EctiBot's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[The Chase Begins]

I remember judging your A.I.M piece last year, and yet again you are able to perfectly portray the atmosphere you are going for. The mixing is top notch, the sound design is amazing and the atmosphere in this is of the chart. Great work! Take my follow, and I hope you continue to submit music on here :D. Alltid fint å ha en annen nordmann på newgrounds ;).

erlendflatin responds:

Thanks for your kind words :) I will try and upload more of my stuff on Newgrounds, I upload a new track on my youtube every Friday. So I will probably upload some of my earlier works here, but on a set schedule, so maybe 1 track per week or something.

Aner ikke hvor hvem andre som er nordmenn her, veit du om det er mange på Newgrounds?

[Broken Game]

This is a really interesting track! The mixing is a bit chaotic though. at 0:15 the bass suddenly gets heavily compressed. I don't know if you did it on purpose or if the kick just ocmpletely kills everything else. The kick btw is way to bassy. It completely dominates everything in the song, making it really difficult to hear the other elements. When you bost the low-end too much, it just ends up compressing the high-frequencies in the track. Really adivce you to take a complete different approach for the kick, boosting the low-end doesn't make a kick more powerful, it's the high-end of a kick that gives it that pumped up sound. Really difficult to comment on the other aspects of the mix when I barely can hear them, but the hats and especially the claps doesn't really blend that well into the mix.
The tracks get very repetetive after a while as you basically play the same melody over and over with very little variation. There's nothing wrong with repetition in music, but to make it work you either have to have a very intriguing melody, or make tiny variations at times. I also think this track could use som extra elements, as right now you pretty much just have a single bass with percussion over it. Also, as this is a video game track you should also try to have some dynamics in your track. You could have som calm and some energetic parts for example. This contrast is very important in all types of music, but especially in music that's made for games.

You do certainly have an interesting idea going on here, but the mixing isn't of a high standard and I felt like it could really use some more work. Remember to carefully mix your low-end to make sure that your mix doesn't become muddy. I know that this review and score might seem harsh, but rather than feeling angry or discouraged about it I hope you consider my adivce as I did have the exact same problems in terms of mixing and arrangement when I started out, and it took some very harsh reviews from some very skilled musicians to make me improve, and remember, I wouldn't take the time to write a review like this if I didn't want to help. Keep it up :).
-Ectisity

FGK2015 responds:

About the mixing, I never focused on the mixing one bit. :P

Variation here was a problem and so was the melody as there either was none or too much (whichever sounds best).

[Strong Force]

In the first chipscompo this was one of the tracks I felt had the most potential. Still, there are a lot of problems with the mix that detracts from the quality of the track, and I'll try to specifically describe why it bothers me.

First of all, the mix is a bit muddy. Mud in a mix mainly originates from the low end of the tracks, and you get mud because lower frequencies that normally are barely audible clash with each other. To avoid this problem you the lowest frequencies that you don't need from all of your synths. I advise you to go through every single mixing channel and listen closely to each instrument individually. Try to cut all unwanted frequencies, both audible and non-audible. A common mistake many people do when they begin to learn mixing is that they don't recognize how non-audible frequencies destroys the mix. when you have a lot of different elements.
Also, to me it sounds a bit like you at times boost the higher frequencies of your leads in order for them to stand out. If you ever have to boost frequencies because your lead doesn't sound clear in the mix, consider lowering the same frequencies from the other elements in your track like the bass our pad. You very rarely want to aggressively boost frequencies unless it has to do with sounddesign. It's always better to lower frequencies rather than boosting them.

Also the kick sound could do with some improvement. Though a kick often is considered to be an element that reigns over the low-end, that doesn't mean that it shouldn't shine through in the mid and high frequencies. The "umph" feel that you get from a lot of kicks in EDM songs and especially dubstep comes from the higher frequencies. If you boost the bass frequiencies too much however, the high frequencies completely disappear in the mix and thus the kick-sound ends up sounding very dull.

