help please

[Necrox]

Could I get some outsider feedback on this? I can't really tell if my ideas sound good to anyone's ears but mine sometimes.

https://soundcloud.com/twilight-stream/nebular-ruins

[timaeus222]

It's an interesting concept, but the beginning sounds (up to 0:22) are really abrasive and piercing, and the dissonance doesn't really sound right from what I can tell. I think you have a few different keys going on. There's a way to write good dissonance, and this dissonance here sounds less natural than I would imagine you were intending to go for. It sounds like you mixed minor intervals with diminished scales and tritone intervals, which theoretically clashes easily, often. Try sticking to diminished and tritone, or sticking to minor, or sticking to minor and diminished. Mixing diminished and tritone is hard, but mixing minor and tritone is just weird.

Worth pursuing though, but it'll take a lot of work.

[Necrox]

Thank you! Do you know where I can get a good free ear training course, because I seem to keep running into stuff like this.

[timaeus222]

I don't know about a course, per se, but I think looking at how zircon writes his atonal music and trying to predict how he writes it can help you to write it.