How am I as a musician?

[NumiGamer]

It's been a LONG time since I posted in the musician's jungle gym asking for any reviews, as I just started with music right before the site went down. I think I've progressed a lot since, and I'd like to hear what a community other than NG has to say about my music. Would anyone care to lemme know if it's good, bad, and maybe give me a pointer or two? I feel needy asking, but reviews on NG suck balls 99% of the time (I've really only gotten helpful reviews on one track [the dance one I'm leaving here]). "This is kool" doesn't help me. lolThere's just three tracks I'd really like people to hear, but feel free to check out some of my other stuff if you want.


tl;dr - tell me if I suck.


Dance:
http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/393918

Chiptune:
http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/391718

Ambient:
http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/402240

[who_cares973]

mr ghettoleelewis knows what he's talking about. songs have a good start though

[rushyrulz]

Spark of Revolution is clearly the best. None of them are bad though.

[kommisar]

the chiptune isn't bad. lacks variation/sound though. feels too fake but that's just my opinion

[NumiGamer]

Originally Posted by who_cares973

mr ghettoleelewis knows what he's talking about. songs have a good start though

Mm. =/ I'm working on learning to master/EQ properly since I read that review. Any basic pointers you could toss me, just to get me in the right direction?

Originally Posted by kommisar

the chiptune isn't bad. lacks variation/sound though. feels too fake but that's just my opinion

Too...fake? I know it doesn't sound like something from back in the day, it's not something that'd be on an NES for example, it's just not that style. Is that what you meant, like, it doesn't have the "classic videogame" sort of feel?

[DarkbearX]

I'm gonna assume you used FL9 because as ghettoleelewis said, it sounds horribly compressed, and if you don't know what that is it's likely you have a Fruity Limiter on your master track. Well, you can't mix a song properly when you have a compressor washing out all the dynamics you need to work with, for starters, so get rid of that.

Things that I hear that are wrong/off-putting:

-It sounds really muffly, like you put some high-cut filter on the master or something. The reason this is happening is more-than-likely because everything is just meshing haphazardly together and nothing has a place. A fix would be to find a place for all your sounds (on the frequency range). e.g. cut the lows (approx at 100-150hz) off the supersaw and anything other high-freq sounds.

-Reverb is sensitive and should be used sparingly in most cases. Remember if you're using reverb because you want your song to sound FULLER, you're doing it wrong, find another way, because that's just gonna muddy the hell out of things even more. This is personal preference most likely, but I like to cut the lows off my reverb tails at about... 300hz, since ~300hz is where really conspicuous muddiness occurs.

-Supersaw's too loud. You'll need to find a balanced volume where everything works together. How? I don't know, too many other things to take care of. Once things start tuning in and sound better, everything falls into place.

I can't stress enough (to EVERYONE) how important compressing and limiting is. If you don't know how a compressor works, learn RIGHT away. If you don't understand how a parametric equalizer works, or which frequencies certain sounds fall under, look it up RIGHT now. If you don't look it up for yourself, you're going to learn much, much slower.

Edit: only listened to spark of revolution, btw.
Edit2: I also wanna say how ****ing retarded Image-Line is for putting a limiter on the master track as the default template in the first place. Seriously, wtf were they thinking?

[bmah]

A long while ago, I talked to DarkbearX and inquired about compression. He provided me a helpful link, which I still have: http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/718886

[NumiGamer]

I appreciate the help, guys. DarkbearX, I understand what you're saying completely. I need to learn this shit, it's important.

Bmah, thank you for the link. I'm pretty sure I understand compressors now.

I appreciate the feedback you guys, it's nice to know I can get some help if I need it

[LogicalDefiance]

I don't even know how to approach it. I suppose I'll skip the mixing advice because I don't have time to write a whole book in this post. I think the best way to approach better mixing to is to buy books like 'The Art of Mixing' and 'Mixing Engineers Handbook' and just devour them. Thats how I started.

I know a lot of musicians are into the whole 'feeling' your melody and harmony thing, which is fine, but I think with some basic music theory knowledge you could really expand this piece. You could easily make variations on melodic phrases, you could have much thicker harmonies, and keep a more unified theme without repeating the same progression.

Perhaps look into building chords and chord progression theory. I think that would benefit you the most. In addition, scales and intervals would help your melodic phrasing to be less repetitive. Simple stuff like inverting some intervals, switching notes around rhythmically. Last but not least would be to look up embellishments. Passing tones and neighboring tones are EVERYWHERE in tonal music.