I've had this on my mp3 player for a year, listened at least a dozen times. Deserves the 5 stars, awesome work on the composition and lead guitar but could have been mixed better. Fantastic work mate.

Your NGADM review for Round 1
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Both you and Realfaction had some quality work going here. However as I've stated on Realfaction's piece, I feel like you held better production quality yet he had more interesting melodies. As your production quality seems to be at a great standard anyway, I'll focus more on the melodic content for this song.

We'll start with the first 30 seconds. Step has already mentioned this, but parts of the track feel fairly bland. I like to be captured instantly by a song and I struggled to listen slighty at the start. This is because where the guitars are playing chords, I feel you could've thrown in a few interesting variations, change the chord structure around! The piano as well (Production tip here) seems fairly subtle as it is but I really didn't like it. The velocity on the piano sounds fairly soft when I feel you should play the keys a lot harder (Even if it's a VST) and lower the overall volume. With a metal track where you're playing distorted guitars over a heavy drum beat, soft piano chords arn't going to fit. MAKE IT POWERFUL :)

The melodies from 0:33 to 1:55 are cool however, I like the ideas that you have. My only grief is that you recycle your same guitar parts over and over! When I listen to a track, it's nice to go back to a riff you've already heard, but to hear it multiple times throughout a song with no subtle changes to build it into something new leaves me being bored. What I like to see is progression and variety so maybe It's worth looking into taking one of your riffs in a song that you're going to repeat and change the note order so it runs backwards? Things like that!

3:20 - 3:35 caught me as well. With breaks like this I feel it would've been MUCH more useful halfway through your song to break the tension, and be made about an extra 20 or so seconds longer. This can give the ears a rest with repetitive riffs and hold interest to the listener.

Overall dude the production is sound (Albeit slightly lackluster in power which you should have a look at brickwalling to make that wall of sound) and the melodies have great potential. Just work on changing them up, make something a variety!

I look forward to seeing what you have for Round 2 and good luck! :)

This is an NGADM Round 1 review.

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Wow, this is fantastic. It was a real pleasure to listen to. Your production is just perfect, man. Other than a slightly disappointing bass, everything in here is mixed to perfection and crystal clear. Another thing you can loosely tie with production in this track is your guitar playing, which was highly skilful. Your transitions are smooth, including your intro and outro, and you give the track a pretty unique touch with that little piano motif that can be heard on its own at the end but is played at other times in the track, making this not just your typical guitar and drum combo.

Maybe the biggest issue with this track is its composition. Rhythmically, this track is great, and there are some pretty awesome ideas in here too, but the composition just ends up sound a bit bland at times, making the track ever so slightly boring to listen to. Having said that, you structure your composition pretty well, so even in the composition department you manage to get stuff right, just with the shortcoming of the melodies being a bit boring at times.

This is seriously good stuff. Keep up the excellent work!

Score: 8.6/10

I don't listen to a lot of metal - it's pretty much on the completely opposite end of the spectrum from my preferred genre, which is something like "people singing quitely and playing acoustic guitar" - but I thought this was totally great. I was just listening along and then I unintentionally started bobbing my head. Really solid and diverse solos!

I'd like a break or two from the machine-gun drums and guitars, but as a non-metalhead you can take my opinion with a pinch of salt :-)

Keep it up man, you're good at this stuff. :D

Solid fucking track dammit gah

Love the solos and the production. The main chord progression is mildly stock, but I don't care the riffage makes up for it. it's all beautiful. 5/5