== This is an NGAUC Knock-Out Round Review ==

Seven minutes of heavy metal! And a Game of Thrones reference in the title! Oh man!

You start out with some chugging guitars, and that’s pretty awesome! And then the guitars keep chugging… and chugging… And then I get 3 minutes in the song and they practically have never stopped chugging. And although the pattern does change up a few times, by the end of the song I’m left feeling like, aside from a few quick breakdowns, that the entire darn song was chugging guitars.

Now there’s nothing wrong with chugging guitars, but there’s a point where *anything* becomes too much. I’d say that this song *really* needs some structural variation. Slow parts, maybe parts with other instruments like piano, different chords, modulations, etc.

Suddenly at 5:30 I noticed that there’s a baseline to this song! It was really hard for me to hear before, since it’s been buried under all the chugging, unfortunately. The good news is that that’s the only big mixing issue that I’ve noticed with this song. The drums and the guitars all seem to be relatively well mixed - it’s just the baseline which is not really in the picture.

And the truth is that I haven’t really been persuaded by your composition either. I really wanted some sweet melodies or shredded solos or something to really flesh out this piece. As is, it’s just a sequence of chords, and while some of them sound alright together, in sum it’s not super compelling as is. It needs more! (And by that I mean, it should be shorter, but it should have more variation and interest.)

So, all in all, I think that this track is a good start, but it needs to be tightened up quite a bit, and it needs a lot more variation. Keep at it!

Overall Score: 4.5/10
Mini-Scores (see here: http://johnfn.newgrounds.com/news/post/936953):

* Composition: 3+/4
* Arrangement: 2/4
* Mixing: 4/4

Hey there. Some general commentary on your song for NGAUC.

-Nice little intro. Some nice distortion on the guitar, though I think there's a little bit too much. More of a personal thing there though.
-Excellent drums there, though the kick definitely has too much high end and not enough low - the reverb really brings that out too.
-While there's a lot of content here, there are three main things I want to point out. First, most of it is thrashing without too much melodic or thematic content. Second, a suspended chord is the most common transition you have, where you could easily have done other things with some other pedals. This includes the ending. Third, your mixing definitely needs work. The bass is pretty drowned out by the thrashing, and the cymbals are pretty destroyed by both the kick, but also the guitar thrashing.

Final score: 6.2/10