song fuckin bops

Here's your NGADM Round 1 Review

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Quality song straight off the bat. Love the length, love the riffs, love the changes. I can definitely see how you're influenced by Metallica in this song considering you follow very similar chordal patterns as to what they do. No on to more critical parts.

Drums: To be totally honest they sound fairly bland. The kick has no punch and the snare has no snap. Bring up the kick volume by a good few db (Maybe about 3) and pull up the snare too, and add some high end EQ to the snare to give it more presence. Cymbals sound alright but your choice of cymbals are very repetitive, mix it up a little.

Guitars: Chunky and thick, the stereo sound you have is awesome but it's a little muddy in the low end. EQ a bit out at around 500hz so the guitars work more in the midrange. Solo guitars are awesome though, however slightly out of time which comes down to production and playing.

Bass: Same as above, it sounds fairly "Honky". I'd take out around 200-500hz so it doesn't have the horrible horn sounding pop to it.

Your playing could use a bit of practice to be perfectly honest. You're a sound player but a lot of your recording is out of time, so I'd work on either playing to a metronome to build up a steady rhythm or splice the hell out of your guitars so they become quantized with the rest of the track.

Your song seems to be mastered fairly low as well? It's only reaching half volume of what is capable. That's LOADS of wasted head room. I'm not gonna slant you on this much because I'm focusing more on the compositional side, but that's a lot of headroom out the window just as Step said. Either Brickwall it so it's useable with MP3 players or use the dynamic potential for drums, maybe some orchestration etc.

However, congratulations for getting through to Round 2. Can't wait to see what else you come up with and I hope you put this critique to good measure :)

This is an NGADM Round 1 review.

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Definitely one of the longest submissions we've ever had on the NGADM (if not the longest). The sheer effort, ambition and length of it all is already something to admire. What I like is that even though its length can be an almost irresistable temptation to just churn out riff after riff without any kind of decent structure, but you make controlled but effective use of repetition to keep things sounding sensible. The synth and orchestra works really well too. You've got some standout things in this track like how you introduce and progress the riff at 2:13, already managing to highlight the importance of that riff by giving it such hefty focus when it's introduced. Guitar-playing is solid too.

I have two pretty major problems with this. First off, I feel that there aren't many impressive melodies in here, with a large portion of the track focusing on simply chugging or ripping out quick solos that seem to focus more on marketing your skill with the guitar and less on sounding memorable. This consequently makes this track sound ultimately forgettable at times. The parts that are more memorable are in fact the slower parts, which involve more instrumentation than just a guitar and drums, and showcase your compositional skill far more. The other issue is that the production isn't quite up to par. The drums in particular are suitably varied, but weak in sound. The track in general just lacks oomph, with there being a pretty large amount of unused headroom in the waveform. This obviously isn't me asking for some brickwalled crap, but considering that the track retains a very consistent dynamic level, it would have been far more impressive had that headroom been used to create more dynamic variety (and increase the power of those drums).

I'm giving this a 7.7 for being such a long, content-filled and mostly enjoyable listening experience, with some great ideas and guitar-playing. Work on the issues I mentioned though!

Score: 7.7/10

kewl bananas. forgot to leave a review, though i gave it a listen earlier. a good song, no doubt. really nice riffage, and the mix sounds fine. that intro is interesting as well. while i have absolutely no idea of what's going on in it, it sounds really cool haha.
the only real issue is the length. while the riffs are good, there's nothing keeping the song together, it feels more like a bunch of random (though sweet) riffs. i would have loved a strong and present theme in the melodies, or some well placed vocals to drive the song forward.

this is something i feel you should keep practicing - creating riffs is one thing. delivering them well through a well structured song is where things often get tricky. longer is (usually) not better. making a long song is easy to any musician. making a song that actually needs to be long is what's hard. try getting a solid idea of what it is you want to deliver.
what do i want with this song? what do i want to convey with it? what's the point of this section? this is a good riff, but is this really a good place to use it?
keeping variation is a good thing, but without a sense of direction or actual purpose, it can easily feel confusing, random, or outright pointless to the listener, even if the content in itself is good.

again, there is nothing wrong with the song. gave it my full attention from beginning to end, and i really like it. but i feel this is the main area where you can improve your music. hope at least some of that made sense. best of luck in the NGADM!

Love the first section, it absolutely sets a great mood, the synths used work great in this kind of song.
When the metal guitars enter the song the first thing that pops to mind is how they are awesomely mixed. The song precedes through with great playing and great mixing, i really cant get over how freaking awesome the metal guitars sound xD Double tracking with opposite panning?
Overall its really easy to see the work you put into this, the mixing is very clean and there are sometimes quite a lot of things happening at the same time, the playing is also really awesome and heavy.
I cant however ignore that this song is over 9 minutes and since people are criticized for submitting a 2 minute song i thing the opposite is also doable!
It is really hard for me to keep interest in a song without vocals that spans over 5 minutes and in my opinion 9 minutes is too long and seems a bit more focused into making your song more intimidating for your opponent and maybe give the judges a second thought because making 9 minutes of music is not easy at all instead of serving the purpose of enhancing the song itself, you did however a great job through the 9 minutes, still doesn't justify the length thought.
Awesome work Metallica!