamer responds:
Thanks a great deal, IamKorry.
That is definitely how I feel too. I'm actually a bit relieved that we lost, as I have had a great lack of time lately. We are hoping to create a better produced version of the track eventually though :)
I do think that the judges in general have done an okay job. Everyone knows everyone a bit here in the audio community, but there is still a bit of bias sometimes, but that's okay. It's just a contest, and I can tell you that we certainly didn't lose because of bias.
We're very grateful to hear that you enjoy our music, as well as that you took the time to write such a nice review. So thank you once again, also for downloading and for allowing yourself to indulge in our world of music.
=== This is an NGADM Round 3 Review ===
Well, dang. As much as you (LSD) were hyping this track to me on Skype, I still don't think that I was expecting to see a 9 minute track when it finally popped up on the NGADM thread. I have to say, that's the single longest NGADM track I can ever remember. In fact, the longest one I can ever remember is... uh... actually, it's one of mine, so I won't mention that, because it sounds narcissistic. Oh wait! Yeah, Kor-Rune definitely wrote some long pieces. Phew! Not narcissistic any more. Though your guys' music sounds nothing like his, so this is not a very good introduction. Crap!
Alright, moving on quickly...
The funny thing, which could be both good and bad about this piece, is that although you have clearly demarcated 7(!) separate sections, when I just let this music run in the background while I listen to it, I don't actually really notice the different sections. A good example is 2:30. While there's definitely some sort of background process in my mind saying, "oh hey, the music just switched into 3/4 from 4/4," and I pick up on that, it's not a jarring change. It doesn't sound like a completely different piece of music stuck randomly in there, and that's a good thing. In fact, it sounds almost exactly the same as the previous section, and that's... well, that could be a good thing in some cases, but we'll dive into that more later.
One of the funniest things about this track to me is that you said you (LSD) had to watch like 70 episodes of sad anime in order to compose it. I often have trouble distinguishing between "sad" and "beautiful" in music, and this is just another piece that adds to the confusion - I actually think that on the continuum from sad to beautiful, this is closer to beautiful than sad, but then again, it's rare for me to put music solidly in the "sad" bucket. So who knows.
The piano playing is just top notch here. I can't recall the last time I've heard such an accomplished piano piece in the NGADM. It just moves all over the place. It's got themes and variations. It's got modulations (one of the highlights for me is 1:44 with the modulation and new theme, and then 2:09 where it seems like another theme variation could go, but you don't do the expected thing, and the piano plays nothing for a second or two. Really nice idea.) It's got fairly standard chords, but every now and then when I think I've got you all figured out you throw something surprising at me. For example: 3:33, the penultimate (lol I always wanted to use that word) chord of the progression always throws me in for a loop!
And since I went and mentioned the piano, I may as well go and mention the strings too, since they are the other half of the song. :P I feel like the strings do a pretty good job emphasizing the piano. They swell at points and hide at others, and it seems like you're properly accenting your more emotional moments by allowing the strings to become stronger at just the right times. (one quick problem though - often different notes had the exact same amount of vibrato, and this did bother me)
Heck, I think that in terms of raw melodic content that this song might even beat out "Facing the Foe", which I obviously liked quite a bit.
So, I ranted and raved about your piano playing. Why did I not give this song as high of a score as Facing the Foe? JOHNFN Y U SO INCONSISTENT. Alright... let's see if I can explain why.
I find it somewhat difficult to write about this piece. I think that's because while the entire piece seems to be full of medium-high heights, there is no singular climatic moment that steals the show - nothing that makes me go, ah, THIS is the moment I've been waiting for! Or anything that I can latch onto and remember when I step away from the computer. Compare to "Facing the Foe," which had a distinct and heavily repeated motif. In this song, none of the motifs are emphasized strongly enough to stand out.
This style of writing is risky, since it requires the listener to expend a lot of effort, but *can* work, of course, if the individual motifs are strong by themselves. However, I feel like that's part of the problem with this track - the motifs run the gamut from "good" to "pretty good," but, again, there's no standout, so the piece begins to blend together.
Of course, you are making it very hard for stand-out motifs to occur. You've avoided the two main ways that musicians cause good motifs to become great: repetition and arrangement. I've already mentioned how you don't have repetition. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but keep in mind that repetition can help good melodies really become ingrained in a listener's mind - Facing the Foe is a great example. (It goes without saying that this only works for good melodies. Don't repeat bad melodies and expect them to become good.)