I know I'm a bit harsh, but I'm honestly only trying to help, and I honestly wouldn't spend all this time writing this review if I wasn't. The main issue with the track lies in the mixing being chaotic. There of course other things that could be improved as well, but before I can comment on any of that, I really believe you should focus on improving your mixing skills. I recommend that you take time with each and every element in your track seperately and make sure that they sound good together. If there's something you don't like, fix it straight away even if it's only a minor issue. In mixing, many minor issues tend to become a major one once they all arelayered on top of eachother. Also I adivce you to listen to your mix on different speakers before finalizing it. If the mix sound good on a laptop speaker, it will sound good anywhere, but if the mix only sounds good on your cheap or expensive headphones, that means that it might not sound as good on my headphones. The goal is that you want your mix to sound good regardless of the equipment of the listener, and this is something I'm still working on getting down.

Keep up the good work :). There's some really interesting elements in this, and I believe that you have a lot of potential that can be realized if you dilligently continue to learn more about music production :).
- Ectisity

[BrightSide]

Ahh, I remember this! Great work with the drums in this, and the melodies are really neat. Think you could have experimented a bit more with the melodies in this, because some are a lot better than others. Especially the solo part at 1:20 has some melodies that sounds a bit too random.
I really like the bass sound in this, but it sounds a bit seperated from the rest of the track. Hard to explain, but it feels like it hits me in my throat for some reason. It's probably because you didn't want the bass to clash with your lead, but it is a bit disturbing to me. Might just be me though.
The mix sound a tiny bit chaotic at times. I think this is mainly due to the bas, but the hi-pads you use clash with the lead because they both fight over the clarity frequencies from 2k - 4k. I would probably dampen the high frequencies of the pad a tiny bit and maybe mess a bit with the stereo field to ensure that the lead and pad arent fighting eachother.

Overall a really solid and original track. Hope you make more like this for chipscompo :D!

LunacyEcho responds:

=> solo melodies

Ahh for that solo I was trying to do a bit more of a rhythmic focus! I guess that makes the lack of melodic focus apparent :P :P

=> bass sound

The bass sound here was inspired by funky slap basses—except I don't have any of those, so I tried to make a similar sound using a synth. :P

=> lead clash with hats

Ooh, I never thought about doing that. I don't have much experience in mixing and mastering, so this isn't the kind of thing I'd look out for naturally, but I'll definitely do that in future songs!

Thanks so much for the review, Ectisity! And good luck in the NGADM :) :)

[NGADM 2017 Auditions Podcast]

NGADM HYPE!!
Your voice is smexy btw, you should do more podcasts!

ChronoNomad responds:

Haha, thanks a bunch, Ectisity! I think it's safe to say that there will be more. :D

[Lunatic]

really cool soundesign and some interesting melodies. The arrangement is a bit repetetive, try varying up your climax-es. Please turn off the limiter and lower the volume of your synths, this track is both too loud and overcompressed. ALWAYS make sure that your track never goes over 0db both with and without any limiter or mastering plugin. This is incredibly important for EDM, I can't stress that enough.

Overall a good and funky track.

[Misdirection]

This would have actually destroyed us all if you had submitted it XD.
Absolutely an amazing and unique piece. This is such an incredible mash of genres that it creates something entirely new. Really like the direction you went for with this. A fantastic piece of art :D.

zybor responds:

sorry i didn't reply to your review in a while. been busy week since our department was hit with IT problem and i didn't even got time for NG. (suck to be a sysadmin)

thank you very much for your review dude! :D

[Desolate Dream]

As i already told you in CHIPS, this is beautiful. Hope I one day will be able to make an entire piano composition as beautiful sounding as this :)

LucidShadowDreamer responds:

Oh, you certainly can! You have a great sense of melody, after all. Naturally, it's easier for me to get a dynamic sound since I actually play like all of my piano tracks. But you can do it in a DAW too, SoundChris is proof of that!
Thanks for reviewing/listening to it again!

[AIM - Chris, the Boat and the Tormented Sea]

No words. Simply amazing, omg.
Just played this randomly on the subway on my way home for work, and I almost cried. Just too beautiful.

LucidShadowDreamer responds:

Aww, thank you, dude ^___^
I'm glad that you liked it so much!