Reviews for Vanquish the Night

[SkyeWint]

My, that's a lot of reverb at the start. That explosion is totally the end of a sample of a big impact with a timpani reversed and then played forward, isn't it. I used to do the same exact thing all the time. :P You might want to take the second of higher noise.

I'll focus on the time signature changes because I don't know the exact sound of different keys by ear. Just how they sound relative to each other.

0:00 - 4/4.
0:39 - 5/4 followed by two measures of 4/4 or a 5/4 and a 3/4. You dick. I knew you were going to pull some stuff like that the instant I saw you did time signature changes. It's easy to count because of the constant high hat, though.
0:50 goes back to 4/4 for a second.
0:56 back to the 5/4 plus 3/4 combination thing.
1:06 - 4/4, and it stays like this for awhile.
2:17 - ...fuck, hang on. Give me a minute. That's either 3/4 or three measures of 4/4 in a row. Also holy shit that guitar.
2:27 is two measures of 4/4, which is a change if it was 3/4 before.
2:31 back to whatever 2:17 is.
2:37 is the same as 2:27.
2:40 again the 2:17 thing. Can I just say at this point that this section is easily one of the most badass parts of this song. Like, by far. Flamenco-style guitar is INSANE.
2:45 is again the 2:27 thing, and then the section ends. :(
2:52 is the 7/8 section, OR STACKED 6/8 TO 4/4. But I'm pretty sure you meant that as 7/8 unless there's a more obvious one later.
3:03 is back to 4/4, and fairly obviously because it's the same melody. Later it turns into triplets, which are *not* 6/8 unless you say that you changed the tempo to just perfectly fit triplet form of your 4/4. But I doubt that. Or at least I did until I fully counted 4:10 which is not actually 6/8 either and the piece stays at 4/4 until the end.

I really, really hope that you didn't mean for triplets to be 6/8. I really. Really. Really hope not. ...also 3/4 is 6/8 just with an emphasis on quarter notes instead of eighth notes and so it has a slower feel.

Anyway, other technical stuff. It's ironic, all of the orchestral brass is what sounds the most fake. That and the explosion effect at the start. Everything else is great. Also, I'm not sure what your main melodic theme is in this. It sounds like there are about four you intended to be the themes, but then only appear once in any kind of thematic fashion.

Whatever. It's still an awesome piece. Period.

bassfiddlejones responds:

Skye! Thanks for taking the time, I still owe you a review (I promise it's coming!). You were right about time sigs for the most part. 2:17 is 6/8 with breaks of 4/4. (and yes, triplets and 6/8 are very different, haha. the part you're referring to is in 4/4)

Glad you liked the piece man, hope you'll enjoy the rest of what we put out for this thing!

[stunkel]

NGADM Review:

Dude, this is so cool. The number of times which you changed time in this song is absolutely ridiculous. The attention to detail in the layers and arrangement is freaking awesome. Like when you add (what sounds like) taikos right before the part with piano at 1:25. It's pretty far buried in the mix, but I think that's a really nice place for it honestly. The acoustic guitar solo is freaking awesome dude. The only thing I have to say about these solos is sometimes they go a bit into randomness and not really melodicness. As in, it's cool that you guys are playing pretty fast stuff, but I'm not really feeling anything from it, that's for the some of the part anyways. Other melodic theme played throughout the track are beautiful.

Excellent excellent excellent composition. My favorite part being 3:43, it's awesome how seamlessly you were able to change the pace of the song and make it sound good. The part following that is really awesome too. You're drums dude, they have so much emotion and feel to them. The final ending is beautiful as well, where those horns come in playing staccatto bits.

A few other complaints: I realized what it was last time that sounded "cheesy" to me, I think one of the judges cleared it up, but it's your samples that seem to bother me. The piano sounds very bright and although that can be appropriate at times, I feel it hasn't worked in this or the last track. Same with the brass, the brass work GREAT compositionally, but sonically I felt it could use some work.

Again, send me a message if you need any clarification.