The other way is through arrangement, and I feel like arrangement is the single biggest problem that this track has. As much as this track has different sections, the energy level in the different sections remains pretty much flat throughout the 9 minute duration of the track. Since the energy level is not super high, you don't run into the risk of fatigue. Instead, since the energy level is only about medium, you run into the *other* problem - boredom.
If you listen to your favorite pop songs (I don't know why I want to use pop as an example, except maybe that it generally follows the basic rules of good songwriting and everyone in the world is experienced with it) - I mean *really* listen to them, notating all the different parts and stuff - you'll find often that there are entire sections that you've just never paid attention to before. They've always been there, but you tone them out waiting for the "good part". They usually follow the high energy sections like choruses and their sole purpose is to remove some energy from the arrangement so that the songwriter can add it back in later.
This is *necessary*! You can't just bomb the listener with 5000 interesting parts in a row - if it doesn't go to the extremes of fatigue, it still can be exhausting. You have to give listeners ups and down.
Now you might be thinking, johnfn, you started off talking about arrangement because you said that it's the other way to make motifs better, but you haven't even that yet, and it's been like 5 paragraphs! To you, I say: very observant, but you need to learn how to count paragraphs a little better, sheesh. Anywho: the advantage of going down in energy in the arrangement is that when you bring the energy back up, that gives a very natural obvious emphasis on whatever melody you're focusing on when the energy returns. THIS MAKES MOTIFS BETTER. This is something that I thought was nearly completely missing in your track. I can't recall a single melody that receives focus due to the arrangement. (The only part that sort of sticks out is the 4/4 to 3/4 transition.)
To be completely fair - your song does have a few quick breakdowns, but they're all so short! I'm speaking about more protracted periods of lower energy.
You might be thinking something like, "but I don't want to have obnoxious edm-style buildups/breakdowns! That is not the kind of track this is!" Which is totally fine. Simply going from a more sparse section with just a few piano notes here and there to a more rapid section with lots could do the trick just fine. Or going from just piano to just strings, or from just strings to both strings and piano. There's lots of options to keep the arrangement interesting, even with few tools.
I'd be remiss in my duty as a judge if I didn't mention the other part of this track that needs work: the mix. I don't want to spend too long on this, because I feel like it's a rather obvious problem that everyone and their granny is going to point out, but I'll just gesture to a few sections I felt needed particular work:
1:10 to 1:15 - the ascending piano chords are a great idea, but they are buried and are not given proper emphasis.
3:38 - those crazy piano arps are so awesome, but again, they're too quiet and not given enough emphasis.
This is happens again at 4:00. I think that the piano often carries the emotional content of this song (could be my bias as a pianist! but I don't think so), but it is often either buried under the strings or not mixed quite right. The bassy parts of the piano don't carry very well, and the rest of it is often buried under the strings.
All in all, this was a pretty DANG good song - my main complaints fell mostly into the realm of the technical rather than the compositional, which is both rare and a good thing. Keep at it - I would love to hear more from you guys :)
Score: 8.25
P.S. Whoa, didn't expect to write quite so much. I guess once you get me talking about arrangement, I never shut up. ;-)
LucidShadowDreamer responds:
I'm warning you right now. I'm way too tired for a spellcheck, so a lot of the text is probably really weird XD
Either way, here we go :p
Gaah, I totally forgot about this for a while! Sorry for that D:
But as a Christmas present, I guess I might as well respond now :)
(You better have watched some Steins;Gate by now , btw-_-).
"Phew! Not narcissistic any more."
=> Don't even try. We all know what a narcissist you are, hehhe (jk).
Yeah, this turned out to become a pretty long track. It just needed to be, for all the meaning and different sections to fit into it.
"although you have clearly demarcated 7(!) separate sections, when I just let this music run in the background while I listen to it, I don't actually really notice the different sections."
