timaeus222

This is really beautiful, I love it! I especially appreciate the small effects such as what I assume is some kind of rolling ball effect applied in the beginning and the ending. And the seamless mix of several electronic genres, and the intricate sounddesign and the overall atmosphere and the harmonic progressions and instrumentation and everything is basically just great. 

I've likewise been long waiting for this remix to be posted! It's a great one!

Been looking forward to this post since I heard it in the workshop. Two great sources woven into an exquisite piece brimming with life. Most excellent work.

Sends are for groups of signals going through one effect chain. It saves a lot of CPU compared to loading effects units on individual channels (and came about because with hardware, you physically can not duplicate a $3000 rack gear reverb on like 50 tracks). Additionally with send levels, it's pretty easy to control how much of each signal goes through the effect, and additionally if it is pre-fader (absolute send, no matter what the volume fader of the track is) or post-fader (the track volume directly scales what is sent to the send).
Yoozer pointed out several use cases of sends. It's really just a better way to work and allows more mixing possibilities than sticking to inserts does. It's literally less effort to manage 1 (or a few if you're experienced) reverb send and just controlling what's going through it. You get a 100% wet signal in the send track and can do stuff to it, like EQing or filtering it, adjusting the *entire* reverb level of the song all at once on one fader, applying mid/side techniques if you're into that, and more. The consistency afforded by routing all of your tracks into just a few plugins creates much better mixes, much more easily.

If you use sends, you typically set the dry to 0 and the wet to 100% and use the send level to control the balance.
I have the impression you’re looking at this from the perspective of a single instrument. When mixing, it’s important to look at the track and balance as a whole. And trust me, I’d rather have 3 reverb sends where I can control the send levels directly from the mixer, rather than having 60 insert effects where I’d have to open the vst or automation lane to control the balance.
Make it easy for yourself, save some cpu and look at it from the perspective of mixing a complete track. $0.02.

If you have two instruments and both give 'm separate reverbs, it's just going to sound unnatural. "Sound quality" is a weird way to describe it; it's more of a "this is something you can't ever hear naturally". Mixing is about the suspension of disbelief, and unless you're live-recording an orchestra with a pair of microphones separated at a distance equal to your ears in a seat somewhere in the venue (which is -still- an approximation because your ears work different from microphones), you're always trying to "stylize" things to paint a scene, send a message, or perform illusionism. It's like a render of a scene; your eyes don't focus on two distant things at the same time and adapt continuously to the light around us (and fill out a hilarious amount of details outside of your focal point that aren't really witnessed - just painted in there by your brain).
With inserts, you're actively decreasing the volume of the dry signal while increasing the volume of the dry signal. It's a crossfader.
With sends, you keep the dry signal at equal volume while adding more wet signal - and as Jorito says, you should have the wet to 100%. It's two separate faders.
It's about the ratio of the mix plus multipliers. With inserts set to 20% wet, it means the dry signal is multiplied in volume by 100% - 20% = 80% (0.8) while the wet signal is at 20%. With a single wet/dry knob, you can't have a scenario where dry is 90% and wet is 40% or something - the sum always has to be 100%.
With sends, the dry signal is left at 100%, the wet signal at 20% - the sum of this (120%) is the "new" 100%, and if you'd scale everything back proportionally (100/120 = 0.83), it's comparable to the insert's dry/wet as 83%/17% in terms of ratio, but both are louder.

Hey guys, it's been a long time, but here's an atmospheric Final Fantasy mashup of FF4's Prelude and FF6's Terra with dubstep and light glitch elements! This has been submitted to OCR on March 18, 2018. [EDIT: To show the timeline, this just got approved August 31, 2018 for a direct-post, so about 5 months in this case.]
This was inspired by Stephen Anderson (stephen-anderson on soundcloud); it primarily uses bell and pad textures from Spectrasonics' Omnisphere 2; a Chapman Stick from Trilian; 4Front's TruePianos; and various FM sounds from my Zebra2 soundbank "FM Variations". Glitching was via Illformed's Glitch 2, and some of the remaining stuff was from LA Scoring Strings, Rhapsody Orchestral Percussion, and Serum. The solo violin was Embertone's Friedlander, highly recommend it!

@GuJiaXian In case you were curious, it just got approved this morning for a direct-post. Those are by email, so this would not show up in the Judges Decisions page.

