Balls Fast (after Dragonforce)

[CobraTPT]

http://conorbrace.com/music/BallsFast-GameplayLoop.mp3

A quick track I composed for an abandoned game project that involved hurtling through space at breakneck speeds. It's a 90-second loop, so there's no ending -- one of these days I'll have to fix that.

I'm particularly looking for comments about the mix. I'm an experienced composer but haven't been working with virtual instruments for very long, and I always have trouble with the mix...

[Diseased Project]

Awfully midi-ish throughout. Plus the wankery is too loud compared to background. Breakneck is one thing, breakeardrum is another. This all just seems like it's nothing but speed, melodies and riffs don't seem to matter. It's almost like all that matters, is that it's fast. Then again, I think DragonForce sounds pretty much like this, and I can't understand why some people like it. Maybe I'm not the right person to comment on this, but anyway, I'm going to go all Simon Cowell on this and say this is garbage. Sorry. However, I think there might be some people who could like it. I'm just not one of them.

[melody]

i feel similarly.. there is a section with nothing but pure double bass and some guitarish sounding synth playing root notes. more harmonic development could really benefit this track; it's easy to be a bassist who only plays roots but that gets stale pretty quick. just accentuating the fifth and m/M9s is an easy way to breathe some harmonic life into a piece. i think the drums need some phattening up too -- you can do that through eq and some light reverb/stereo width. also a melody is entirely absent throughout. dunno if that was intentional or not though. as far as working with acoustic samples goes, the first step to making them sound better is humanization. edit the velocities so consecutive note/drum hits are never identical, offset the timings of notes by a couple ticks, and mess around with note lengths. it helps to put yourself in the shoes of someone playing the part.