=> I agree. But it's also intentional, mostly. While we call them different movements, they are all supposed to sound like parts of a whole. What those separations really indicate, are twists and turns in the "story" the piece depicts, as hinted by the names of the different movements. That said, musicwise, there are also differences between the sections if you look for them. Most noticable to me though, is the changes in emotion. Nothing is really a very "happy" part, so in that way, the contrast may not be as strong as it could be. But I'd rather arrange something in a way that keeps true to the story, than I would arrange something in a way that changes the entire piece, and ruins the meaning behind it. Although this has no concretization in an animation or a game/similar, it's not your standard standalone piece either. But as it was submitted for a competition, it's natural that you'd ahve to judge it like one :)
"I often have trouble distinguishing between "sad" and "beautiful" in music"
=> I find it very easy to grasp the emotion in most pieces. That said, I never seriously lable anything as just simply "sad". If one would feel that this track is just a "sad" composition, I think that a lot of the meaning behind it would be lost for that listener. A piece this long and complex, explores multitudinus different emotions, to the extent that the lines between them are blurred. Which I feel, is just like it should be for something like this. Also, while this track (my half of it) was inspired by anime, it really has nothing at all to do with anime :p
They just helped me get in the right mindset to write this XD
"The piano playing is just top notch here."
Why thank you! As I told you on Skype, it was all played in one take. At the time, I had already played the piece like 100 times if not more, during the 9 days the piano part was made in, so I didn't even have to correct many mistakes. Some of the parts are very difficult, but I had to arrange it so that it would actually be playable by me :p
If I recall correctly, 2:09 is one of the last places I got arranged in the way I wanted to. There are a lot of modulations and key changes in this piece, so to get all the parts to fit together, a lot of time was spent or transitions especially.
I use a lot of chords in this piece actually. Some are indeed standard (like the D minor, F, C, Bb, Am sections etc.), but many are not, depending on how you look at it. The modulations and borrowed chords especially, make for a lot of variation in the track. That said, I wanted even more avant garde chord progressions to sound smooth. In the 4th movement especially, you'll find some weird chords and progressions (dem0lecule made most of that movement, actually; I just arranged it).
Penultimate is a pretty cool word indeed XD I don't know if he himself remembers, but dem0 made the chord at 3:33 to be like it is (I think it's Fm => F (or A?), unless my memory is all wrong).
I'm glad you like the string work! Dem0 made most of the base, and I arranged them to fit with the piano. But it really bugs me that we didn't have time to make a good version with his samples, and that all of the automation would need to be revised! This is a piece that will definitely be, well, not remade, but at least revised at some point! :D
"I find it somewhat difficult to write about this piece"
=> But you couldn't have left a shorter review to respond to XD? I kid, of course. I'm happy you wrote your review like you did :3
"nothing that makes me go, ah, THIS is the moment I've been waiting for!"
=> I actually don't think this is as much a problem with the arrangement, as it is a problem of the production, which is really mediocre at best. If I could bring the sections to life with more dynamics, I feel like it'd be easier to notice what's what :)
As for repetition though, there is actually much, much more than there ever was in "Facing the Foe". But it's not as jammed in the listeners face, and a lot of it is only partial repetition. The middle sections of this piece do have much less repetition than the rest of the piece though, which is probably partly why Step felt they were the most heavy to get through. I was originally planning on going into detail on where all of the repetition and careful arrangement lies in this piece. But I don't quite feel up to the task, really, and I don't even think I could fit it all in this one response. I think you'd have an easier time if you could analyze sheet music of this piece :p
Or just listen to it as many times as I played it ;)
Once again, this piece is written partly like one would a movie score. Unlike "Facing the Foe", everything can't stand out and be awesome. And while you may not think it now, I promise you from experience; that'd actually be way more tiresome than listening to this piece. I don't think that comparing the two tracks is really an accurate comparison to make, at least not if it's supposed to have a point, and no be arbitrary. Except of course, that you obviously personally like "FtF" better, which is fine. But from a compositional standpoint and from one of arrangement, I'd say that if such a thing as objectivity existed, this would objectively be way better arranged and composed than "FtF" :p
"You've avoided the two main ways that musicians cause good motifs to become great: repetition and arrangement."
=> I simply disagree. That said, if we wanted to have written a pop song, we probably would've written a pop song :)
As I said, I won't go into the arrangement or specific repetition of the piece. But I can say that I spent 90% of the time I put into the piece on arrangement, and only 10% on composition (That said, I spent a lot of time). Dem0lecule focused more on the compositional side of the strings, as they to the most part, are based on his. I did compose all of the piano of course, but I come up with melodies and chord progressions rather quickly when I am as inspired as I was when composing the piano section of this piece.
