Complete Darkness (TGP ver.)

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Complete Darkness (TGP ver.)

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Author Comments

Mmmmmm I discovered what synthwave actually is. I'm probably gonna make a lot more of it. I love it.

Check out my friend @OMNiVRSE 's version! :

Original

Gensokyo Midnight Drive by Violet Delta

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SkyeWint

2021-08-16 04:25:05

Hello! This is a review for the NGUAC competition.

I've gone over one or two general categories of issues specific to your song, and one section of things I think also deserve complimenting. I prefer being very direct with my critique, none of it is meant to offend. Thank you for your understanding!

Constructive Criticism:

- Be careful with how intense your bass is! Notice how large your waveform is the whole way through. This is because your bass is VERY BIG from the beginning and all the way to the end, with essentially no variance. The kick's reverb also contributes to this, as it generally floods the lower frequencies with the main intense bass and causes other instruments to have their volume reduced unnecessarily. If you wanted to add more elements, it would be essentially impossible without fixing up the bass. This also gets very fatiguing to listen to over time due to the bass frequencies. Here's a comparison of another synthwave track: https://soundcloud.com/pong-man/gravitation In listening to this, you can hear how much room and space there is in the mix, due to the relatively minimal bass.

- Continuing to compare to Gravitation, notice how there are some main themes such as the delayed pluck with phasing used to maintain a steady evolving texture, along with a very clear and clean melody sticking out through the rest of the track. This is arrangement, and very important to keep your track memorable. In Gravitation, these elements are VERY present and immediately come to mind when listening to the piece again. Having something like that for this piece would improve it quite a bit.

Compliments to the Composer:

- Honestly, I do love synthwave. This does feel very synthwavey, and the drumline's high hat loop smashes. With some more interesting textures and clear melodies, this type of basis will let you make some pretty tasteful synthwave tracks! Analyzing other tracks like what you want to make will give you some good inspiration and ideas to use to great effect.

Final score: 6.5

TheGoldenProof responds:

You may not ever read this, because I'm sure almost everyone replies to their reviews, but I'll put my response anyway.

All criticism has been taken constructively, so I really hope this doesn't sound like I'm arguing back, because I have a tendency to do that.

First, the bass and the waveform: I really don't know much about mixing, just things I've heard here and there, but all of my techniques are self-discovered. One of the things I heard at some point was that a flatter, more consistent waveform sounds better. I used to have issues with this, and it was very obvious my lack of mixing. All of my songs sounded quiet, even if it got to the point the audio was clipping. Then, just recently, I figured out how to use compressors to make the audio fill the entire space and my songs sounded fuller. I have other synthwave songs, most incomplete, that have much more room in them but for this song I was going for a very full, high energy synthwave. This brings me to the bass. One of the first places I heard synthwave about a year or two ago was Carpenter Brut's "Turbo Killer". When I made this song, I hadn't listened to much synthwave. All I had to go on was the album I linked and what I could remember about Turbo Killer. I loved the sound of the super powerful heavy distorted bass, and its something I've been trying to recreate for a while now.

Next, the part about themes and memorable stuff: I had a hard time deciding what song to submit for this reason. This song is a remix of a song from a game, Touhou 2. The size of the Touhou fan base is absolutely massive (though not so much in america), and the amount of artists there are that have hundreds of songs that are solely remixes of the near-700 song ost probably outnumbers any other game fan base. And as such, to the listeners, a big part of the experience of listening to the song is to hear how far the original can be taken. So to an average listener, the song may lack something that sticks, some theme or something, but to someone who has heard many different versions of Complete Darkness, they would immediately feel the familiarity and memorability as soon as the recognized the melodies.

Thank you for the compliments. I'm leaving for college tomorrow, and I doubt that I'm going to have much time to make music over the next 9 months, but if I do, I'm glad to have these tips here.