timaeus222   Members

The piano is fine as it is. I like the subtle flanger on it. It kinda brings it underwater a little bit. The world flute is pretty nice. I wish the snare was a little bit louder, but it's good otherwise. Smart arrangement, and the japanese atmosphere works pretty well. 2:53 upright bass was pretty cool. Trumpet solo was fitting. Good lengthed remix.

I usually don't like 'badly made' dubstep, but I think this is perfectly valid dubstep. It's a little borderline annoying, but not a dealbreaker to me. I for one fully support constantly evolving dubstep songs. I just wish the wobbles were a bit quieter to allow the leads to come through, but aside from that, I like it, especially the part at 2:06. Pretty sweet textures there. Drums are passable IMO. Not super great, but they work.

Actually, you're equivocating informal and formal teaching in this regard, and they're two completely different things. Formal teaching comes from teachers/professors who know how to teach effectively and convey information effectively. It's much more practical to learn from someone who knows how to channel information into you easily than to learn by yourself or from an unofficial teacher. However, learning by yourself is almost as effective as getting taught, and is just as viable an option, depending on your googling skills and information browsing prowess. If you can afford to go to a university to earn a music-related degree, sure, go for it. If you can't afford it, it's not completely necessary to go there anyways. It's better than learning by yourself, but it's not a necessity.

I'm just not hearing the bass instrument loud enough, but I'm sure I can hear enough bass in my headphones if the artist mixed in enough bass. I'm not talking about sub bass, I hate excess sub bass. When people say bass, they usually mean 20~100Hz. I did a quick sound rip of the remix since it can't be downloaded and checked the bass. There isn't much at all below 98Hz. Small iterations of bass show up and go away, which is basically ethereal bass. Maybe the bass instrument is just too soft. I'm actually barely hearing the bass instrument itself. Yeah, that kind of arpeggio with polyphony makes the sound seem like an organ or something, except the notes and voice mode make it bleed into itself and draw attention to itself, when you didn't want that. Quick example of what I'd think beeping works on:http://zirconstudios.bandcamp.com/track/colossus at 0:15-0:16, but feel free to listen to the rest. Well, an ending, meaning a satisfying way of ending a song. Right now, what you have is kind of abrupt.

Instruments seem buried and over-reverbed. Sounds pretty muddy. Otherwise, great instrument choice and percussion work. Reminds me of the Globulous OST.

The USB recording setup you have just isn't giving you good quality sound. I think you'd be better off trying to find VSTs that emulate the sound you're going for, or spending time studying how to set up your room for recording and finding the proper equipment. I'm definitely not hearing any significant bass frequencies. The beeping FX are also still kind of awkward, especially in the fast arpeggios where it's polyphonic. If it was retrigger, then it would sound much smoother. The arrangement on its own is getting there, but of course, an ending would be a great thing to have.

Instead of notching the EQ at muddy frequencies, if I can, I just use an internal filter module inside the plugin I'm using for some of my instruments and notch it in there. That way, the timbre isn't as muddled. It's a much better solution than notching the EQ using an external EQ plugin since internal filter modules "use" keyfollow, unlike external EQ.

No, I'm just saying that to advise you to not do that in the future. You can't really blame yourself for not learning quickly. Obviously, everyone learns at different paces. I guess it's one of those sentences with two different temporal contexts. When I said that, I meant the glitching I heard was all unexpected, without much of a logical flow to it. It might sound weird to you that glitch music can have a logical flow, but there can be one. For example, gating can be followed by retrigger, retrigger can be followed by reversing, reversing can be followed by delay, etc. (that's not a chain of glitching events, that just happened to be my train of thought, and all those are separate pairs) Don't get me wrong, I do like a glitch style, but there's a huge difference between good glitching and not-as-good glitching. For example, I can say this is really good glitching: http://zirconstudios.bandcamp.com/track/memory-ft-jillian-aversa If you study the glitching in here, you'll see that you probably wouldn't have changed any of it or reordered any of it. The point is, it's cohesive. Your glitching is not what I would necessarily call bad. It's just erratic, or awkward, and doesn't gel nicely with the source. That's not bad, that's just not-yet-fully-developed. If you work with glitching more in general, you can develop a mindset for glitch music, but right now, you're not quite there yet. You have the skills, for sure. You just need to improve on the flow of ideas. The production quality is solid enough to me.

You SHOULD feel much better. I didn't listen to the previous version, but this is a pretty fun remix! I'd say you nailed the kick and snare. The bass is coming right through. I love the 90's funk lead. Really fun solos! Sequencing is great. 3:25 is some great electronic/bitcrushing fun. I think based on production it would pass.