"As much as this track has different sections, the energy level in the different sections remains pretty much flat throughout the 9 minute duration of the track."
=> Once again, I see where you're coming from. But I'd say that this is almost all because of the bad production. It really takes away a lot from the piece. The piano by itself would probably show the dynamic better at this point, but it too would need a better sample to do this.
"If you listen to your favorite pop songs"
=> As I said, this is not a pop song :p
"I don't know why I want to use pop as an example..."
=> I don't either XD
"you'll find often that there are entire sections that you've just never paid attention to before."
=> You can say that about literally anything though! If anything, many pop songs get bering to me, as I've heard much of the pop formula again and again. There is only so much that using a certain formula can do for me, really. I see a difference between "arrangement", and a "recipe". Recipes can be good if you don't know what you're supposed to do, or if you want instructions on how to make foods that most people already recognize and will enjoy like the everyday stuff they see. But it can be more interesting to eat homemade food when visiting a friend, and taste their unique spicing or their unique dish, no? Sure, there are ways that those foods can turn out to be bad or mediocre too. But it is really those kinds of foods, that can reach a potential that a recipe never could. And funny enough, food tastes a bit different based on atmosphere and on who made it. That is why I think that the meaning (even if the meaning is the listeners; make a piece your own, as they say) behind a piece can be much more important than general rules. Arranging the piece differently could ruin all that, especially since it's written based on the "story", not the other way around.
That all said, I think that the dynamics of this piece need a lot of work, to bring out what should be brought out. The food needs some stronger spicing for sure, to bring out the right tastes :)
I hope that that isn't what you mean with the word "arrangement" though. But it doesn't sound like you do. But as an example of how the arrangement does bring the energy at some points, take the part after the climax, at 6:29. Or another part (which 6:29 is actually a repetition of), at 1:25. Or parts like 3:45, which is also a clear transition.
As for more climatic parts, take for example: 2:49. Or the biggest climax: 05:38. Or the repetition of the main theme near the ending: 7:43.
What bugs me, is that all of these could be so much more powerful with better production, which is easily the biggest flaw in this piece.
"I can't recall a single melody that receives focus due to the arrangement."
=> How about 7:00, which comes right after the calm part? And this too serves as a bridge, that lead up to the main theme at 7:43 again? Or indeed, the calm part before that at 6:30 again, which comes right after the climax? Both of those are part of the 3 main motifs btw. 1:41 is another part which receives focus thanks to the arrangement, though not as much as 2:03. The sections starting at 2:30 makes more use of gradual buildup, which is another way to emphasise something.
"To be completely fair - your song does have a few quick breakdowns, but they're all so short! I'm speaking about more protracted periods of lower energy."
=> Well, some of the breakdowns are indeed a bit short. Some of them seem shorter due to the fact that the piece is so long though. Apart from the 2nd and the 6th movement, there aren't really any long sections that are calmer. But I am certain that your problem with this would be fixed through better production and dynamics too.
"but I don't want to have obnoxious edm-style buildups/breakdowns! That is not the kind of track this is!" Which is totally fine"
=> Yeah, This track is what it is meant to be. I personally find it to be very arbitrary to compare it to pop songs especially, as anything more than an interesting observation.
"I'd be remiss in my duty as a judge if I didn't mention the other part of this track that needs work: the mix."
=> Duh XD
I agree about both parts you meantioned too. And they are far from the only ones :P
Same goes for 4:00.
As for the bassy parts of the piano not showing, I've found that that is largely because of how Piano One is sampled. I'm sure there are ways to make them appear more, but I am not good enough for that :p
I'm glad to hear that you liked the piece despite the arrangement not really being your cup of tea :)
Thanks a lot for writing such a monster, and I'm sorry for the insanely late reply! But I have less that 700 characters left, so I hope that makes up for it.
Merry Christmas, Grant!
Man, you always post some good to listen to, nice one :D
LucidShadowDreamer responds:
Thanks, man!
Glad to hear that you enojy listening :3
pretty good, could use some reverbs
LucidShadowDreamer responds:
Thanks, dude! You might be right. I usually overuse reverb, and I used quite a lot for this too, but I guess I may have been too worried about using too much of it :p