timaeus222   Members

Even though I don't do live bass, I could do good sequenced bass. I've got Spectrasonics Trilian on hand, which has some mean electric bass tones, and tops Shreddage Bass IMO. One of the basses sounds like the one in this, for example, from my ReMix of Brandon Strader's "My Choice".

Yeah, I totally get what kind of idea you were going for. It's really hard to do this kind of thing, and I have trouble with it too sometimes. I occasionally rewatch for advice and ideas on "effective harsh dissonance".Oh, and get better, Trism!

Oh, well I didn't know. This is my first OCR competition. Yeah, that's essentially what the filter I mentioned does, IIRC. Neat production work on this.

Okay, gonna give reviews! ProtoNitroGENerator - Tempos were inconsistent and the arrangement felt disjointed. Still, I can't blame you for trying. Good effort, and good luck for future material. Dancin' Through Club Wily - Nice dynamic reso saws. Pretty good funk-ish bass. I liked the lead, aside from how it gets rather resonant in the mids whenever it reaches low cutoffs. Drums could come through more. Texturally, it comes off as a bit sparse sometimes, and there are times when the rhythmic choice on the percussion was a bit confusing. The bass was probably the highest quality sound from that song, IMO. Nice and thick. Ascent - Good effort! The orchestra comes off rather fake, but doing something like this with fake samples is going to be tough to be convincing anyways. Even if it's only a minute. Entangled - This is actually really good. Loved the vocal processing and the dubstep wobbles. Who knew you could do dubstep? Reminds me of the ending of Blast Beatdown. ;D At 0:59... is that the exophase filter from Zebra? Random guessing! At 1:25, the lead is a bit too sustained to have a resonant timbre like that and not hurt. The DnB section drums didn't seem to work tonally. And... that's about it! Follow Your Dreams - The bass is too loud, but the tone is good. A bit too much reverb in the background instruments, and your vocals have some distortion artifacts as well as remaining sibilance. The rest was pretty OK in my book. The Ohm Operatives - The instrument choice isn't quite gelling, IMO, and the mixing is quiet. I liked the glitching you did in the background. It has a little bit of a metallic chiptune feel. Some sounds were cool, but the mixing made them feel narrow and lo-fi (not because of any sort of bitcrushing or lo-fi processing). Guile of the Nile - The bass notes were good, but I think the bass tone could lean less towards a sine-like bass and more towards an electric bass for this kind of song. 1:05 lead was nice. I kinda wish it had more expressiveness. The glitching felt welcome. Good work on the E. Piano chords. Smooth Moduhater - Mixing is pretty quiet. The bass instrument and possibly the kick are actually too loud, perhaps in the sub bass, and the hard-panning lead was a bit confusing. There's a hollow feel to the mix due to little midrange presence. Nice rapping, though the execution sounded kind of flat (i.e. not that much variation in the intonation). I loved the lyrics, and the inflections were clear. Spirit of the Wind - The sine wave was pretty piercing on the higher notes and could have used some keyfollow/keytracking on a LP filter. Good snare, and though it could have a little more low mids, it was able to come through. I personally don't think it fit the somewhat chill atmosphere though, and it does stick out a bit IMO. I'm not sure I really heard any obvious lead other than some bells, a piano, and a sine wave, which all tend to be rather thin and trebly at those higher octaves. It feels like you really went out of your comfort zone tbh, and it was a good effort on your part. Reverb was good, and background instrument choice was good. Prayer for IDOLA ~ Kobayashi's Final Descent - For some reason the bass felt offkey versus the square arp. The track feels texturally awkward to me, at least until 0:52 where things get more structured. The square lead at 1:15~1:56 felt dissonant in the non-jazzy way. Tbh, I don't hear a super clear direction in this, but there's definitely variety in this, and it was a good attempt at complex dissonance. Speed Run - Nice drums. I do feel like the 909 snare gets used a lot when power is the goal. Generally I find it useful for snare rolls, but I don't actually use it for a main, power snare if I don't have any other layers on it. Good piano. The snare works better in the 1:47 context with that noise gating. The backing and lead though, both use saw waves, so the clarity is a bit hurt. If you want textural distinction, it tends to work out well if you use different waveforms for each different synth. Square waves come through with a powerful bass fundamental, and saw waves tend to work well as piercing, cutting timbres, generally. Interesting glitch section. I personally felt like it was somewhat random in the effect choices, but for the most part it was good. Great improvement from your entries in the past.

So damn pumpin' and kickass.

Yeah, I was pretty thrown off by the intro. That aside, nice retro/funk feel. Moog lead was pretty cool. I agree that the snare doesn't fit. It could have used more of a floatiness rather than tight glued compression, and a faster decay. Overall, pretty smooth work!

Yeah, I'm gonna miss this one. I had O-Chem II Lab until 5 PST and was doing homework til 7 PST.

