Here's some feedback from me on this month's submissions:
LibreMusicChallenge #28: OctaSine - Review
A-Lin - Revolution
- Composition
- Chord changes simple but with enough unusual choices to keep interest
- Main melody doesn't stick in your head much but is pleasant, maybe too many big interval jumps. The melody from ~ 01:52 and ~ 03:00 is a good hook.
- Bass parts are a bit un-inventive.
- Sound Design
- Some obvious FM-y sounds, like the bell at 2:30, which is fitting for the challenge.
- Nice saw strings/pads
- Vibrato on the lead sounds gives them a nice melancholic quality.
- Snare has too much noise.
- I like the snare rim-shots with delay.
- I think I know were these toms came from
- Production
- Striking but clean reverb sound
- Good subtle use of panning
- Drum fills bring some liveliness into an otherwise very quantised feel.
- Good progression of density of arrangement and weight of parts
- Generally many (too many?) high-frequency elements and not much in the mid-range, so it all sounds rather pristine and maybe somewhat cold.
- Atmosphere
- This sounds melancholic but bitter-sweet to me.
- Maybe "elegiac" is the right word.
- I don't understand the relation too the title, though
MyLoFy - Rusty Waves
- Composition
- MyLoFy is a master of bringing interest to a simple chord vamp or progression, but I sometimes feel his songs are going nowhere and I do like music with a story.
- The lead line introduced first at ~ 0:45 is the most memorable element and it's good that we get a few variations of this.
- Execution
- Sound Design
- This is just excellent, so many SFX, bleeps, sweeps and stabs...
- Especially that crash sound!
- Some sounds have a grainy texture to them, which I like.
- Production
- There is *a lot * happening in this track, IMO too much, it gets too gimick-y after some time.
- All the individual SFX are great, though.
- A lot of work must have gone into the precise timing of all these effects.
- Too much loudness optimisation for my taste
- Atmosphere
- This is very playful, even showing off.
- Interesting mix of vintage sounds and modern "hyper"-production elements
Trumpetrespas - Idk What To Call This Song
- Composition
- Lead melodies don't leave any space and are meandering without any pauses.
- Hi-Hat changes from quarter to eighth notes at a seemingly arbitrary point.
- There is some sense of progression as additional arrangement elements come in and drop out again, but it all is rather aimless.
- Sound Design
- Very basic
- More effort should have gone into making the sounds less penetrating.
- Production
- Lead sounds way to loud.
- There seems to be no post-processing with any effects at all
- Atmosphere
- Look ma, I bought this old Soundblaster keyboard at Walmart!
Nyx Eles - Rapture
- Composition
- Atmosphere more important than composition here, I think.
- Simple scale or interval-based lead elements, which gain interest by layering and juxtaposition.
- Sound Design
- Most sounds instantly recognisable as FM
- I like the combination of the droney pad and the pitch-bendy lead starting at ~ 00:57
- Production
- Good sounding but rather bare-bones
- Seems more a sketch than a fully fleshed out track.
- Atmosphere
- I get a feeling of despondency rather than "Rapture".
Spotlight Kyd - It's Late
My submission was put together rather quickly (for me) in two days without much pre-planning.
The inspiration, maybe somewhat surprising, came from one of Chopin's Preludes. I was trying to find a similar minor-chord-based bass line as one of the slower preludes has and for that I needed a piano-like sound in OctaSine. Wurlitzer sounds are rather easy to make with FM synths, so I quickly came up with a rather good sounding one, I think.
If you add chorus to such a sound and play minor chords in eighth notes, it automatically sounds like Supertramp, so I followed that avenue and decided to use mostly sounds, which try to emulate "real" instruments.
After I had a basic chord progression and arrangement for the intro and verse, I experimented with different instrument sounds for a lead melody, e.g. some saxophone or oboe-like sounds and synthy leads. For that I tried to use my Akai EWI wind controller, which ended up being used for the horn/synth-brass sound in the intro.
I then decided to try to make some guitar sounds in OctaSine and when I put that through Neural Amp Modeller with a Fender Amp model, I got this Telecaster-like sound, which "clicked". I tried to use my Fishman TriplePlay guitar-to-MIDI adapter, but it didn't work that well and since I was in a hurry, I played the guitar parts just with the keyboard of my Yamaha MODX and its pitch wheel.
By that time it was already late Monday evening, so I had to finish up quickly, which is why the production and mixing is very rough and basic. There are still lots of timing errors and sloppily executed edits, and if I have had more time, I would have probably done many things differently (e.g. the drums sound much too electronic for the style of the track, IMO), but it is what it is now.
