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:

- There needs to be more to that arpeggiated bell sound. 100%. It repeats far too much with zero variation whatsoever. This piece would be tremendously better if it were a pad with a slow progression, simply expressing ambience rather than an arpeggio. This would also let your piece develop a lot more, such as if you used the bells for that ambience by swamping them with reverb (though be careful with this) and reducing the dry signal, varying the chords played by those bells and slowly fading the dry signal in and out at low volume. These types of little effects would work fantastically with the feedback played by your guitar while providing more variation to keep the listener hooked into the piece over its full length.

- The overall mix gets pretty swamped as your drums and bass come in, seemingly because of the intense reverb on your distorted guitar and even the mild reverb on your bass (bass frequencies have particular trouble with reverb!). It might be beneficial to reduce the reverb and feedback on it during that section of the piece with automation, or at least check your EQ mix to make sure it isn't muddying up the sounds of your other instruments by flooding the same frequencies. Further, sometimes the guitar feedback gets a tad too sharp in the high frequencies and can be painful to listen to. Using a very gentle high shelf filter to reduce those high frequencies would reduce this issue.

Compliments to the Composer:

- Okay, so. Your atmosphere and sound effects are fantastic, especially at the very beginning. I actually love the distortion on your guitar, though do be careful with the high frequencies and feedback as they can get a tad TOO intense sometimes, as I mentioned while commenting on the mix. Good work!

Final score: 5