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Okay, I'm sorry, but I've been here for quite some time and this is the most insane feedback I have ever seen on any music forum anywhere. Whether you find his track "cliche" or not is completely irrelevant to making a quality track and in dance music in general, there are very specific basslines, sounds etc. that define the sub-genre in question and as such listeners expect to hear them and they also play to timbres strength. You actually recommend he undergo shock therapy to be "forget whatever he knows about music". For real? I don't know what you're smoking, but pass some of that this way. ANYWAY Here's a few problems: • The bass synth is pretty cheesy. See if you can find or create a deeper sound with a bit more sustain. • Timaeus talks about the lack of melodic contour. This can be solved by having using strong voice leading in your lines and correct utilization of non-chord tones. Here is a good list of the types of non-chord tones that create dissonance and how to resolve them. • The lead synths sit above your voice, playing a different melody and this is a problem because our ear is naturally most perceptive to the highest frequency in the piece. As such, it's easy to lose focus of your voice and just start listening to the synth. • Past the 1 minute mark, you have these low organ-sounding chords going on at the same time as that high synth, creating significant gap. Further regarding overtones, that synth is voiced considerably higher than your singing voice and organish patch. As harmonies are played lower, they should be spread out farther apart; as they go higher in pitch, they should be closer together. You have a great voice, though! Keep it up man!

This is not really my type of music, so I can't really judge the track itself, but as a casual listener I have to say that I have heard something very similar a lot of times. Lacking originality might be a problem of referencing and isolating yourself in what you like and know. There's a good video about this problem in Hollywood action blockbusters that may or may not be your case: I had a similar situation two weeks ago: For gaming school project one each student had to come up with a plot for a game. Nothing big, just 3-5 pages. Most students had problems, some couldn't even think about something that was a screaming cliché. I turned in a 13 page plot and apologized to the teacher for only having the backbone due to time constraints. They were surprised and asked me how did I do it. I just told them that I had a lot of references (at least 20 book plot points and arguments, from children's book to hard philosophy, a life long of JRPGs, movies, TV shows, cartoons, animes and tabletop RPGs to get stories from). Try listening to different stuff from different people's recommendations, even if you don't like it. I forced myself to sit down and listen to Bieber and 1D once just to see if I could figure out why they are so successful (turns out they aren't really as shit as people make them sound and can actually sing). This week I'm going with classical composer Tarrega and before that I was having a go at jazz. And before that I had a full Fury Road OST appreciation week. If you are lazy or has time constraint, I recommend a shock theraphy of mathrock/mathmetal to forget whatever you think you know about music: And this is just the tip of the weird stuff. Do PM me if you want some weird stuff to listen to. If you really don't want to go beyond your comfort zone, last option would be listening to remixes of stuff you already like and find out which remixes you dig and which are totally unbearable. This way you can find out what makes the track unique for you and can try working from remixes from that and before you see it, it has become something else. As far as composing goes, I usually feel more comfortable with an audio editor finding the notes and rhythm at random than writing it on paper. But this might be just me. Good luck.

Kinda what Jorito said about critical listening, but here's my take on a list of relevant tips/tricks in order to critically listen: For an overall perspective on structure, try turning off your screen and playing a song (or close your eyes), so that you can't physically see where you are in a song that you are listening to (especially if it's on soundcloud, which has a waveform display). I sometimes suggest this to people who may be struggling to write less repetitive structures, so that they can work on knowing when to create a shift in the dynamics or sound design. Try importing a song into your DAW, then using an EQ plugin to filter out frequencies that are distracting you from a particular instrument you want to analyze. That may help you hear the actual notes, if the instrument is hard to hear at first. Try recreating a small part of a song (or even an entire song?), in composition and the sounds themselves. That should train your ear to pick out parts, from both the compositional perspective and the sound design perspective. It'll also help you learn new techniques that should hopefully improve your compositional skills. For example, I learned how to sequence a cello by listening to this song, and recreating (and also modernizing) it as this in the process. It also made me realize how complex strings layering can be. (Besides that, I had tried that the year previous to then, and I quit trying. When I tried again a year later, that's what I made, which is how I knew my ears were seriously improved.) Mark down particular spots in a song where transitions occur, to work on transitions. Then, try to pick out each instrument and see how it helps make the transition work. More of what I said on this can be found here (which you've seen). If you don't have a MIDI keyboard, get one (for general non-virtuosic piano use, 37 - 49 semi-weighted keys with modwheel and pitchwheel is probably fine)! It's where many ideas get borne accidentally (or at least, mine). If you do, try thinking of the feel of a chord in your head, and try playing the chord just by knowing how it feels in your head. This is a way to train your ear to think of chords that work together in a progression, just by having a vague idea of how you want the harmonies to feel along the way (are they contemplative? Ominous? Silly?). Listen to new music every now and then. If you just listen to the same influences, you probably won't know what other inspiring stuff is out there. I like hearing inspiring sound demos like the stuff from http://soundcloud.com/isworks (particularly the Ventus Tin Flute, Turkish Oud, Stroh Violin, and other unusual or World instruments). For instance, this track inspired me to write this ReMix in 3 weeks or so.

