Awesome vox.
This song is as damn cliche as trance gets! Wow, I can't get over that. I quickly skimmed over the reviews and noticed that you said you needed to get rid of... I wasn't paying attention to what though.
Nice tempo change at the beginning, but I think you should have not have used the main melody. It just builds on the repetitiveness of the melody. Cut the melody in half, and then change it so that it sounds all prety and DIVERSE.
The drum work is good, but way too fucking powerful! Sure it serves the pattern of being rythym. But its not COLOURFUL rythym! Its just *kic kick kcik kick*. No breaks that are noticeable. Nothing fancy. Also, the compression on the entire song is rather sad, i hate to say. The kick is too bassy and long. The bass is also too bassy, crowding out the low frequencies. You have heavily reverbed synths attempting to play. High freuqnecies cut through low frequencies, but, if there is TOO MUCH BASS, not only will it sound like a loud 'MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM' sound on subs, it would completely destroy the sonds of the treble instruments!
Compress songs this way: Make sure the kick is bassy enough, but always make it short. synths, well, they need to be loud. BUT MAKE SURE THEY DON'T RED-LINE. Same goes to any synth. f it touches the red-line everyonce and a while, thats not bad. Just its not prefered.
To do this, make sure that instead of turning UP synths to make sure you can hear them, turn them all DOWN, and then only turn up the ones you need to hear only slightly! Then the redline may only touch every once and a while. Then, put a soft compressor on, with 200-1000 release, with a 10.0 : 1 ratio. Change the gain if it sounds shit.
The song is overall not that bad, but lets go throgh the scores, shall we?
Originality 4. Why? Just listen to it! Rise strings, 4 by 4 kick, high trance leads... there is no originality here. Sorry.
Diversity, 8. Very nice melody changes. But the fact that you don't have ENOUGH melody changes, kind of bugs me. I want to hear so many changes that I think the entire song is one pattern! Make it simply amazing. ONLY use repeptitiion if it is COMPLETELY nessecary. Like, if you have this amazingly diverse song, and then the main fucking melody comes up. Then you can repeat it once or twice, but still, I'd prefer instead of repeating it twice, you make 2 separate melodies that are only slightly diffrerent so people still get the same idea.
Clarity 6. I already went over compression.
Effort 8. Like I said, no noticeable drum breaks, other than the ones that the whole fucking SONG breaks down. Jst read diversity over again if you wanna know what i think about your effort on this song.
Overall: 7. Cliche, no new ideas, not that great compression, but the melodies are nice. The ideas are nice, you just have to bring them out better.
-zenon-