9/10

-Ryan

bassfiddlejones responds:

Ryan thanks for the review man. We went back and forth with which piano sample to use and ultimately decided on several, but I hear you. When constrained to two weeks one of the biggest hurdles of a piece of this magnitude is spending time fine tuning each individual instrument to sound perfect - I agree the samples weren't really up to par with the rest of the piece. Gotta cut your losses at some point and forge ahead! We might revisit all this stuff later and adjust the minute details. Thanks for the review again, your feedback really does help!

[Geoplex]

This is an NGADM 2015 Review.

This is a fantastically varied epic. I love how rich and diverse it is, and how well it all flows. Most of the transitions worked seamlessly, and the few that didn’t weren’t noticeably off. Production is also fairly good, though it isn’t perfect, but I don’t honestly think it hurts the song too much.

So, starting off - lovely intro, really like how you jump into the epic theme of things so suddenly. I like the time changes that you weave in and around the 4/4… it creates this tense pace that I really like, but I don’t think each sections is carried very well by its solo. The first two seem a little melodically messy. The third one is SICK though good lord.

One of the first overwhelmingly positive thoughts I remember having about this song involved the first piano section around 01:30. I love the sound and I love the melody. It’s nothing new but by god does it work. The breakdown that follows this section is lovely as well, providing a nice change in pace. I like the brass in this section a lot, and the transition to the flamenco guitar works fairly well.

The flamenco section itself really stands out from the rest of the song. I feel that you should have let it sit on its own a little more before bringing the electric guitar back in. Without standing on its own for a while it feels a little pointless and sticks out a lot thematically - that said, it definitely re-engaged me from a listening perspective on my first playthrough and I enjoyed it.

Production-wise you’re pretty solid; I can hear everything quite comfortably. Everything feels a little mid-oriented, though - it could be the lack of high end that makes me feel this way. The lows are mostly fine. I think you might be over-using your reverb a bit, because some parts of the song did sound quite muddy to me, especially the second piano section. Despite any of this, your mastering is pretty great - the song is pretty loud and reaches around -10RMS. I think the only major issue is too much reverb and not enough high end, as the song is a little dull (spectrally!)

Seriously impressive track. My review would probably sound more praising if I was better at talking about composition, because that was definitely the strongest part of this song. Fantastic work.

bassfiddlejones responds:

Geoplex, thank you for the review! I wish we could have done more flamenco actually, but the idea is that the acoustic and electric guitars were battling each other, thus the breaks in between (which I liked, but I understand your point). As noted below, mixing had to be rushed a little bit (a lot). Thank you for the kind words Geoplex, and we definitely use your feedback. Glad you liked the piece!

[johnfn]

=== This is an NGADM Round 3 Review ===

So, BassFiddleJones and JoshGawaldoMusic turn out a orchestral/rock hybrid track. What's next, PirateCrab making a metal tr... hmm... Alright, so both of you guys pretty much stayed the course this time. That's totally fine! It's the NGADM, after all. But was it successful?

First things first. I have a confession to make. I've always considered that orchestral rock has to be one of the cheesiest genres. Like, it's this marriage of two completely separate genres, which is normally interesting, but it combines them into something that is just super overly bombastic. It's actually quite dangerous because it's very possible to, in the process of being bombastic, forget about what makes music good in the first place.

Your song is not simply bombastic, however. Bombastic is only one of its *many* virtues. In terms of variety, this song is by far the most varied of any track this round - only LSD/dem0 come close (and their song was twice as long - that's like cheating). It's got rock. It's got orchestral transitions. It's got hints of heavy metal. It's got some piano ideas. It's got a FRICKIN FLAMENCO GUITAR SOLO. You'd think from my description that it'd start to sound like a bunch of songs strung together, but you guys miraculously keep the whole thing tied together. Magic.

So let me get right into what makes your song good in the first place. It's 1:26. YES. To me, this is the central idea of the track, the section that elevates it to be excellent rather than good. When I think about this song, I think about this section. Yeah!

The chord progression at this point, while bordering ever so slightly on the realm of cheesy, is sweet. I mean, who doesn't like III? NO ONE, that's who. I also like how you switch it out to be a V on the second iteration of the progression. I often find that too many IIIs can be kind of irritating, but just a few can really improve a track. Honestly, the melody is rather take it or leave it here. It doesn't really add anything - it just sort of outlines the chords. This is actually totally fine, since the chords deserve to be outlined, but I thought you should be aware.

