Bowlerhat

Thank you, I really appreciate it! That was a tibetan bowl sound from Omnisphere. I think it was "Tibetan Bowls Shaking Doppler".

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. 

Subbed this track as I feel it's ready for an evaluation from the judges panel!

I think it's still about 70 minutes per "musical" album (as though there'd be confusion as to what kind of album it would be) as the maximum and seemingly the choice for many who can really output at a prodigious productivity. My opinion is that putting down $9.99 for music should net me at least 2 virtual albums of music, or one physical disc I really want (like from a retail game OST).
If you're someone who needs to ask how long they should do an album to attract people to pay $9.99, then I don't recommend you do a 70+ minute album or price it anywhere close to $9.99. It loses accessibility needed to build you up to the kind of artist who can better justify those parameters. Instead, I recommend breaking up such a hypothetical project into smaller releases, maybe 30-45 minutes, and charging $3-$5 for them a piece. I think that would make your starting releases much more accessible to people scouting around for new things they might like.

Hiiii, I did an arrangement of Zelda's Lullaby from the legend of Zelda. I'm thinking of submitting it. Any thoughts on this before I send it in? I'm not so sure about all the mixing, and there's also some minor timing issues that were difficult to solve. But generally I think it sounds cool. 
 
 
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpfYSyiyf2U&t=62s&frags=pl%2Cwn
 
 
 

Killer!

I could see some minor mastering tweaks/permutations but they'd really just be variations - sounding fantastic as-is, please do submit when you're happy with it (I certainly would be)!

Fantastic arrangement. Wowow.

Hiiii, I did an arrangement of Zelda's Lullaby from the legend of Zelda. I'm thinking of submitting it. Any thoughts on this before I send it in? I'm not so sure about all the mixing, and there's also some minor timing issues that were difficult to solve. But generally I think it sounds cool. 
 
 
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpfYSyiyf2U&t=62s&frags=pl%2Cwn
 
 
 

This is killer! You're a great composer. Are the lyrics original? I don't think I've ever heard them before!

Hiiii, I did an arrangement of Zelda's Lullaby from the legend of Zelda. I'm thinking of submitting it. Any thoughts on this before I send it in? I'm not so sure about all the mixing, and there's also some minor timing issues that were difficult to solve. But generally I think it sounds cool. 
 
 
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpfYSyiyf2U&t=62s&frags=pl%2Cwn
 
 
 

I wish I knew anything about arranging for big band. You've clearly got the chops for it!
I love the liberty here.

Hiiii, I did an arrangement of Zelda's Lullaby from the legend of Zelda. I'm thinking of submitting it. Any thoughts on this before I send it in? I'm not so sure about all the mixing, and there's also some minor timing issues that were difficult to solve. But generally I think it sounds cool. 
 
 
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpfYSyiyf2U&t=62s&frags=pl%2Cwn
 
 
 

Sounds great!  I'm more of a jazz listener, not a composer, so I can't really critique you properly at all.  But from a listening standpoint, I really enjoyed it!  The voice is beautiful.  And the rest of the playing is fantastic, its sounds realistic, so kudos to you if you arranged and/or played it. 

Thanks for your criticism! With @Bowlerhat's live flute, there will be enough variety to make it sound more interesting and less, "Okay, I dig this groove, but what's hot here?"
Glad you enjoy it!

This.
Even when I'm arranging a video game tune or a jazz standard or a whatever and the melody is already given from outside, I always first play the bass and the melody together to make sure they work. When I have two outer voices that convey the things that I want to say at that moment, it can be anything from atmospheric desert to adventurous battle theme, the inner voices fill in themselves. It can be done in many different ways, but when the outer voices run I know that I'll have a nice progression. That's the reason why things like counter motion works so well, and paralel fifths and octaves don't. This is of course also a stylistic thing, but in every genre of music you can have good and bad relations between the outer voices, it's just that the criteria is different. I think that when you're just thinking of chords, rhythm and melody as something separated by semantics, you'll never be able to write coherent music. It's all about the relationship to each-other and how it mixes and ends up as an organic whole that makes the music. 

