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:

- This grooves a LOT, and I think we can actually get it to groove harder. Right now, the actual 'drops' of this piece feel really... really empty, and I think that's because in this piece entirely, there's a severe lack of mids and especially low mids. This brings a lot more impact into the music, which can be made more groovy with some sidechaining on the steady four-on-the-floor kick. Additionally, however, I think synchronizing your main syncopated melody (the same one introduced at the start) would work much better than the altered melody in the drop right now, if it used the kick as a type of "bounce". A legato note with the kick followed by a quick and snappy end on the higher note could lend so much energy to this melody, especially when paired with bursts of lower mid pads to fill out the frequency spectrum underneath it.

- Beyond the mixing points, I find that this actually gets... surprisingly repetitive, despite the groove. Part of this is the highly homogenous sound palette. Many of the sounds are very sharp and focused on high mids, aside from the relatively weak bass and decent kick. The reverb on your pads probably doesn't help this either, as that would certainly become a bit overly intense on lower mid frequencies. However, beyond that, there's so much time put into the same ideas repeatedly without much development, no countermelodies or harmonic lines, no drumbeat working along with the melodies, and very few fills to keep things more interesting (like the one at the start of the drop, which is wonderful).

Compliments to the Composer:

- Outside of those points of critique, I do really want to say - I *love* so much of what you're doing here. I love the groovy melody, I love how bouncy and swung the feel is even if it doesn't punch as hard as it could. You have some really nice variation and I love the kind of relative emptiness in the breakdown starting at 1:18. More of this for breakdowns would be fantastic, especially if there was more content outside of it to really contrast with its sparseness.

Final score: 7