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InvisibleObserver

167 Audio Reviews

104 w/ Responses

Dank shadows.

Whatever the result, you should be darned rootiny tootiny proud of this piece.

johnfn responds:

Thanks. I am proud of this piece. Although I don't think it's perfect, I do think that it's a very meaningful piece in a way that my previous pieces weren't.

man this is like sick core brutal gore step bro. #winkyface #touchdongs2gether

only one thing though, needs more autotuned ned fladners

I imagine you took part in some sort of blood ritual and channeled Enya.

I always try to invoke a little Aphex.

Wolftacular responds:

My sister thought the same. I'm flattered! I don't know this Aphex dude, but I'll definitely check him out! Thanks for listening and commenting

I'm going to explode.

Best of luck my entrails don't hit you.

I mean.. good luck! This has been a stupid tough week I think for both of us.

SourJovis responds:

We'll see. This song I made in the first few days. I spend the majority of the two weeks on a song I couldn't finish. Strange how things can turn out. Looking forward to your submission.

Do you intend on finishing this up with vocals outside the comp?

midimachine responds:

yes

mak sur ur song follows all duh rulesz bb

Sequenced responds:

wat rulezzz?? LOLOL rebelll anarchy y KLBHORKLAEOHKO!!

YAARRRRR

Yeah if I was against you I'd probably just write a musical white flag.

etherealwinds responds:

Haha aw no HalcyonicFalconx is extremely talented so this round is definitely going to be a hard one for me. Thank you!

Your song, my review

Expressing my enthusiasm for this. Looking forwards to hear pieces from the album when it comes.

Your song, my review.

I enjoy the lyrical content, the vocals saying them, as well as the processing on the vocals. I enjoy the melodies and progression. The drums are a wee bit boring, but they function in carrying the song along / giving it a very accessible rhythm. There is panning on the drums and some of the synths which is helping distinguish things from one another. However...

0:00-0:01 the white noise fuzz while stylistically might give a nice gap space and act as intro sfx that is adding realism to a performance, I'm pretty positive the noise from it (which I'm assuming is background white noise from vocal track) continues throughout a lot of the song.

0:05ish - fun little synth diddy but the tringle/ramp waves are causing an awful lot of over/under tones that are meddling with other instruments. While semi minute individually, its a common element in all the instruments.

0:20ish the vocals intro in, and the instruments playing all are by frequency have their sweet spots within the same range. Its a bit blurry and the instruments sound to me as if fighting for being foreground, but none really win this metaphorical battle. Sounds as if master channel or master session had some compression or limiting done to things to pump things up which is hurting clarity between instruments further. Somethings pushing things up where there isn't much room.

0:40 Reverb on vocals is nice, but reverb on everything is causing blur issues. I feel as if tighter attention to the filter controls on the reverbs would benefit this song a lot, especially with dropping off lower frequency reverb.

0:50-0:55 with the other instruments being automated down pre-lyrics theres a sweep from over saturated mid freq blur and lyrics standing out on top in a positive way. I felt like a lot of the song could have used the relative clarity had there throughout.

1:20ish / throughout, the 8 bit drums are cool and all but 8bit drums blow for quality and they fail to standout amongst the sea of other white noise based sounds. Reverb everywhere and gritty over tones on synths.

The plotting bass (intros at 0:55 and goes throughout song) is diminished sounding in nature and I'm assuming this is cause of reverb and other synths basically infiltrating the low end siney-ness with varied bits of noise. It sounds sort of masked/distructive interference-y with compensating compression to bolster the basses sonic effect.

1:55 synthy solo is awesome, its higher pitched and stands out nicely. Playful / memorable. Could still have more definition but I'm a bitch for production.

The backing vocals are lovely for filling the song up, but are filling a role that a bunch of reverbs already done, they have an effect and are hard to notice. I think this is a good thing, but I've been sitting here for 20 something minutes listening to this peice now and noticed after a few play throughs they're there while wearing my critical pants. I know I'm hammering this, but they're just hidden by noise.

Lovely voice btw. I normally want to injure vocalists.

Assuming NG visualiser bar reader is at all accurate, it looks like on the master 18khz and higher or lower have been EQ'd out LP style. Unsure why, the top most frequencies for clarity are the least of your concerns. They might sound shrill on some of the synths, but just lop that stuff off in the synth or the individual instruments mixer channel pre-effects like reverb and compression.

Visualiser doesn't show if a 20hz HP drop off is used. Might help a bit stop the undefined buzz from being as muddled as it is.

Overall I really do like this song, and I understand this was done on a schedule, but the mixing and post production (if any) need to be handled a bit differently. If anywhere I've mistaken something or assumed something wrong, don't worry about telling me. I don't expect you to make the changes I've suggested either. Didn't write this with the intention to make you feel under attack.I do hope something stands out though for you to give a shot in future projects. Shoot me a PM if you ever need a listen over of a WIP for opinions.

midimachine responds:

awessssssoooome review and extremely helpful in regards to the vocal mixing and reverb business!

0:00-0:01 background noise is from the game boy output, I haven't done a "pro-sound" mod to mine so the noise floor is quite noticable but I EQ'd out a 9250Hz ringing and did a steep roll off starting at 60Hz or so.

0:05 is thin pulse waves doing their thing. the overtones are probably just the volume envelopes since the sound channels are 4-bit and only have 15 dynamic levels (+ silence) so sometimes the changes in volume sound like a soft click, especially at low levels. This kind of hardware does a lot of weird things to otherwise benign waveforms though and I'm often finding myself trying to make a certain sound but the hardware injects a lot of unwanted clicks and overtones in so I just have to work around it or incorporate it somehow.

0:50 - everything coming out of the game boy is on one channel so I don't think I automated the instrumentals but I know I ducked the chorus vocals a bit when the next verse comes in.

I really like the 8 bit percussion sounds but I don't really think of them as conventional drums so they don't strike me as sounding "bad" or anything. And I guess I feel like it'd be out of place to use modern sounding drums in this track. One thing I've been doing more recently is using brownian noise instead of white noise for some sounds and it makes for a much more varied palette of percussion sounds!

The backing vocals I intentionally kept pretty low and subtle; even as they are now the track sounds really empty without them but in saying that the first version of this that I put on soundcloud had a number of comments about the backing vocals being too present and cluttering the mix and it definitely influenced the final product. I definitely think that, in retrospect at least, I overdid the reverb on the vocals especially but overall the track is kinda washy.

ANYWAY yeah, thanks for the analysis and fantastic critiques. I really appreciate it man!

Age 33, Male

Ottawa, Ontario

Joined on 2/9/09

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