Melodies by themselves imply chord changes by the chord tones that are present in them. Polyphonic, contrapuntal textures still imply harmonic progressions without ever actually playing a "chord".
The two are not as separable as many may think.
But to say that starting with the melody is dumb, is to say that composers like Bach were also dumb.

Well, that's true, a melodic focus isn't necessary, but I do think some sort of leading contour could still shape, say, a desert track, using your example. It doesn't have to end up being a melody, but you could hypothetically hum a melody on top a chord progression you try playing, but then not put a melody. It can just guide the chords you write (or help you visualize which chords you could write), knowing that one can write a chord progression to any given melody (in principle). And then, that wouldn't have a strong melodic focus, but it may be easier to construct by using a leading contour as a guide.

I won't pretend to have any valuable experience to offer in your situation, but if i was to advise something, it would be not to establish your self limitations too early. It takes a while for ANYBODY to naturally start asking those questions. Just being able to isolate and analyse a single sound out of an ensemble with only your ear is a skill in itself. I'm a few years in and it's only now that i'm really thinking about music, because frankly if i had been too analytical too early then the passion would have worn out (in fact it did for a while). Years ago, I bought a theory book and began writing out fake lessons (they were planned for YouTube, because obviously YouTube needs MORE videos explaining what a major chord is haha), and i was abosrbing all this new information while doing so. I ended up with about 12 pages before stopping and i felt like i hadn't even scratched the surface.
 
What did i retain from doing that? Mainly the formulae to build scales and chords because that was the one thing that was ALWAYS useful, but that's about it. I consistently have to remind myself how modes work, despite using them all the time, and who actually gives a fuck what a subdominant and submediant are. I can hear when notes work together and when they don't. On paper, i was getting it, but the time spent writing this stuff out was time not spent on just working towards what i was hearing in my head, which was much easier to realise by simply placing my hands on a piano or guitar. I would feel forced to apply something just for the sake of memory retention and frankly was uninspired by the whole thing, and i wouldn't even feel like i was learning how to utilise it properly. Theory rarely ever tells you how to actually apply all this jargon you're learning unless you have a good teacher right there with you, and the application is the most important part! However when i just sat down and played something that resonated with me, i would WANT to find out the theory. For example, i discovered that i naturally, in almost ever scenario, gravitate towards the Mixolydian mode when playing. It would always come through in my music, and from this i began to notice how much of the old video game music i used to listen to as a kid was also Mixolydian. Just making that personal connection was a thousand times for satisfying than learning the Circle of Fifths.
 
Nowadays i definitely spend more time (not a lot though) reading about the "why" more than the "how". Sometimes i'll find something helpful, sometimes i won't. But asking "why" allows me to pursue the "right theory", which severly narrows the learning required, and you can gradually allow the not-so-important stuff to come together naturally over time. Patience is important in this, and i notice you mentioned impatience in a previous post. We're definitely not so different as people. Overthinking is creativity-cancer and i've been a long time victim myself. Overall when it comes to learning music, I believe that listening to what you like and imitating is the most important thing and i stand by that. That way when you're brainstorming your own ideas, you'll be applying more complex theory that they used without even realising it, and you don't have to worry about the analytics of it all until you're ready to. And you will never be completely imitating other peoples work because something will always happen mid way through the process that sets you apart, usually some form of happy accident. The key is to turn it into a happy not-accident
 
