I like the mood and instruments. I think the mixing needs some cleaning up. There’s a bit of distortion in here, and it’s possibly because the instruments were not equalized carefully enough. There are times when some of the melodic lines are hard to make out, such as at 1:27 - 1:30 and 2:20 - 2:25. The piece has a sense of constant continuity whereas you should’ve stripped away some of the harmony significantly in order to create more structural contrast. This moment finally comes at 3:08, but you could’ve done a lot more to maximize the emotional polarization of the piece. Also, 3:40 is a completely different piece, and I think you know that too. If you were trying to form a mash-up here, you needed to connect the parts before and after 3:40 much more cleanly. There were also other transitions, even within the 6 littler songs that make up this grossly long track, that needed smoothing over, such as 4:21. As a judge, I’m expected to treat your content as one concrete, complete, and coherent whole, but this is not a coherent and succinct piece at all. It’s hard for me to get a sense of melodic development or cohesiveness within the 6 individual pieces themselves. You need to focus on fleshing out individual ideas more instead of conglomerating all of your little ideas for riffs in one place. You seem to have made very little effort at connecting the various movements of this piece. 10:53 comes to mind. If you don’t plan on making two or more sections of music into one cohesive whole, those sections do not belong on the same track. I also suggest you try watching and following YouTube tutorials for “equalization” in whatever Digital Audio Workstation (FL Studio, Garageband, Logic, Reason, etc.) you use. Also, the part at 15:17 isn’t even in the same genre as the content before it, despite being the most enjoyable part of the track IMO. You did a nice job of creating a full texture throughout, though, and your melodies are generally solid. I also thought the piece was pretty catchy, too, although there wasn’t really any one section that was particularly memorable in this 18-minute morass. Above all, you’re just force-feeding the listener too much content at once here. You need to slow down and focus more on the details of this piece - a sense of build and flow, coherence, mastering, etc. - before you go for a 18-minute-long epic narrative song. Because if you don’t tie the piece together as you progress, it falls apart underneath you, and that’s what happened here. Without the author’s comments, I would’ve been able to garner almost no overarching sense of structure from listening to your piece, and that’s a dire problem. I seriously hope you understand why I’m giving your piece such a low score because you’ve clearly put a lot of effort into it, and if you don’t understand please don’t hesitate to PM me. Keep working at it, man. You have the melodies and atmosphere down. Now, please work on the structure, mixing, and coherence...a lot. Best of luck. ;)
4.5/10
flaminglog 
![Mind Paradise [Purplerized]](https://aicon.ngfiles.com/1381/1381808_medium.webp?f1733695308)
