InvisibleObserver's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[footsteps]

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.

[Wolftacular NGADM Round 3]

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

[Whiteout]

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.

[Another Day]

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

midimachine responds:

yes

[Can't Express Myself]

mak sur ur song follows all duh rulesz bb

Sequenced responds:

wat rulezzz?? LOLOL rebelll anarchy y KLBHORKLAEOHKO!!

YAARRRRR

[A Long Way Home]

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!

[No Homers Club]

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!

[TCP - Structureel Preview]

Your song, my review.

Excellent startup.

The kick is a great suond but I think it could have a single osc sine layered on it in the 30hz range to give it a warmer feel. Higher up near 200hz probably would work too, you've got a nice low sound introduced later on you'd have to mix around if you do layer in a sound with your kick.

Your snare sounds reverb is pretty heavy. It is nice, but to my ear doesn't fit the rest of the song. It might do well with a bit of a tone down.

0:53 the keyboard sound is muted sounding. Probably won't have much conflict iwth other insturments and probably can afford to simply be raised in volume.

Its really smooth, mellow but the mixing off at the moment. Intro has some nice stereo panning on the pad and attention dealt with the minimalist grouping of isntruments, but I don't feel that attention is sustained through to the minute mark.

0:40 seconds comes in the pads sound tinny, and contrast the warm feeling the intro setup. Unsure what to do about that other then rework them would be my 2 cents.

1:15 writing with the bass and the plucky later introduced keyboard/synth sound has the friendly/warm tone thats at the beginning.

Song sounds like a great WIP, I'd love it if you added more panning details to help give it a rich sound. Don't go too heavy with the reverb, especially on the hats, else it just ends up sounding like semi tonal white noise.

tijnn responds:

Thanks for the criticism! Some very good valid points given here, I'll surely give this a good read when I get back to working on it, thanks!

[Ironesque Valley]

Your song, my review.

0:00-3:50ish, neat pads/sound scapes, samples used. I feel as if the clips of (unsure what it is) clicking/scraping could have been cut up and separated panning wise. Parts sounded smooth, others bit rougher, sounded like some granular editing/bit map editing took place. If so, kudos for delving into it. If not, well it sounds like it. I was fond of the hints of bird-eque nature sounds throughout. I found myself thinking a very sharp plucking ound could hit at an ymoment with a long trailing reverb, and fit in perfectly. I wasn' given that plenitude.

3:50 transition feels more like the swap over from one song to another then that of a coherent blend. One section fades out while the other fades in, and it isn't the smoothest of swap up. I think simply entertwiing the patterns more so and twining the fade in/out of the instruments to be a bit slower/individual from one another would make up for it.

One of your synths post 3:50 has a gritty edge to it, it sounds like a square wavey sound. Unsure if I like it, the high pitched arp has a bit of a tinny edge too.

4:30 roughly reminded me of Secede.

5:35 might be my headphones, but low ends are hardly present. The soft change in synth filters and compositional movements are nice. I feel things could sound fuller, but I'm kind of a turd-meister for always trying to buff things up in that reguard. Minimalisms not really a strenght of mine. :P I do feel however the arpping nature and continued playstyle alot of the instruments drone on a fair bit, that something that was more sporatic could give for a pleasant contrast that wasn't chosen by you.

7:05 your arpping main lead has a note that cuts like 1/16th of a note off. Its a bit of a hitch.

7:53 once more the transition from driving arps to sustained note feels a little too unbuilt up to for my liking. The following airy sounds after though work, its a smoother transition from held note to wind, then that of arps to sustained note. I don't know what to suggest other then simply a more layered approach to the transition. Say having a clone of the instrument playing a droned note slowly fade in, while the arps fade out, so it isn't purely a playstyle change, but one of volume/reverb drness or something else as well.

9:30 sounds like PWM / binaural beat modding, or intentional destructive harmonics. Its neat. I feel as if production wise the distorted shifting sound could be much more engaging if it had its higher frequencies reverberating or delayed so to fill up the high end a bit more.

10:40 bit crusher movement is evident, and has some clicking. It sounds like the steps of the automation can be heard, and the clicking sounds like the plugin doesn't support the automation. It sounds good admittedly, but it similarly to me sounds like some mistakes

11mins ish, I like the eerie ambiance an awful lot.

11:45 drop off is really nice a change from the elevating sound. I felt pacing wise there could be a bit of a gap after that of near silence before the introduction of the next section. This transition while I don't fully agree with the pacing/timing (given the last sentance), does maneuver much more smoothly.

13:40 there is a detuned sounding siren. Very nice. Alot of the sounds used throughout are very muffled, reverbated, obcured in some way. Long sustained, long to drone out. I really wish there were more sharp sounds that were in a psycho acoustical foreground, it would make the peice far more captivating I think.

15:38 vocal synthy blip is almost one of those sharper sounds I was hoping for.

Song ending as an individual piece is kind of weak, but given its ambient, they tend to be dependent on what follows after.

-

Work on transitions more. I know working on a long peice can often become cumbersome given the sheer girth, and to listen to and evaulate your own work becomes awfully difficult, but it is absolutely necessary. Not all transitions in this song were equally strong as they could have been, and I think for fulfilling a strong ambient peice, there needs to be a high level of attention focused on cohesion.

FatKidWitAJetPak responds:

wow. That's the longest review I have ever seen, thanks a whole lot! Anyway, I'll try and cover everything you said in a short summary...