As for your comment about motivation dwindling when it comes to the "tiny strokes", i don't know a single person who doesn't go through this. I don't believe it's possible to love a project from start to finish. Just because you care about something immensely doesn't mean you love it, or love sitting in front of it for hours every day. The two main points i've found to be consistently stressful are the halfway mark and the final stretch. The halfway mark is where you will most likely be lost for where to go next and also start obsessively fiddling with the material you already have. The final stretch is due to the fact a project is NEVER FINISHED. Perfection is impossible and even if you feel amazing satisfaction on the day you call a project finished, you'll listen to it a week later and want to change things. For example, i just submitted an OCR that i was immensely happy with. Listened to it a week later and wondered how the hell i didn't realise the rhythm guitars were too loud. Now i'm hoping they ask for me to resubmit it so i can fix it. It's natural and everybody goes through it, and i still struggle with it as much as i did when i started, maybe even more so now that i have a lot more knowledge rattling around in my head. My goal to eventually overcome this is again, consistency. Repetition breeds confidence, of which i have very little, but i do believe gaining confidence over time will make the process less stressful and the quesitons in my head easier to answer.
 
EDIT: Btw i appreciate you creating this thread, as it's not only helped you but given me a good outlet to really sift through my thoughts and read back to myself just how i feel about these things. I've never said this stuff "out loud" to myself or really pinpointed my feelings this way. It's quite therapeutic.

My life.
 
I'm starting to find that having more of a "leap before you look" approach to things helps. Come up with a project idea and then try to fulfill it to its full potential. You will naturally do all the learning you need along the way because your curiosities will guide you. Theory books do nothing for me unless i need them for a specific purpose. Reading through a few consecutive chapters about chords, scales, modes, cadences, circle of fifths etc just overwhelms me, because i can't possibly apply all that to the next thing i write and still have a natural flow of ideas or any amount of FUN, and without application all those concepts are just abstract, which really doesn't gel with me. However, If i'm halfway through a piece and i'm struggling to make a melody and harmony work, then it can be helpful to maybe ask myself what my notes are really doing and what my options are, and the experience is far more beneficial because i can apply my learning right there and then.
 
To begin with, you can't easily come up with a direction for a piece unless you listen to the music that fascinates you and pay attention to the composition, arrangement, sound design and production in said music. That will raise questions in your head. "Why does that lead sound soar so well?", "Why does that melody over that chord change give me butterflies?", "How is that kick drum so punchy?". This will start your process, even if it's simply Youtubing "How to make dank kicks yo?" (Disclaimer: I can't make dank kicks).
Doing this will eventually open up a rabbit hole of resources and learning; the tricky bit is trying not to fall too far into it otherwise you'll get distracted and the project will get shelved in "that folder". You know the one, with the 50 other projects you never finished that makes your stomach sink when you think about it. I think we all have that folder. So make sure you only go as far as you need to in order to fulfill the project. The next project will reinforce and build your learning further as you'll already have that base experience that you'll be applying and can afford to dig a little deeper. Don't right off the bat think "Fuck! I need to know sidechain compression! I'll never be able to do a proper music without it! All those popular people like Skrawlex and Ziggy Dog Dog use it!". Yes it's useful, but not using it doesn't make your mix unlistenable, and not every genre requires it. Unless you're trying to make a dance music-esque "pump" then the mix benefits of sidechaining are subtle and only necessary on something that repeats a lot e.g kick and bass as it's really just automatic amplitude automation. Don't think i'm understating the benefits of sidechaining though, it does make a noticeable difference that's worth it when you get a better ear for mixing. But before worrying about "mix tricks" like that, i'd say it's more important to understand general mixing practice and balancing of levels, then enhance that understanding with sidechaining. This will make you more assertive and justified in your choice of using sidechaining, rather than just doing it because other people do and you think it's helping (I'm saying all this because you mentioned sidechaning in your post above).
 
