timaeus222

Of course, but why shouldn't they be seamless? Unless they're following a Classical era standpoint, there should be transitions.

Really cool arrangement, guys! Add some transitions though! Sounds like four arrangements pasted together.

You should keep remixing. It's fun.

Got muddy at times, but other than that, nice and industrial-sounding! Cool atmosphere. I also liked the lil military shouts at the end.

Ah, the memories of writing this one with Kris over a whole year ago. I have to credit Kristina for writing that chord at 3:37 (and keeping it), and doing the precise edits to synth patches and bass sequencing I communicated to her from my iPad at school. Still fun to groove to! =D

Neat stuff man! At 4:09, I was like, "what is a whistle doing here? O.O" Great job! This is really fun, and you should do something of this sort again.

Nahhhh, it's just my way of saying "here's my review in case a mod doesn't show up as quickly as you'd like".

I'm actually pretty strongly believing that. V_V This would pass as it is on the basis of arrangement, that's a given, but there are certainly some nitpicks which are bound to show up that will resemble the things that I said. Some will be downplayed to a certain extent, others will be emphasized to a certain extent, but all of what I said just then were pretty minor nitpicks, at least to me. I think it makes total sense for this to at the very least get judged as successful enough in the panel, because there are some very neat harmonic additions and meter changes to the source tunes that contributed to the flow and cohesiveness of the arrangement. There's plenty to like here. In other words, Y U NO LET ME BE NICE?

That would certainly be an example of too minimal, yes; just hadn't checked on mobile til now. However, something can be well done objectively if it captures the eyes of many or most people and the attention to detail is high, but ugly by itself is subjective. Why it's ugly is objective if the why is technical details. And just to be clear, this isn't personal.

Yes, the banner could be eliminated and the rest of the site already illustrates what the banner shows, but it's a "featured" banner. It has its purpose: to show people the latest thing as soon as they load the page, before they do anything at all. Who wants to scroll through a big web page to find something? No one, if it's gigantic. I'm looking at it entirely objectively. Yes, it only shows demo reels and such, but the aesthetics are very well done. Even though the center banner will have laggy fades on low-performance computers, the only drawback is not its speed but its framerate, and that isn't that big a deal. Minimal is fine, if not an underdone design. If it's bare, it looks weird, but ugly is just entirely subjective. V_V Either way, minimal for mobile is a good idea. The less resources and distracting elements, the better for mobile.My point was that the resources that load in the background load when you don't see them. Thus you don't think about them, and they load while you aren't looking at them. Then when you do look at them, they're often already loaded into cache. That's the key. You don't immediately see the items that take the longest time to load, and you don't gain that impatience that web designers dread. tl;dr: I'm focusing on efficiency, and you're focusing on marketing.

I can certainly agree that the music video was really well done, so I of course had no issues with that being posted. It's definitely a fun remix, and it deserves that spotlight.

I like the design itself of fulginitivo, but damn, there are 8 youtube embeds on the main page. xD Again, dunno how that'll fly on mobile. Soooo many people have iPhones now, so optimizing for mobile got pretty important. The jQuery "slideshow" was great though. Wiberg's site is simplistic, but it works well for many types of browsers and very well for mobile because of that. Now, mobile-friendly websites don't *have* to be as simplistic as this, but it does help to have the landing page to have either a) as little memory-heavy content to load as possible, or as much of the memory-heavy content loading in the background as possible and the important content loading first (since computers read and process coding from top to bottom, putting the largest linked stylesheets, scripts, etc. at the bottom is pretty effective, and putting images within CSS helps them to load before the page loads fully). Vayron definitely has a very modern look. There are lots of little details like the dotted vertical bar on the right and the thin font that add to its sleek look, and my favorite here. Rockbarnvoices is also great. My only gripe is that the navigation's jQuery fading is laggy on the Home and the Showreels pages, even on this Mac OSX at my university's library. Seems like a lot of content to load on those two pages. So... my top pick of those four would definitely be Vayron, but Rockbarn is a close second.

Ah, okay, I got the source and remix name mixed up. Generally, a tightly processed electronic kick would have some compression with a fast attack, medium release, and maybe some extra gain. If you can, you could try parallel compression. All that means is you process part the signal and leave the other part dry; that way, one signal can be very compressed, and when mixed with the other, it balances out to "just enough". This can be done by creating a compression send, then routing a certain percentage to the master and the remaining percentage to the send. 40~55% wet mix is pretty typical, but feel free to try experimenting within 40~80% if that sounds better to you. Layering the kick itself is more or less a matter of taste, but generally, it should feel grounded, snappy, and "glued". Something kind of like this, perhaps.

No, I hear it too.

Hm, there's some clipping from the kick drum starting at 0:20 and the cymbals afterwards. It makes this sound louder than it actually is. Most evident at 0:59. This sounds somewhat like this in mood and genre.

There's a lot going on at once at 0:38 - 1:24, without a more careful volume hierarchy to allow each instrument to be relegated clearly to a specific part. You have a trebly saw arp, an octave-playing square-ish arp, that chippy sound you called the "ticking" sound, the bass's partwriting at 0:53, and a lead by the time you reach 1:10. Lots of trebly material fighting for attention. While this is more of a rhythm-centric piece than most, there still needs to be one or two instruments that capture the focus of the listener so that the general listener can follow what's going on. You'll need to pick and choose some parts you want to come through more and simplify those parts while slightly lowering the volume of the arpeggiated parts. A bunch of arpeggiated parts at the same time really demands a lot of attention when all of them are nearly the same volume. That aside, the kick could be stronger; it's somewhat of a generic dance kick at the moment, and while that isn't a bad idea in general, the execution is a little less strong than the sound design of the other elements. A kick like that one could work more in psytrance perhaps, but that wasn't your goal 'cause you don't have any 303's. Also, seeing the track name, I'm surprised there isn't a lot of noticeable cross-panning automation.

