STEPHEN4705's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[Sleepness Nights (wip)]

I love the vocals and guitar. Nice lyrics. Very nice upload here Josh.

All I'll say is remove a small part of the vocals. Theres a little croak about 50 seconds in, and it's quite loud. But it's a WIP, so whatever. I love when the drums come in as well.

Fantastic sounding demo, I beg of you, let me know when the full thing is done, I'd love to have a copy!

SuperGoodSound responds:

yeah - there were definitely some weird little vocal things going on. it was slapped together really quickly. Even a ton of the extra production I did in adding strings and such was rather messy

[Spaced Out (Inst.)]

This is sweet. I love the pads/pianos in this. Drums kinda remind me of flying lotus a little. A DL and a fav from me :D

Stavier responds:

Thanx you good, I'm especially glad you liked the pads since I experimented with the mixing of various pads together :D

[SmK- Count Me Out Preview]

Fantastic. I forgot about your stuff, which I regret largely. This is brilliant!

[Dubstep for miles]

Excellent. I love the 90s club-dance feel this has, digging the bass noise especially so. Keep up the good work!

Just a word of warning though, try and get your classification right. This is a little more dancy than dubsteppy. Doesn't make the song any worse but knowing this website, somebody will have a go at you for doing that.

[Norato - Back than (v1.1)]

It's a pretty good song to be fair. Composition wise it's good (barring the little fast high melody which to me just feels a little awkward). The background synths are pretty nice, but the whole thing sounds a little odd in terms of the volumes. The kicks, for example, are barely audible. For a house track, you're gonna want to boost the kicks to roughly the same level as the bass, perhaps even a little more. The hats too are somewhat difficult to hear in the mix of the synths towards the end of. They don't need to be in the foreground so much, but I think your track would benefit from having them louder.

The intro sounds pretty good, but I think the main synths in the beginning are really overpowered with reverb, so you might want to tone it down a little bit.

Nice use of automation at the one minute mark. The build up to the drums is very nice.

Overall though it's a pretty good song. Certainly better than a lot of songs on the Audio Portal. My complaints are pretty insignificant otherwise.

Ste :D

[DS Beat V2.0]

It's honestly not that bad. To me personally, it somewhat resembles the soundtrack from a game called platypus which was basically comprised of C64 remixes. Honestly not a bad sounding song at all though, just gets a little repetitive in places.

Pretty nice :D

[KKS - Nothing Less [rmx]]

Stunning sounding song, absolutely love the synths on the intro. Drumwork is absolutely brilliant, love the build up and layering of sounds, and the fact that you can still hear everything despite the sheer amount of synth melodies piling up on top of each other.
To me, whilst listening to it, I sort of get the wierd image of a futuristic city building itself from the ground up, one building at a time, I dunno xD

Brilliant sounding song at any rate. Its nice to see an ambient song on newgrounds with a bit of bite to it, a lot (including myself) tend to forget about the existance of percussion whilst making this sort of genre, and its refreshingly different to hear an ambient piece with a somewhat stronger, less ambiguous rythm about it.

Hats off to you sir, this is bloody brilliant :)

KKSlider60 responds:

Thank you sir, for your kind words and review ^^
Hope you enjoy the rest of my works too, as well as Antiskill's.
KKS

[Escaping the Black Hole]

Needs a bit of work, and I hope that by reading this I can give some advice.

First of all, the drums seem to follow quite an odd pattern. Rather than going KICK KICK KICK KICK with a simoultaeonous PAUSE CLAP PAUSE CLAP, Try going for a more traditional drumloop. Pendulums a pretty good band to follow an example of drumloops. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtKhX6 Zd_Hk
Notice the kick-kick snare (hats) kick-snare style. This is a pretty useful pattern to follow, and on your sequencer should look a bit like this.

x = Sound placed
Number = Pause

Kick x2x4 1234 12x4 1234
Clap 1234 x234 1234 x234
OpenHat 1234 1234 x234 1234
Closed Hat x2x4 x2x4 x2x4 x2x4

That'll normally work for most DNB tracks, and is pretty much that pattern there, minus some of the extra percussion pendulum have in there.

In terms of how else to improve your track, I reccomend a less awkward melody, unless your going for something prodigy like. If so, you might just want to choose a different preset. The chimes in the middle sound a bit awkward, and I personally would remove them.

Also, everything is really far too loud for its own good. I'm geussing you may be working on laptop speakers, and boosting everything to a more hearable volume. If so, get some headphones. If not, just make sure your song doesn't distort like it does when the second set of kicks come in. The piano melody (to me) is by far the nicest thing about this track, its a nice sound, quite a decent melody, but its far too loud and distorts and overpowers the other elements of the track.

I hope that I've helped here, if you need anything else feel free to private message me and I'll see what I can do :)

Certainly not bad for a first attempt though, keep it up!

Zirocket-8 responds:

Thank you SO MUCH. You don't know how much you've helped.

I'll work on my next piece with your advice.

Zirocket-8

[[LY] The Far Deep (clip)]

I felt it would've been rude of me to not give a review back after the amazing one you sent my way. I dig this, the bass is freaking fantastic. No kidding about the deep end of it, but the low pitched-ness of it certainly feels appropriate in this. Love the sound of the sweep, great sounding drums. Feels like more /could/ be added to it, but it sounds great as it is already. Love how you can hear the sub bass even through headphones as well :D

la-yinn responds:

Hey man, can't thank you enough for the kind words. :-)

I know, there could be added more, and there *will* be added more! I'm really diggin this one myself and I want to make it a proper tune, haha.

Thanks for reviewing!

[Act II: Scene One]

Cleverly titled.

If I remember correctly, act 2 scene 1 is the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, isn't it? It's beautifully put together, the piano melody is fantastic, the guitar sounds brilliant, love how much effort that has gone into this. It fits perfectly with the animation it was used in, but it certainly stands up by itself as a standalone piece of music.

Its been a while since I've seen a song of this quality on the audio portal. People like you are the reason I've learned to play the guitar. Not big name bands from the 80s, NG Audio portal users, small, local YouTubers, and other smaller names. Although, quite frankly, this deserves far more than what its been given. Amazing score for a beautifully made animation, you have really truly done an excellent job here.

Thank you for posting this here.

10/10
Fav'd
Again, this is just simply brilliant. Excellent composition here.