By the end of a project you probably won't remember everything you've learned, but something i do is to just have a small notepad on my desk for "Session Notes", stick the date at the top and any time you learn something or discover something that could be important, just jot it down quickly. For example, i learned when doing my last remix that the tom drums in my plugin needed to have their release times turned down to almost zilch because they were overlapping and creating a lot of mud and resonance. I wouldn't have been able to pinpoint the toms as the "bad mix culprit" without painstakingly soloing EVERYTHING, but now i don't have to do that again and i'll have a note on how to set up my drums next time. I still don't have notes on how to make a perfect snare drum, but i have some notes here and there. Over time i'll have more and i'll start to realise what it is i actually like in a snare sound, and then crafting what i like in the future will become second nature. By the end you'll have a pile of these notes and you can flick through them to remind yourself of small things. Eventually you'll have so many you'll want to consolidate them, and by this point you will have been through a fair few projects so it'll be easier to know which notes were valuable to you in the long run. Maybe by this point you'll have experience in mixing an entire drum kit and not just the kick, for example. Why not use your compiled notes to write a mix strategy for drums and pin that shit on your wall?
 
What i'm trying to get at is that it's more important to just "do". The learning comes with the doing. I can vouch for it as i've been doing this for a few years now and this is the first time i'm reading back a post and feeling like an actual human who kinda knows what he's talking about. Sitting, paralysed with anxiety over what i should be learning didn't get me anywhere. I'm assuming from your OP that you know a fair bit of piano. Well when i started i was just putting my fingers in random places, but it was enough to get SOMETHING down (I also cared a lot less back then). Over time i'd just hit a wall and start to ask myself "Right, how the hell do i make Major and minor chords, because this shit just ain't working for me anymore", and that was my learning motivation. When Major and minor chords weren't doing it for me anymore i started adding some 7ths etc. Simple example, but you see what i mean. The "doing" part is daunting, but not necessarily difficult. The hardest part for me personally is coming up with a defined style in the first place, which is where listening to already existing elements of your favourite tracks comes in handy. The best starting point for anyone in my opinion is to take elements you like from the genres you like and try to mash them together and see what happens. That's your ruleset established and your necessary learning narrowed down and from there you can refine your style. That's how i made my frankenstein of a debut track on OCR. I mean, I'd love to learn how to write beautifully composed scores on a piece of manuscript and conduct a symphony orchestra, but that'll only come after i learn how to make a song out of mic feedback and guitars processed through 12 synthesizers while i play with my feet! This is how you make a Doom 2016 soundtrack and change the game, guys!
 
Mastery comes with repetition. Don't listen to the voice in the back of your head telling you you're doing it wrong, or you should be learning this or that. You can't do it wrong, and i believe it's an impossibility to somehow lose progress and get worse over time. Just keep doing shit. As @Rozovian said to me when i made a similar post some time ago...
"Keep making pancakes."

This happens all the time for many different people, so you're not alone by any means.  A thing to remember is the amount of exposure you have.  Find a recording you didn't have anything to do with.  Listen to it 100 times, and tell me you still like the sound of it as much as you did the first time.  With the best made recordings, you will to some extent, but most likely not.  Also, you know what your shortcomings are, so when you hear them over and over again it just kind of solidifies the idea that you have those shortcomings.  People who have not heard them over and over may not even notice.  For the most part, nobody will put a recording on as many times as you did making it, regardless of quality.

It's also important to take into account that your tastes evolve.  Sometimes you'll love something, then come back to it in a few months and hate everything about it (I can't stand to listen to my earlier work, or performances because of how much I've grown as a musician since producing them).  This just means what you see as good or ideal is changing constantly as is normal.
 
This one can be remedied by doing more listening.  Music isn't as original as people think it is, and you can use this to your advantage.  When working on a track, if you struggle to find out where to go next to finish a track, find somebody else who expressed the same sentiment you want to.  I work with big band arrangements quite a lot, and most of the time I do more listening to others' writing than actually working on the track.  There are tropes and idiomatic ways of writing that are common because of how solid they are.  Don't steal them note for note, but do think critically about why they work or don't work, and see how you can apply that to what you're working on.  You mentioned piano solo, I actually have the scores of all of Debussy's solo piano works handy for whenever I need to write a solo piano piece.  "I want this musical idea, how could I express that?  How did Debussy express a similar thought, and what textures, harmonies, etc did he use to do it?"  In a jazz style I'll usually defer to solo performances mostly by Makoto Ozone and similar pianists.