I'll be honest, I like the JMC example most, though it's the most generic looking (it looks like something pulled from a googleable "good website design" template and modified). Still looks good though. I didn't really like Brady Hales' design simply because it's flash, and mobile devices hate flash. In fact, iOS's have been switching over from emphasis on Flash to HTML5 for a bit over a year now. Brad Ziffer's main body container is pretty bright against the dark background, but I liked the graphics. Steve Blum's site is just... bad. It's old, outdated-looking, and it looks like one of those sites where the domain expired and you're led to a particular page after that. There's also a lot of animated material that would be sooooo slow on mobile. Your current website has a background that conflicts with the text (which is plain ol' Times New Roman in the body), and the text has nothing to help it sit in page nicely (like reverb letting an instrument sit in a mix). The background image is also 4 MB, which is gigantic for mobile devices to load. ~200KB max is a good guideline. Generally the website looks OK, but optimization for fast-loading is pretty important too, IMO.

I don't even know if Hollow came up with a name.

Happy Birthday!

Hm. I didn't get much time to do stuff, so basically all that happened is that I mastered Hollow's track and did some volume humanization, and... that's all. Ah well.

No Likes is much less degrading than a bunch of (1-6)/10 ratings. Depends on your standards, but I consider a 50% failing. Either a track is liked a little, some, or a lot, but since you don't know the extent of the "Like" by itself, you feel obligated to explain it. djp already talked about his preference for Likes without Dislikes, and I have been and still am very much agreeing that Likes is a good choice. The major issue with numerical ratings is pretty clear. If people only give numerical ratings, it may give them an excuse to not give a review, because let's face it: many people are lazy when given the opportunity unless it's a topic they're passionate about. You implied that yourself, right here: We don't know exactly what people are thinking or doing while they're listening to something, so for all we know, listeners could just give their numerical rating and go to sleep right afterwards without giving a review, thinking a number is enough of a "review". A numerical rating is a sparse opinion by itself, and not extremely helpful towards the improvement of the OCR community's musical skill. We want to know why something sounds good or bad, not that it simply sounds good or bad (that's the whole point of judging threads and mod reviews; to give the why). We want to keep improving and dishing out wonderful music for everyone to hear. Regardless of whether numerical ratings are optional or required, if they're there, then they'll still be there for some of the lazy to pick and some of the passionate to pick less. Out of all the people you know, what percentage is passionate enough about music to compose it? What percentage are they with respect to the entire world? Pretty small, hence it's a thing to pay musicians to write music. Saying you "Like" something is just like saying "This is cool to a certain extent because...", and thus it makes sense to provide a "because". Sometimes the "because" is "Just because", and sometimes it's a real reason. Regardless, "Likes" imply an ultimate reason, hidden to either the artist or the listener himself/herself (or both), while numerical ratings are concrete, concise, sparse opinions with some sort of reason to match the number. Human reason may or may not suggest that the number itself is self-sufficient. Likes are less hierarchical, and less impactful to any extremes.

I can't believe no one but me said "center of mass" in the entire list of answers.

A 1-10 rating would be either entirely degrading, partially degrading, partially good, or entirely good, but what you're implying is a rating by itself without a review. We like reviews. I did a speech about a year ago on music appreciation. Pretty much the whole class I spoke to said they don't quite know why they like their music, and they're all pretty casual. Thus, a casual listener generally goes off what they "simply like", so you know, "casual" listener --> into music just because "they like it", and then that equals no review. Why rate with numbers if you probably won't review? Just because YouTube did numerical ratings before doesn't mean we're totally 100% all for it. Hence, this deliberation.

Nice FM bass! I didn't think it was too loud except wherever it was meant to be the focus (e.g. no lead sound playing). That can easily be fixed with velocities (I presume it has that velocity sensitivity). Generally, the mixing is pretty good, but as the saying goes, everyone has room for improvement. One step up from here, I'd say, is either getting the part of the EQ having to do with the keypresses of the E. Piano to come through (low-mids warmth, and if it's of the tines, upper mids sparkle), layering on a warmer E. Piano sound, or both; then notching the FM bass at the same frequencies would accommodate that. The non-drums are pretty consistent with their general loudness across the board, and while the snare could be stronger with parallel compression and/or transient shaping, it's the kick that is coming through less than enough to match the loudness of everything else. See if boosting near 4000Hz adds that click you need to get it to pierce through the mix, perhaps also increasing the gain on any compression it has, and bringing slightly downwards any sort of threshold/ceiling you have on the sidechaining I'm presuming you have on the kick (and maybe snare) to the bass to let the kick and snare come through a little more. Small thing, but the lead at 0:41 on the slight left sounds a bit tinny, and maybe some slight thickening of the timbre might give it more body (e.g. detuning). It sounds more tinny and a bit shrill on the higher notes, especially at 1:01. The guitar lead at 1:32 could be brought a little bit more upfront, as it's the only lead there. I thought its performance could have had more emotion, but it's solid enough as it is. 2:13 is entirely a personal thing, but maybe the ping pong delay you already had on the reverse cymbal could be louder just for that part, for a more ambient effect (simply automating the delay's echo volume could do it). Great arrangement. I love the effective syncopations and the general jazz fusion / synthpop vibe. As it is right now, it's probably going to get YESed with some very minor reservations. The arrangement carries it far, and I believe touching up on some of the above points would bring it to either a very enthusiastic YES or a DP!

I would have said "WELL THEN YOU'D BETTER FIX HIM!" but that's already done.