The playing was a little sloppy, but it looks like you had fun with it.

I don't know why you really want it, but I can send it to you.

Please use Soundcloud, Box, Tindeck, etc. Those are much easier to preview with.

The glitching is really erratic. I usually like glitch, when it's naturally flowing. There's a complete randomness to this glitching. I can almost never hear the melody. It's buried. You need to think about what you want to glitch first, make sure it seems logical, then write it in. Don't write in a whole bunch of random glitching effects and then say it's ready. An idea is flowing, but this needs a whole lot more work to actually be a logical remix. If you take the time to slow down a bit and rework some things, this could work.

Alright, no one's said this one yet! 7/8

Yeah, don't be afraid to add more instruments and drum samples. If you feel like your song is getting stale, it's probably because you need to bring some instruments out and some more in.

The first kick sample was way better than the other ones.

Yep, that's it! Gently is totally gentle! Somehow, I get that reference. Basses tend to be hard to sequence mainly because the lower notes usually mess up the timbre, so a really carefully crafted timbre is needed to make it sound good low enough to give it a strong presence. You gotta be careful if you want to get a good bass sound AND a good presence. A#3 is where most basses start failing. Here are three different bass sounds I would suggest for a bassline spanning so many notes: Fretless Bass (I synthesized this one! ), Bass with a vintage filter, Bass guitar http://www.box.com/s/o95guj2vmj5wnw1jkc8u No problem! I look forward to seeing what you come up with!

Sounds good. The only thing I would suggest is to add back a little more of that reverb on the brass section, just so it doesn't sound so dry, and the glitching I had at 2:46 and 2:53 (which I actually felt were minimal and interesting). I also felt that my 808 snare rise at 3:27 was a little buried.

You should post the remix for context.

0:11 is NOT a bird chirp at all, it's a cross-panning resonant filter sweep. 0:39 did sound like a transition, as I mentioned earlier. It does sound like you added a sine wave to the pad, but edit the patch some more. Maybe you can link an envelope to a slightly overdriven resonant filter (norly)? I think 0:39 - 1:04 can work fine if you make the pad more evolving. It would help if you do a few notch filters / thin peaking bands to have the guitar plucks pass through and leave the piano a little in the background. A few delayed ambient House claves might do the trick in the intro as filler. 1:22 - the strings are too soft. Bump them up by about 3~4dB. They sound like they're near -40dB to -30dB. Yes, the piano is exposed, but there are some strings there, so try bumping their volume up. The drum intensity is fine. I would sharpen the high end on the kick, though. Maybe you can try a Korg-DDD-5 kick if you can find one. The snare still needs some more high end snap. It could be good to do a little notch filter in clashing instruments' EQs where the snare fundamentals are to bring out the low end thwap.I dunno, I'm just not liking the sine wave bass. It gets pretty grating to me, especially with the House kick. The choir pad is fine, but I don't like the sidechaining on it, or the volume on it either. Should be softer. The new instrument sounds like a piano+bells layer to me.2:46 was a pretty sudden change to me. Needs a heads-up! It also warrants a longer breakdown section than that. 3:04 needs a really nice synth lead. Maybe a quad-voice legato saw wave? Something awesome. Hit me up if you want me to give it a shot. 3:36 needs a transition. There's literally nothing, in case you were still working on that.3:45 - too bare, needs a quiet pad in the background just filling up space. 3:58-3:59 - I think the second note should be softer, and the first note should be louder.

That's true. Sometimes if I'm really inspired, I just rework the melody's rhythm right then and there, and create some bass/rhythm to go with that instead. Actually, that probably happens more often for me than writing the bass/rhythm first.

You should try a subtle, broad high pass on the rhythm guitar, reaching 0dB at about 100Hz. As for the bass, maybe give a small boost at 200~250Hz. Then give a small notch cut at 200~250Hz in the rhythm guitar, and in the rhythm guitar EQ, leave the sub-100Hz for the bass.

I work on my mixing first and arrangement later, as well.

Looks like Gibs lended Mordi some free energy. ...Get it? xD Fantastic, sounds like something I would do.

I sit down at my keyboard, pick a semi-random sound, and audition it. If it's inspiring, I try to create a hook with it. Then if ideas pop into my head, I write out the intro, and ideas flow from there. If it doesn't turn out to be inspiring, I pick another one or take a break, and then try again later if I took a break. I write intro, next, next, next, end. Pretty straightforward. I polish the mixing as I go, and fix velocities as I go. I know velocities will sound good because I play piano, so... yeah.