Don't think of it like you're piggybacking off of other musicians.  When learning to talk for the first time, you didn't learn to talk in a vacuum did you?  All you're doing is listening for musical vocabulary to enrich your own.
 
 
I get this one entirely.  I only use the default sounds that came with Logic, mainly because I can't be bothered to get anything else that isn't free.  As a result I do as much with live instruments I can, which is why my music typically uses so much french horn and other brass (I'm a professional french horn player, and I have access to a good recording setup for that).  I also do a lot of jazz, which samples do not do well.  That said, there are all kinds of really good free sounds.  An example is the Sennheiser drum library (Drummic'a) that was released for free as an advertisement for their microphones.  It's definitely a solid drum sound that works for many things.  You can find these things if you look hard enough.  A lot of music composition and arranging is knowing how sounds work together, and the limitations of having bad sounds can spur creativity of how to work around them.  More easily said than done, I know.  But in college there were several times where we would have assignments like "this is a saxophone player who only has an octave of range that sounds good.  Write a solid piece that takes advantage of that.
Production concepts are universal.  Generally basic things like compression, EQ, and reverb, and even non plugin things like musicality, balance, and arrangement used correctly can do a lot for a track.  If you get solid with these fundamentals, you'll notice your sound will get better just because the sounds you have will work together better.
 
 
So a really easy way to find out where to go next is just focusing on one shortcoming that you have, and learning about it.  If you have a mix that sounds very loud, muddy, and noisy, look at balance and separation.  If you have a mix that sounds very stale and robotic, look at humanization.  If the mix lacks energy and seems very static, look up textures and orchestration techniques that can add variety to a mix. 

Alternatively you can sit down and say "I'm going to really nail this style in this track."  Let's say you wanted to write a solo piano mix in the style of Joe Hisaishi.  Do a lot of listening and transcribing solo piano works he's written (there are a lot of them because he's Joe Hisaishi).  Then when you sit down to write a thing, basically take note of what characteristics he uses in his writing, and see if you can use those in your writing so that your track will sound right at home among other Hisaishi tracks.  Listen, analyze, apply.  Then, once you have that one, move on to something else.  This applies to any style or genre.  Gradually, as you do this more, you will get better and better at it and will notice that learning comes much more naturally based on what you're interested in.

Your improvisation with the flute is quite enjoyable, a refreshing twist on an oft arranged song. I'll admit that the recording quality isn't the best, and that the piano sounds a little too quiet, but you've got something great going on here. Keep at it!

Ok, I'm interested. I would really really enjoy some live flute on this! I know I already submitted, but whatever. PM me with some deets!

Cool stuff, it reminds me of something in Super Mario Galaxy, don't know what track specifically. If you want I could record some actual flute for this, maybe add a little solo if desired. :) 

In my experience, working with other people does indeed involve waiting, and sometimes that can get a bit frustrating. But there’s another side to it to, or at least for me: being able to work with other people does make it more enjoyable, social and educational. Depending on your individual needs and desires that may or may not be something that interests everybody, but I’ve learned bits and bobs from everybody I worked with, and that is totally worth it for me. But YMMV of course; just wanted to mention another side of it.

This is the one point I will disagree with you on.
Maybe in certain genres starting with something else works, but most music is composed melody first. Actually, starting with a chord is still technically melody first.
Great example being that the very basis of part-writing, and how harmony came to be understood today, is by playing multiple melodies at the same time. That's all a chord really is: Different melody lines moving homorhythmically. Pretty much everyone from Bach to John Williams started with a great theme or motif, and harmonized it from there.
Not to plug my own shit, but I literally just posted a track for critique over in the Original Music forum before reading this. I started with all the melodies, and built from there. To my ears, it turned out cohesive.
So I'd agree that building a piece of music is like building a house, but I'd disagree that the melody shouldn't be the foundation.  
EDIT: Points 7, 8, 12, and 20 are very, very good points.