Hey man, sorry for the wait!
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MOD REVIEW
Phew, this sounds like a rather ambitious piece. Also, a mod review is generally for when you want to submit to OCR, just fyi.
Summary
The main things that I would keep in mind are:
Each note in each instrument feels like a similar intensity, so the instruments feel robotic. Try to keep instruments playing their usual role, at least in this context. In this context, my suggestion is that, e.g. a bass should play bass, not "baritone", orchestral drums should play as orchestral drums, not rock drums, etc. Perhaps consider cutting out some parts of the arrangement, so that it flows better. I know you may be attached to some of it, but sometimes you gotta be more objective about it. There are some good things in this though:
Props for writing something this long. It's hard to even think up something of this length. You have a pretty good structure, and nothing too much feels that out of place, besides the parts I mentioned. You do have drum variation, which distinguishes sections from each other. Arrangement
Whenever I see a long piece like this, I consider whether the ideas still flow into each other, whether there are sufficient transitions, whether there is a dynamic progression, etc. Because I like to be able to figure out how a piece progresses, here's how my mind is trying to structure this based on what I hear. Maybe it'll help you decide what you may want to cut out, because this is quite long, with many ideas packed in, and can be condensed down.
0:00 - 0:35 = Intro 0:35 - 1:00 = Buildup/Verse (maybe?) 1:00 - 1:26 = Chorus? 1:26 - 1:46 = Slow Bridge 1:46 - 2:14 = Chorus 2 + Solo? Leads into breakdown 2:14 - 2:27 = Breakdown 2:27 - 2:41 = Big verse? 2:41 - 2:49 = ??? This doesn't feel like it fits here, because it's out of the key and sudden. 2:49 - 3:15 = Chorus 2 3:15 - 3:41 = Continuation, suggests winding down again. 3:41 - 4:15 = Dissonant proggy section? Perhaps try cutting this out to see what you think, as it seems to connect just fine without this in here, and it feels a bit out of place. 4:15 - 5:07 = Big verse again + drum variation 5:07 - 5:20 = Breakdown + more drums 5:20 - 5:34 = Chorus 2, meant to sound bigger 5:34 - 6:17 = Continuation to ending Production
You seem to be fairly new at this, so it may be better if we focus on arrangement primarily. Nevertheless, I would say that most of the production weirdness is actually in the choice of sounds (in terms of what roles they are apparently playing, or doubling up on), and how robotic their note intensities are.
Regarding the note intensities, they feel like they're mostly the same; an analogy is plunking on a piano with your fingers for the entire performance. They need humanization. A typical pianist would have phrasing, and in that phrasing, the note intensities have variation (randomness), and an arc (a flow or shape to it). This is hard to learn without learning an instrument in real life, but perhaps it will help to listen to how these differ:
https://app.box.com/s/ndt9vz26mjhdul6sreqgkvf6eqlp2qfy (Robotic intensities) https://app.box.com/s/lr9nxha1zbg5vfcxufqqvuiz9vjnliyu (Robotic rhythm) https://app.box.com/s/pmwybgad4who5679p9xvuxdnnmqshas5 (Both) https://app.box.com/s/jjapuupib9zfypwoew1ecr31nlq8siw4 (Humanized) This probably fits better as an arrangement critique, but... it influences how you would produce it, so here are some examples of how certain instruments seem to be not playing their usual role, or seem to be playing in an uncomfortable range.
2:49 - 3:14 --- the bass seems to be playing pretty high, so it's not providing the low foundation that it typically would. 0:48 - 1:00 --- the lead there is pretty piercing, since it's playing fairly high notes, above its usual range. 1:00 - 1:24 --- the drums you are using (snare, timpani, ...) are made for orchestral music, but here they are playing the role of the double-time 1-2 kick/snare rock pattern. It is because of things like these that there is a lot of frequency clashing, particularly in the low-midrange (250 - 500 Hz or so). The range above the bass hits here, the range of the left-hand piano would hit here, rhythm guitars would hit here, etc. Lots of ways to clash, and you'd want to avoid that. Whenever the timpani plays as if it were a kick drum in a rock drum kit (0:35 - 1:26 is an example), that adds to the muddiness of the production.
Besides the clutter due to instrument roles, also consider the clutter due to instrument count. I know it can be fun to keep adding and adding, but sometimes you gotta take out an instrument to leave room for another (call this competing for attention), and you gotta let the lead shine. An example of too much is 2:49 - 3:15, where everything competes for attention.
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Conclusion
Overall, unfortunately I would not believe this is going to pass the panel, if that was your plan. But it's a good starting point for improving. Good luck!