Ooh check it out! Nintendo's online service is apparently going to offer various classic games (more than one a month) Netflix-style with your online subscription. "Nintendo Switch Online includes ongoing access to a library of classic games you can take anywhere!" I brought up this exact thing (not originally my idea, but still) a few months ago:

Quick comment. Cool mood. Piano and strings are quite stiff. Humanize. This should probably be dealt with both in sound design (envelopes, velocity sensitivity) and in the actual writing (velocities, timings).

Critical listening and transcription are very useful tools to learn how stuff works. There's a lot to be learned from music you already love. Pick one of your favo tracks, listen critically to it. What is the core genre? How is it structured? What different instruments do you hear? How does it flow from part to part? How are the instruments placed in the mix? Also try transcribing (by ear) the song (or parts of it) yourself to get an intimate understanding of how things are done. This is a biggie and takes time, but it's worth it. If you haven't done it before, start with just the chords or the bass of a slow song. These are just some options, you can go as deep as you want with it, and for me personally it works a lot better than analysing sheet music, learning notation or music theory, simply because I'm pretty much a hands-on kinda person.

Sounds like a soft sine pad with chorus, maybe some FM. The first chord is A# D F G, an A#6 chord. It's then shifted to a C6 and a G#6 afterwards. In terms of the sound design... I made something kinda like it with a sine wave with a little bit of the first overtone, detuned with eleven voices, and added some chorus and plenty of reverb. There's also a breathy FM layer on top, so I used a default Ah choir from Omnisphere as a substitute. There's a little bit of motion, so I just put some mild slow vibrato, but adding some slight tremolo via an external plugin may be better. It would be even closer if you put an FM oscillator in there, using the sine oscillator as the modulator. For the ADSR envelope, a slow attack of course, but also a long release. https://app.box.com/s/mcrlv5v5z55rjgwyol31zd16ecw6uquk

Sounds like a layered but not too complex pad soundscape to me. I'm sure you could get pretty close results even with free VSTIs like DSK ChoirZ and some external reverb 'n' delay plugins and some movements/automations in the stereo panorama.

Looks AWESOME. I'm very excited to see what they've done with this. The music for the trailer seems appropriately creepy and tense - hopefully this is an indication of the kind of music in the actual show. I wonder if we will hear any of the CVIII soundtrack remixed in this - it would be a shame if we didn't hear Beginning somewhere in there, being Trevor's theme and all. I'm not sure why everyone is disappointed with the anime style. What's wrong with it? Forgive my lack of terminology, but it seems like they went with a Ninja Scroll-esque approach, which doesn't seem wrong to me... were we expecting uber-CG or something?

Super general rule of thumb: Contrast. Contrast is everything in making an effective transition between parts. The more different the sections, the more likely it'll be considered a new section to the listener's mind. if you're having trouble making something sound like a transition, drop out more elements, change more items until things sound very different from what came prior (yet has enough motivic elements to keep the track sounding relevant to your arrangement). It's a tricky balance, but contrast is the one big item that makes one section sound different from another. A really cheap trick? At the end of one section, drop everything out, then have the next section come in at full strength again. There's really no greater amount of contrast than from going from nothing to everything. Don't overuse it or else the track sounds repetitive, but it's a nifty tool to have under your belt. You probably know this intuitively, since you use it in your latest posted track (yout Lemmings remix, at 3:15), but perhaps hearing it spelled out can help you understand how to use it in the future, as well. There's a whole study on this particular element of music theory, called Temporal Gestalt Perception (or musical segmentation). It's some heavy reading, but if you get through it there's some useful insight on how to parse music into defineable segments. For the super technical among us the theory has issues in it's applicability (since there's no way to properly weigh how much an individual count things like timbre, dynamics and harmony as 'different enough'), but the concept is pretty sound: we hear contrast as something that separates the music into sections. Hope that helps!

The MIDI is set at 350 in 2/2, so technically it's 175 in 4/4, but I slowed it down a bit regardless; it's goes by like a blip and it's over. XD

Thanks Timaeus! A lot of your critiques are very helpful, but I am glad you like the vocals. That one I just figured out eventually and learned how to layer a bit (but it was pretty awful before). To me, your points bring up one of my major flaws: lack of variation, and complexity, especially in composition, structure, and arrangement. I also have started to notice I can be negligent of mixing in a... less irritating way. Most of my songs are made in a heavily "improvised" manner, I play most of the bits myself on a small keyboard (like 2 octaves, its ridiculous, I should get a better one sometime) and because of that I think I end up repeating the same rhythms, contours, and basically the same bag of tricks over and over. My plan is to get a heavier focus on composition, going to pen and paper music notation before making a track, and learning a lot more about music theory wherever I can. Thanks for your help!

Late again, what's good? Your gameplays seem fine, no glaring issues. No worries if the face cam rate doesn't match game rate: if you followed the resample advice, you won't have any blurring between frames, and things won't look noticeably jaggy as long as any source is at least around 30fps. Cams are tricky, though: some may say they record at 30, but actually record at 15 and then just double the frames... not cool. One thing about your face camming that I've noticed is the wide variation in color and lighting in each vid, which is natural considering you're recording indoors from, I suppose, a living room or bedroom, but they could use more quality and consistency. Proper lighting wherever you can, and/or good color correction wherever you can't, will work wonders, but that's outside the scope of the advice I can offer right now; I can't claim to be an expert on it at any rate, but know that Vegas has many great tools for color correction, including Color Corrector and White Balance. I'm sure there are good tutorials out there for it; maybe I can link something later.

It's a music production workshop, that's why it's not there.