Basically, I see you looked into this track on an extreme technical level. The thing is, I purposely put in seemingly mistakingly created sounds on purpose. I personally find it to be as coherent as possible. Since it is a ambient / experimental track, I tried to stray away from normal expected structures and techniques. I also wanted it to sound fairly random at points, representing my bipolar attitude. This song eerily describes BPD, a chemical bipolar disorder I was diagnosed with earlier this year, in musical form. It is also a sort of journey track, telling a story depending on how the listener feels. Not everything is suppose to be perfectly pieced on a technical level. Although, spent the majority of the time mastering this track.

I really appreciate the review, and will certainly look into high pitched pings for distraction elements. I am trying to use only my ideas, however, and will therefore try to simply develop a more memorable and recognizable melody in my next track, although I purposely didn't include very many recognizable melodies in this song to replicate the deep and dark drone feeling of the ambient soundscape I was trying to create.

Thanks again!

[/M: Cyrogenical]

My review, your song:

Kicks kind of dull, it to my ear sounds similar to the FL preset base one. Wether it is or isn't its evoking a negative thought in my head. :P I think a crunchier kick would have done well in the song, then use the low end of the one you have for its body so to speak. It is an easy way to get the timbre you may want (dunno if you had a strugle with the kick or not). Grab 2 kicks, one full bodied deep one and one with a sharp attack and mix the two using the details of each for one another. I find electric/synthy kicks matched with sampled drums attacks gets a good sound.

Early bass sound, unsure what it is, I'm assuming 3xosc. I think you could probably afford to compress it up. Its god a good saw-grit to it but it sounds like the filter settings are clamping its output down an awful lot. Worth trying with the 3xosc, or any synth really is to be very delicate with the filter/resonance ASDR and instead use effects in the mixer rather than in the synth itself to produce the texture/timbre you want. I've found the filter settings on 3xosc to be rather limiting myself at times when I want to get all funky.

1:00 the drums are very engaging. More panning diversity would make it move around a bit more. Another suggestion for trying out in the future is to take a single drum sound and seperate by frequency its panning. Say the wooden click-ish sound had its lower range sounds panned left and its high end panned right, you can get a very simple rhytmhn to become very enveloping ounding without much work done in terms of the writing itself. EQUO works for thi with its pan option, a bit crushing plugin called redu(p)cer works aswell (and is IMO a cleaner sound).

1:10ish, your instrumentation choices all layer quite nicely. Lot of good decisions made. I do not know how you've mixed this but I'd make sure not to clamp down high ends with the EQs, nor reduce the reverb/delay allowed frequency outputs. I found outside from some of the percussion instruments, there wasn't alot of definition in the high end until 2:40. In future projects if you drop a parametric eq on the master and look at whats playing, sometimes you can fill a higher register just by cloning an instrument and doubling up raised an octave. Bit of layering can help cheat your way to a more full sound if thats what you desire.

2:33 is a nice fluffly filter shifty majigger. Feel free to include some details about what you did there in a response. Thats right Mich, I'm assigning you homework in a review.

Fade out boo. Lazy.

Mich responds:

Kick: It's not the preset base one for starters. I actually aimed for a pretty thin click-y kick, to get the minimal sound. It is in fact a layer of 2 samples: A 909 kick of which I've cut off a bit of the decay with a volume envelope, and one that's called "HOUSEKIK", of which I've used more or less the mid, or punch if you will. To add to that, I used to spend without exaggerating half an hour or more on crafting a kick to get the right punch. That lead me to end up with a bit of a drum line and barely anything melodic by the time ear fatigue kicked in, so I started spending less time tweaking the kick and more time just making a song. Thanks for the tip on mixing a synth kick with sampled ones, that should give nice results in the future.

The early bass sound is actually NI Massive, simply because I dislike the sound of 3xOsc's base saw. You'd think they would sound the same, being basic wave shapes and all, but they don't. I usually make a nice base sound with synthesizers and then spice it up to often make it sound completely different using the mixer insert effect. However, I wanted to keep it minimal again, so I opted for this very thin saw here, as a bit of an introduction to the deeper bass. If I recall correctly, I was trying to imitate some elements of another song I had recently heard. Obviously I didn't quite pull it off and made something completely different, but hey, isn't that what being an artist is about? Anyway, I digress and I need to keep an eye on my character limit.

Damnit, people have mentioned the panning things more than once but I forget about it every single time. I'll make a note saying "PANNING" and pin it to my bulletin board so I don't forget. Nice idea splitting the frequency range up and panning them differently. I've been playing with splitting synths over multiple channels to have different effects on different ranges, making it a whole complex mess of sound, but the simplest thing like panning I haven't done. I'll look into EQUO, I don't think I've ever really used it. For bit crushing I usually use Fruity Squeeze.

I hadn't actually realized how much this was lacking in the high end. I mostly fill that up with a pad or something, but because I wanted to keep this minimal, I haven't added pads, and kept it low on synthesizers as well, as to not have the thing all over the place.

2:33: That's actually as simply as lowering the cut-off on a LP filter. Another subtle thing was bringing in the delay effect ever so slightly for just a moment, and then back down when it kicked it again. You can tell what delay effect I'm talking about at 1:55, it builds up from there. The idea is to just make it all a mess, filter it away and make it kick back in, but clean again.

Fade out, lazy indeed. Sorry. :( I was too uninspired to come up with a decent outro.

FANX for the wonderful helpful review once again. I booted to Windows and opened the project in FL just for you, so feel special. :3