Fair enough, my counter-point would be that it's a teacher's job to be hard on you and expect more out of you though.  When people don't (appear to) have any motive other than the commentary itself and providing their opinion, it can be a real kick in the ass to hear someone doesn't like something.  And whether or not the commenter actually knows what they're talking about vs. just trying to puff themselves up, if it pushes you to improve, the effect is the same (at least in terms of general advice/impressions - if someone's telling you to blow up the low mids on all your instruments or something like that, that's another story).
Using myself as an example again, I used to think of myself as a great composer, even after I found out exactly how bad of a producer I was.  But when you hear "wandering melody" and "stagnant harmony" (or whatever variation of that, if the feedback was coming from someone who didn't have the musical vocabulary to describe it as such) over and over from people on forums or non-musician friends or comments from complete strangers on music hosting sites, it eventually sunk in that "oh wait a second, maybe I'm actually not nearly as good as I think I am".  That was what it took for me, and it made much more of an impact than it did in situations where someone whose outward purpose in critiquing me was to help me learn.  I guess some additional context is also necessary to clarify my point - I've never been a good student until I "decide" I want to learn more about something, and I know I'm not the only one.  Again, that's what it took for me, and I have to wager there are others who operate the same way.
As a bonus, I came to find out eventually that a lot of those people giving me that feedback actually WERE being hyper-critical and couldn't follow their own advice.  But the result was the same - I put my nose to the grindstone to learn how to better structure a tune, how to write stronger melodies, how to mix better, whatever the criticism might've been.  I still learned as a result of the feedback, regardless of where it came from or how much the person giving the critique actually knew themselves.

Hopefully I didn't botch the point I'm trying to make in so many words, but basically: feedback from different sources can have drastically different effects, and people will respond to the effect it has on them accordingly.

I think @Gario pretty much shares brains with me at this point. Yes, all this. Having a mentor is good and if you find someone who can help like that, go for it. But don't let that be your only avenue for learning.
Public feedback can be useful too, because
It potentially could provide a greater number of fresh ears. In principle it is probably easier to obtain (if the mentor would be hard to contact, which he/she probably will be because he/she is only one person who has a life). It opens you to potentially inexperienced perspectives that you should digest, which likely provide for you a realistic experience on how your music may sound to a general audience. The main problem with public feedback is of course that sometimes, you have to filter it and figure out who is actually saying what, because more experienced people might either speak with jargon, or less experienced people might say what they think they mean without actually projecting what they meant. That's the chance you take, and I am quite glad I took that chance for 2+ years...
Fortunately, when I got public feedback, the people who came in (Flexstyle, Gario, Phonetic Hero, Chimpazilla, DaMonz, . . . ) knew enough, and I will fully admit that at the time it was I who needed to learn more! And it was because I took that chance and met those people, that I had extra motivation to keep coming back! So, for me personally, public feedback (forum feedback) was more important than mentor feedback. I don't think I had a real mentor (besides the Judges), more like I had some friendly collaborators...

I think another deeply valuable aspect of public feedback that hasn't really been touched on is that you might find out you're not as good as you think you are.  Sometimes people on a forum are blunt and brutally honest, and as far as I'm concerned, that exposure is extremely important.  Because hey, that's the way the world is, and if you really want to improve then you have to learn to be brutally honest with yourself.  Sometimes, that's a practice that begins externally.
When I was 19 and first starting out, I thought I was amazing.  After having my ass broken repeatedly, learning just how much there was to know and breaking through that Dunning-Kruger wall, I was able to be MUCH more objective and honest about where I actually was, what my weaknesses were, and what to do in order to address them (or who to ask if I didn't know).  If you already think you're the best, you don't have much incentive to improve, and without people giving me their honest impressions (musically experienced or not) I doubt I'd be half the musician I am today.  Often it takes time to sink in, and sometimes people can be very averse to honest critique (I certainly was for a good while), but I find it to be another valuable part of the process. 
In this regard, I think feedback from strangers is much more potent than that of a mentor or teacher - finding out what your peers or the general public thinks about your art can be a powerful agent for introspection.

