Awesome composition! I love the 30 second mark piano. mm, and it builds into more tasty five drums <:

This is an NGADM Round 2 Review.

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Man, despite the loss of your CCC samples, you've definitely not given up yet and use your fantastic composition skills to stay in the game. That's what I call being resourceful.

Naturally, I can't review one of your submissions without commending you on your fantastic composition. The chords are very well-chosen and everything just harmonises SO well. Very sophisticated composition as usual, but you still make it appeal to my not-fully jazz-oriented ears by keeping a clearly foreground and undeniably catchy melody. You've even got some dynamics too, despite the song being just over a minute in length, since you threw in that very cleverly-placed piano solo at 0:28, and progressed fantastically from then on. Oh and your melodic structure is absolutely fantastic. I love how you start off with one melody, introduce a B section, and then seamlessly and successfully integrate the two together at 0:54.

This is all coupled by clever rhythms, great use of the 5/4 time signature, and a fantastic blend of instruments. You still make it sound quite good, despite not having the wonderful East/West sounds you used to have. Again, this is a sign of an aptitude to being resourceful. Everything sounds very clear and it was a pleasure listening to all those melodic layers working together to produce such a compositionally-strong result.

Unfortunately, the first complaint is one that you saw coming a mile away. The sounds are still pretty crappy. Thankfully you make them sound good with such sophisticated composition, but they're still horribly unrealistic. You could've done a little more to increase realism and intricacy such as make the buildups (like the one at 0:58) more pronounced, add some more reverb, grace notes, and done stuff like actually fade out the flute note at 0:28 instead of blandly stopping it. Any other sound-related problems are because you lost your samples so I won't complain about them.

Oh and I agree with Back-From-Purgatory that the intro and outro are both pretty... unsatisfying. The intro pretty much comes in out of nowhere with no form of progression and so does the outro. They're not really that abrupt or bad by any means but if you just expanded on them a little more you could provide a more satisfying experience. This brings me to my next point; this is really short, man. I know you probably didn't have much control over this and you already know about it, but there are ideas in here that could be expanded so much more, and it just feels so short right now. It's concise, sure, but its composition isn't reaching its full potential.

Anyway, you probably already know about most of what I've said but I hope this review was helpful in any case haha. Great work on this, goes to show that a good composer can still make great stuff without fancy samples that cost hundreds of dollars!

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SCORE:
7/10

NGADM 2 and stuff.

For what was here, this was really awesome to listen to, great sounds (Despite having your HDD stolen), mixed really well, and well composed. And the flavor of the whole thing felt very unique and had a lot of style to it. It all just felt very natural.
I do take issue with how it starts and ends though, there's really nothing to introduce the song, you open up the page, and it just goes... and sounds like you walked in on a song already in progress. And the ending sounds a lot like the opposite, as if you walked out mid song, as it doesn't really have a conclusive or satisfying end.

Still a great listen, despite the somewhat abrupt start and finish. 7.5/10.

This kind of fusiony jazz is just such a clever and overall good genre. And 5/4 is such a fun time signature both to make and to listen to - keeps it simple yet engaging and maybe a bit challenging to listen to (but it can be difficult to make it not sound too much like the Mission impossible theme). You really managed to pull that off with this song. Some of these instruments, like the layered flute and trumpet, sound very Pat Matheny-inspired (I say that just because I know of hardly any other artists in that business) both in tone and melody. It's actually mixed pretty well, which makes the midi instruments sound not that bad really. I actually really enjoyed the general sound of it during the brief moments of 6/8 at 0:18 and 0:58 - it really strongly reminds me of the original Mario Kart of all things (and it's not just the midi sounds, that era of games had some real cool harmonies like what you have here).

The song is about as saturated with interesting elements as a 70 second long song can be. I love listening to it again and again to focus on this or that melody as much as I love playing it and letting the harmonies and collaborating melodies wash over me.

But yeah get your real deal instruments back and you won't have to rely on your competitor having real life interfere for round 3 too :)

7.7/10

The production is weaker than normal for you, but that's understandable considering your CCC got stolen.
I thought this song, although short was very good melody and comopositional-wise. I just wished it wasn't so short.