Lorelei

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Lorelei

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Author Comments

Entry for the Art-Inspired Music Contest 2022.

Art: Waldemar Schuur / @W-P-S

Die Lorelei
by W-P-S

Illustration

2,461 Views

(Ages 17+)

Made using BeepBox: Link here

Tempo: 151 BPM

Bars: 90

Channels 4 (3 melody 1 drums)

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Quarl

2022-07-26 13:58:10

Quarl AIM 2022 Review
Composition/Structure (0-10), Production (0-10), Emotion (0-10), Relevance to Artwork (0-10)
Anonymous-Frog, Lorelei ft. BeepBoxClock: 8,5,6,3 (22/40)

When I saw that art I kind of expected Iron Maiden or Guns & Roses era metal. You might have been better suited picking some pixel art to compliment your sounds and tools but I won't hound you for being ambitious. I was very confused trying to connect the illustration to the music so I gave you an equally confusing 3 to relevance. I've been hounding musicians in this competition to write more about their music and how the art inspired them. Saying something about the art and how it inspired you can only boost your relevancy points and makes it harder on judges to give out low relevancy scores. Guilt us into loving you by talking about the art work and how special it was to you. It can feel dumb when no one notices what you write, especially if you write a manifesto but it's honestly for the people that care and as a judge I care.

I don't necessarily like looking at the art but I'm not judging your music on how much I like the illustration. I'm trying to find connections. We have a demonic figure drooling on top of a seemingly naked woman. There's a red fog in the air and waves are crashing on the shoreline. You could have sampled some waves crashing to create more atmosphere or some howling wind to transport us into the image. I don't necessarily want to encourage any illegal sampling but judges would have such a hard time identifying waves crashing sampled from a one hour long meditation YouTube video. Though most contemporary programs let you rip audio straight off your hard dive a free program like Audacity can do it too, no special equipment or skills needed. You just have to look it up and try it out for yourself.

Some aux percussion might have opened up the track a little, some chimes would go in nicely. Some high fidelity orchestral percussion. I could envision plucked violin strings and drum swells. You're really limited inside of BeepBox, the sound that program produces are very low fidelity. I'd see about putting this mp3 into a program like Audacity and playing with layering samples straight on top of your initial work. It might take a little practice and this technique won't work as well as a full fledged digital audio workstation but using Audacity in tandem with Beepbox, you might be able to get some incredible sounds. I use Audacity all the time to trim vocal samples from larger documentaries or news broadcasts. It's a great tool available for anyone getting started with audio!

I hope this review was helpful and that you keep making inspired sounds. A tough critique can hurt but my goal is always to encourage people to grow and learn! I wish you the best Anonymous-Frog and I hope to hear some progression in your style in the near future!

Anonymous-Frog responds:

A 3 for 'Relevance to Artwork'? I thought it would be a little higher.

I agree that BeepBox is a lot more limiting than something like Reason or FL Studio (even the earliest versions of those from the 2000s). I tend to use it because a. it's been my primary "DAW" for many years and it's what I'm used to, b. limitations help foster creativity, and c. I don't have to hog around 20MB source files on my computer, only to lose it to a hard-drive failure, just a 20KB URL that I can easily share on Twitter or in the description. I also agree that this song isn't what you expected and that I should've explained more about it in the description.

I took advantage of the new 'Simultaneous instruments per channel' feature introduced around version 4.0 to squeeze multiple synthesized instruments into just 4 channels, even though it supports 15 and most modifications support even more, so it's even more limited. This was in part inspired by video game composers like Tim Follin, who managed to make kickass music for even more restrictive systems in the 80s and 90s like the NES or Commodore 64.

= The blue channel has two instruments that I switch back and forth as a 'call and response' between the two characters in ol' Wally's artwork. The lower pitched wobbly 'voice' represents the knight and the higher pitched softer 'voice' represents the naked lady.

= The yellow channel is not just some harsh-sounding bass, I also used it for some percussion and sometimes some higher-pitched instruments.
How this works is that I have a sustaining melody instrument that's set to play regardless of the note's volume, while the percussion requires volume. That way I can have one note with percussion and one note without in the same channel. However, there's no volume control on the melody instruments and it's harder to do pitch control

This trick can also be seen here with just 2 channels.
https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/1132792

= The red channel has the highest amount of instruments, with 8 instruments that I switch between and up to 4 that can be played at once, including a copy of the knight's voice in a section where I couldn't use both voices separately.

= The grey channel's a dedicated noise/drum channel. I used this both for regular drums and also to simulate waves and wind. It's not the real thing, but it's a close enough approximation. It also helps add some 'grunge' to the red channel's instruments.

Thanks for the review! I've made a few endeavours into using samples. There is a variant of BeepBox that supports samples, Pandora's Box, but that's still very experimental. I've tried it a few times, but most of the samples there come from games like EarthBound or Sonic the Hedgehog (which might be a bit iffy for me), and custom samples uploaded by other users can only be used in an experimental beta, and there's no 'no-repeat' option, so samples keep looping. I also use Bandlab sometimes, which has its own mastering options, which I sometimes use on its own.