I think @Gario pretty much shares brains with me at this point. Yes, all this. Having a mentor is good and if you find someone who can help like that, go for it. But don't let that be your only avenue for learning.
Public feedback can be useful too, because
It potentially could provide a greater number of fresh ears. In principle it is probably easier to obtain (if the mentor would be hard to contact, which he/she probably will be because he/she is only one person who has a life). It opens you to potentially inexperienced perspectives that you should digest, which likely provide for you a realistic experience on how your music may sound to a general audience. The main problem with public feedback is of course that sometimes, you have to filter it and figure out who is actually saying what, because more experienced people might either speak with jargon, or less experienced people might say what they think they mean without actually projecting what they meant. That's the chance you take, and I am quite glad I took that chance for 2+ years...
Fortunately, when I got public feedback, the people who came in (Flexstyle, Gario, Phonetic Hero, Chimpazilla, DaMonz, . . . ) knew enough, and I will fully admit that at the time it was I who needed to learn more! And it was because I took that chance and met those people, that I had extra motivation to keep coming back! So, for me personally, public feedback (forum feedback) was more important than mentor feedback. I don't think I had a real mentor (besides the Judges), more like I had some friendly collaborators...

I think @Gario pretty much shares brains with me at this point. Yes, all this. Having a mentor is good and if you find someone who can help like that, go for it. But don't let that be your only avenue for learning.
Public feedback can be useful too, because
It potentially could provide a greater number of fresh ears. In principle it is probably easier to obtain (if the mentor would be hard to contact, which he/she probably will be because he/she is only one person who has a life). It opens you to potentially inexperienced perspectives that you should digest, which likely provide for you a realistic experience on how your music may sound to a general audience. The main problem with public feedback is of course that sometimes, you have to filter it and figure out who is actually saying what, because more experienced people might either speak with jargon, or less experienced people might say what they think they mean without actually projecting what they meant. That's the chance you take, and I am quite glad I took that chance for 2+ years...
Fortunately, when I got public feedback, the people who came in (Flexstyle, Gario, Phonetic Hero, Chimpazilla, DaMonz, . . . ) knew enough, and I will fully admit that at the time it was I who needed to learn more! And it was because I took that chance and met those people, that I had extra motivation to keep coming back! So, for me personally, public feedback (forum feedback) was more important than mentor feedback. I don't think I had a real mentor (besides the Judges), more like I had some friendly collaborators...

Wait, are we asking if it's better to get one-on-one, personal training from a professional over random public feedback? I'd think that's almost comically obvious - of course it's better to have one-on-one teaching from a professional (assuming the professional is worth their salt). If you can afford personalized training and education, that's the way to go. That's sort of like saying a healthy balanced diet is better for you than McDonalds, because of course it is.
However, the caveat is pretty easy, here - also like a balanced diet vs. McDonalds, it's better if you can afford it, and it's better if you can dedicate the extra time required for it. Many casual artists simply don't have those kind of resources, and unless they push toward making it into a profession it's difficult to justify the time and financial investments required for such one-on-one interaction. Sometimes you can get lucky and get some attention from a willing professional for funsies, but outside of that you've got to put in some real resources in order to get something like the one-on-one mentoring you're talking about. You won't get as much out of something like public feedback, sure, but getting less out of it is certainly different than getting nothing out of it. With online forums and chat servers today it requires much less investment from an artist - dropping a quick link and asking "Thoughts?" is faster and cheaper than sitting with a mentor to discuss your music.
tl;dr of course personal mentoring is better than public feedback, but public feedback is more accessible, and it's better than nothing at all (provided my caveat I presented earlier).

I'll concede that feedback isn't technically necessary in a mentorship (which is extremely strange to read), but I still think you're reeeaaally glossing over the importance of feedback.  A "mentorship" in which the mentor isn't observing the mentee's work and giving feedback more fits the description of a generalized teaching course, where a teacher/professor is going down a list and throwing out advice or covering topics point by point, regardless of whether or not it's pertinent to the student.   At least in my opinion/experience, this isn't the most effective way to help someone learn.
Back on topic (and a slight edit for clarity): the feedback process, to me, is about looking at where someone needs to improve and providing targeted advice to help them learn how to do it.  The source of advice doesn't matter imo - whether it's a forum rando or someone you look up to, you're the ultimate arbitrator of which pieces you decide to listen to and which you don't.  Yes, personal drive/ambition is obviously important to anyone's progress as an artist, but why undercut feedback (even "forum feedback") as a valuable part of the improvement process?

