How am I as a musician?

Re: How am I as a musician?

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

Re: How am I as a musician?

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

Re: How am I as a musician?

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

Re: How am I as a musician?

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?

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?

Re: How am I as a musician?

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?

Re: How am I as a musician?

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

Re: How am I as a musician?

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

Re: How am I as a musician?

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.