I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to other than maybe a noise waveform for an oscillator, which is just white noise typically (pink noise also exists). An LFO can have a slope for its oscillation pattern. You're not guaranteed to have all of these, but you might have sine, triangle, square, reverse square (horizontally flipped), fin, reverse fin, and possibly randomized "glide" or "hold" which look like an irregular sawtooth and square wave respectively. Though LFO2 can be assigned to OSC1 if you want, etc., depending on your synth, it might be the case on some synths that there is a rigid structure where LFO1 is only for OSC1 and so on.

Yeah, I've done something that I think is exactly like that on the Gunstar Heroes album. Basically you have a randomized LFO linked to pitch, and another (separate) randomized mild LFO on any filter knobs to make the timbre a bit more dynamic. If you go on my website and go to "Audio Reels", it's the demo on the very bottom.

I highly recommend Resonance, Shreddage, and Groove Bias in particular.

Oh, and to be clear, the tempo drop at 2:55 was fine to me because it was done on a sustained chord, which is less obvious than, say, if very subdivided material was incorporated during that tempo shift or before it.

You may not feel that way because it's your own song, and it makes sense to you. It's jarring for me in particular, and by Kristina's wording, her too. Now you're aware.

So... you want people to go "wtf, why did this just get way faster?"?

The resonant WN sweep is too resonant, especially at 0:11, and same at 2:00. The hi hat at 0:15 also has too much treble due to the little phaser effect there. At 0:34, the sound effects sounded off-key. Can you check that again? Also, check the really high treble. I'm hearing loads of it, so it would help to low pass the treble near 17000Hz or so, and do notches in resonant frequency ranges. 1:29, for example, is pretty resonant.

I think the guitars are too loud or the leads are too soft (sometimes), unless the guitar is at the time supposed to be source usage. 2:07, for example, was a part where the strings lead was a bit buried. The 2:21 tempo shift was a little bit drastic IMO. I really didn't see it coming. I don't think it's cut time, but just an actual higher tempo that isn't a straight multiple of the original (i.e. 108 vs. 121.56 rather than 108 vs. 112 which are multiples of 4.0). Maybe you could do an accelerando rather than just jumping to that tempo. I also think it would be an interesting addition to put a jazzy little arpeggio (that also slows down as it plays) going up at 5:03 on the piano in a high octave (7th~8th)

Hm... You know, if you want clearer video quality on the gameplay parts, you could give a shot at using VirtualDub to resize the original AVIs using the "nearest neighbor" setting and it'll be less blurry. (Or, you know, you could have me do it if you don't have time) Examples on my YouTube channel, especially the Gunstar Heroes music video.

I honestly don't hear clipping. Maybe some overcompression, but there isn't any substantial clipping from what I can hear on my headphones. It's peaking near -0.5dB much of the time. Maybe you heard the click at 0:50.

Okay, the ReMix is considered done now, and Kristina updated the soundcloud upload.

So can you describe the issue? It seems simple enough to just have a folder full of unpacked soundfonts to drag into FL's soundfont player, given you do have the full version of FL (unless the edition somehow matters? I'm not 100% sure on that). What filetypes are the other soundfonts that work? Have you tried an external soundfont player, such as sfz or sforzando (two separate ones despite the similarity in name)?

When is the next possible listening sies---I mean fiesta?

The bass' tone seems fine in my opinion (especially in the lowest notes), but yes, the bass frequencies are a bit weak from what I can hear, and as a result the song's frequency distribution sounds narrow to me. At 1:04~1:07, I'm finding it a bit awkward how the lead just jumps suddenly to the other speaker. Do you think you could find a less jarring way to write that automation and still have the reasonably clean stereo separation you have now? The panning right afterwards isn't anything more than a nitpick for me, but I personally find that a bit awkward too in that it's the lead that's panning, so we have to follow it around. I still like the extra work you put in with the modulations, because it helped improve the character/personality of each of the leads in particular to an extent that fares rather well compared to higher quality chiptune sounds. As for submission, in my opinion it's not quite ready. I think you should keep working on it until you really think it can't be adjusted anymore. This is why I think so: - It does sound a little bit dry (little perceived reverb) to me - Basic sounds, albeit with great modulation work (basic qualities implies simplicity or something of a somewhat low complexity from the perspective of a musically adept audience). It does not mean it's a bad thing to keep it simply because you like it.- It does say on the submission guidelines that chiptune tracks are discouraged, so that means this would have to be exceptionally good to have a good chance of passing. People like halc, Ben Briggs, and PROTO·DOME (yep, with a middle dot in his name!) who often write chiptunes and 8-bit material would be able to help you with this very effectively, from what I've gathered.

Same. And sorry if I upset you in any way.

I agree that the micing is quite good. If I were you I would have liked this result too.

This week is going to be so fun. Can't wait to hear all the tracks, especially 'cause I opted out of going last week (for which I only had one day anyways) to really polish my entry for this week! =D

Mixing is fun IMO, and fun experiences deserve to be shared amongst people who like the fun in it. =D And teh interwebz totally butchers sarcasm :S