Is an assessment not feedback? In assessing, you are responding to an incoming interaction to provide your thoughts, which, whether opinionated or not, is feedback, no? I don't think feedback is disconnected from mentorship, especially since it should involve communication.
@AngelCityOutlaw So, what @Phonetic Hero seems to be referring to is that the mentor is like a teaching assistant, while you seem to be referring to the mentor being like an actual teacher/professor.

Perhaps I'm biased, but I'd argue that feedback is more often than not helpful when someone is specifically asks for it, no matter the skill level. However, if no one is asking for the help and they're just sharing their music it can be counterproductive to point out all of the track's flaws. It took me a few years to realize this myself, but if you pour your critique of someone's music when they're not asking for it, it can take the fun out of the craft and possibly drive people away. Context is important, so if you want to be helpful pay attention to what the artist wants from you.
It sounds a little counter-intuitive saying even experts can benefit from critique, but given the right circumstances it can help make things go faster. Sometimes, for example, if I'm working on something and I need a fresh set of ears I ask for some feedback (I haven't written anything in months, so you'd likely not notice nowadays). It's harder to accept feedback when you're more seasoned, but you can still get some use out of it if you remains somewhat humble about it. Most seasoned musicians will likely fine tune the track eventually, sure, but it can help make things go faster if you just let more fresh ears listen to something and give some honest feedback.
So yeah, if people are looking for feedback it's quite helpful for them when they receive it no matter the skill level, but it's markedly less so when they're not looking for it.

I think it's very important when someone's starting out.  I had no idea what questions I needed to be asking back when I first started, and having people to point out flaws I wasn't even aware of and explain how to improve them is, in my opinion, absolutely instrumental to anyone's development (whether I wanted to hear it or not at the time ).  Whether someone gets the feedback from a forum, or friends/peers with more experience, or teachers/mentors, I think most people need feedback from those with more experience up to a point.  I know I did.
Once you're familiar with the general concepts of music composition and production (and know where to look to further your knowledge), improvement becomes much easier to pursue on your own.  But it's hard to know what questions you should be asking when you don't know what you need to know, ya know?

I do the bulk of my mixing on headphones, and I've learned that you've got to be careful when judging reverb when on headphones; it's easy to apply too much reverb and it becomes quickly noticeable if you listen back on speakers.
As for collaborations, I seem to be the odd one (in that I do a _lot_ of collaborations) and it's usually me asking and actively recruiting people rather than the other way around. The workshop link in the menu can be a good resource to find people to collaborate with, as you can search by skill/instrument there. As to finding a guitarist, normally you can't throw a stone without hitting at least 3 guitar players, but on OCR they seem to be in hiding or running away from me, since I haven't been that successful in finding a willing guitarist here lately... Maybe they think I smell funny
 

8-15 songs. No time length priority. The only important thing for album is to be "album". Main idea or theme through all the tracks and overall sounding should stay in one mood.
Hope someone can understand, what I'm trying to say with my english.

Am I the only one who thinks of this question primarily in terms of # of songs and not duration?
I'm happier with a 12-song, 40-minute album where each song is unique than I am with an 8-song, 60-minute album, generally speaking... more about the number of ideas than their length

An unusually conservative take for Timaeus, but it works.  The increased emphasis on melody combined with the changes in instrumentation and accompaniment more than make up for the similarity in style.  The use of The Spanish Empire is quite subtle, but it's there.  Solid production, as always.  Not really a lot to say here, except
YES

This definitely has Timaeus' usual quality in production, and while pretty straight foward the arrangement works well. The orchestration is done well, and while I could nitpick the humanization (sometimes the articulation swells too much for faster string runs), it's certainly well above OCR's bar. Nitpicking even further, I also have to mention an instrument suddenly popping out at 3:31 in the left speaker (sounds like the Didgeridoo), which is pretty distracting for headphone users, especially since there's nothing like it prior or since. Not a big deal at all, but just be careful with mixing artifacts like that in the future is all.
Repeating what I mentioned in the first post, this WAS submit prior to Brandon's issues, and this IS a part of his Assassin's Creed album, so before we post (assuming this passes) we should ask Timaeus whether that affects his choice to have the track posted, but if there's no problems then I'm all for giving this front page lovin'.
YES

Yeah, pretty nice adaptation to some new instruments and an overall change in the feel of the track. Realy solid work, could easily stand alongside the original tracks.
YES