Similar to your last piece, I definitely want to talk a little about the transitions, because I feel like they could be a lot more solid. Like, you guys have so many good ideas, but without proper lead in to your ideas, it's easy to either miss them, or simply not be as impressed by them as they deserve. One example would be :39. You lead into this nice guitar solo with some orchestral stabs, and on paper that sounds fine, but in the song the transition is very jarring and does not highlight the solo at all. This is a shame because the solo here (at least the first couple of seconds of it - it loses its way ever so slightly after that) is really solid, and deserves to be highlighted!

Another missed opportunity is the lead into 1:26, starting around 1:14 with yet another awesome solo. Of the couple of solos I've heard up until this point in the track, I think this one is probably my favorite (though they're all very good). However, again, there is *absolutely no indication* that we're about to drop into the best part of the song. The drums stay completely steady, and the volume on the solo stays the same as well. With a gradual ramp up in intensity from 1:14 to 1:26, the 1:26 section onwards could be even stronger than it already is.

Alright, so I think that pretty much highlights the biggest overarching problem I have with this track. However since this track is so dang varied I want to point out a number of other thoughts I had about it that were not generalizable enough to expand into broad track commentary.

2:15: Excellent use of iv. I take back what I said about III, iv is definitely my favorite chord. I don't like how you resolved it back down to I, though. I think simply holding at iv until the next section hits would have made a stronger transition. The listener can infer the I from the next section.

2:20: I may be the odd one out on this, but I don't think that this flamenco section is really working. It's really hard for me to say why, exactly, other than that I know that I should be saying "WOW THIS IS AWESOME" but what actually ends up happening is that I'm saying "huh, those chord blasts really obscure the flamenco guitar that sounds like it would be awesome if I could hear it better." Plus (and I hate to say stuff like this without being able to justify it), the 2:27 guitar slides come out of nowhere. I think the track would have been more effective if you had stuck just with flamenco and maybe drums for a bit longer before bringing back in the heavy artillery (the electric guitar).

3:08: Hey, it's a call back to the 1:26 section! Really nicely done, in a way that does not sound at all like a carbon copy of the previous section it's referencing. In fact, it's so different I almost didn't realize it was a reference.

3:50: This section is nice, too. Nice melody on the strings. I'm such a sucker for the C -> Em/B -> Am idea (or any transposition thereof), which I think is why I like this section so much.

That solo at the end (e.g. 4:50) just HAS to be a mixing error. Why is it so quiet? I can sort of understand the reasons you might have done this on purpose, but I can't help but think that with the solo louder this section would have been much more effective. It could be such an awesome way to close the song!

All in all, this was an awesome song. Sorry if this review is a bit scattershot, but then again, your song was super varied, so there was a LOT to comment on. :) One of my favorite entries of the round.

Score: 8.75

bassfiddlejones responds:

johnfn! I don't want to insult your amazing reviews with a short response, but alas time has prohibited me. Your feedback is taken and used for future work, so I want to thank you for that.

So yes, transitions. They're tough to begin with, and we really threw the kitchen sink in this track with all the time/key sig changes, flamenco guitar, etc. So there was a lot of transitioning to do, and honestly some of them just got more attention than others! I think we did a better job of it this time, but it's an area to grow in for sure.

Also, solo at the end was not an error, it was intended to sit that far back in the mix! The idea is like, the electric guitar is fighting the orchestral/acoustic elements which ultimately win in the end.

Anyway, glad you enjoyed the song man (despite your feelings of cheese for the genre). We put a lot of work into it!

[TaintedLogic]

I liked the emotional intro, but I think you rushed a little too quickly into the heavy guitar content. I would've liked to see a more fully fleshed-out climax towards the beginning. That said, this is some really powerful content! You meshed together a lot of different moods here, although sometimes the pacing is a little too fast. It seems fitting for a Hollywood chase scene more so than a stand-alone piece at times (although that might've been what you were going for). I love the melodic content, though, like at 3:30. For a rushed mastering session, I think you guys did a great job, btw. The piece also fittingly has a victorious and triumphant sensation at the end, which I appreciated. Overall nice work! ;)