This is an NGADM Round 3 review.
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Whoa OK wait up for a second here. The production value... wow. Now that is more like it. Your Round 1 track was very muddy, as you and I both know. Round 2 was a definite improvement, but still leaving room for improvement. Now, out of nowhere, you give us a lovely mix that's both bright and warm, clear and detailed, airy and full-sounding, and while it's not PERFECT (I kind of wished for some more powerful acoustic drums and 4:16's a bit heavy on the lower mids), it's pretty damn impressive. I especially like your low end here. You don't have a great bass sample in terms of quality, but you keep it at just the right volume for me to hear all of the notes without it messing up the mix. In fact, levelling here (other than the drums which could've been louder as I mentioned) is very good and doesn't indicate any kind of rushing that you might have done in the composition process.
OK, I'll get the whole "there's no lead instrument" out of the way for now. The composition is otherwise really nice. The chords are really nice, and on top of that there's an excellent blend of instruments. There's a lot to commend in how all of the instruments' melodic passages work together, despite having different rhythms and melodies. You also make a genuine effort to keep the instrumentation interesting. It's not often that in songs like these new instruments are introduced later on in the track, but you're not afraid to do that, adding latin percussion and even some kind of synth thing at 4:16. Considering you were planning on adding vocals to this, hearing this kind of attention to detail in the instrumental background stuff is a nice change.
Transitions are all spot-on. None really stood out for me (except 0:18 which was a fantastic change of mood and pace that could've been a bit smoother with a louder drum fill before it) but that's fine. They all do their job in connecting the various sections of the song together. I can't really say much about the structure since a lot of the stuff here is just background or supporting elements, but considering the structure of your other tracks was always good, I can expect a solid structure from you. Intro and outro are both awesome, as they usually are. For a track whose author's comments starts instantly with "COMPLETELY INCOMPLETE", this is surprisingly polished.
I feel like I'm just wasting time by mentioning issues you already know about, but due to my aforementioned self-diagnosed OCD, every NGADM track in this round must have five paragraphs, the fourth being a complaints paragraph and the last being a shorter conclusive paragraph, so HERE WE GO. The track is lacking something in the foreground; everything sounds like it's meant to support vocals. I can actually hear vocals in my mind, coming in at 0:18 or 0:36, and I know you'll do a good job with them. Right now, the lack of vocals starts a chain reaction to lots of new issues, like the seemingly static dynamic (apart from at the very end), the repetition, the lack of a melody to latch on to, predictability, and so on. I'm a bit worried about how you're going to add the vocals in the mix since your mix is already pretty full up. It's something I wouldn't be able to pull off that well, but then again you probably have much more experience with vocals than I do.
It's a shame you didn't manage to finish this. It has a lot of promise, and contest or no contest, I'm going to keep an eye on your page for a finished version which I hope you plan on doing! All in all, fantastic work with everything else. For a track which has no proper foreground most of time, this was actually fairly enjoyable, and well-produced too!
Score: 7.7/10