Game Developer & Musician - Looking for feedback and/or criticism.

[FoxGames01]

Hi guys, I would love if you can listen to some of my music and tell me some feedback. I create videogame-like songs, with a touch of Ambient. I really don't think too much of the genre while I'm composing, but my main musical inspirations come from videogame composers, like Toby Fox and ZUN.

Some of my best songs:

 

[100_PERCENT ROEMER]

I gave all three tracks a listen. My background is classical piano so that's where I'm coming from regarding my take on the tracks.

Lucid dreams sounds like a midi, which is not a good thing. The piano is monotone and obviously digital and not in a good way. It's possible to make digital piano sound realistic, but you'll need to add some amount of reverb, sustain, stereo imaging, and perhaps delay to mimic the sounds of a real piano and give it depth. Variations in the velocity of the notes is critical and generally pianists will emphasize the 1st and 3rd beats in 4/4 time, the 1st beat in 3/4, and so on depending on the time signature. Some slight offsets in the note lengths, passing notes, trills, crescendo and decrescendo, and other human touches are generally necessary.

Real piano recording for reference:

If you're recording a solo piano track, then it makes sense to simply record a real piano and it's surprisingly cheap and easy to find a good piano and a couple of condenser mics these days. However, if you're wanting to include other instruments like you did for your tracks, then getting the recording to be in time and in tune with your other instrumentation can be very difficult, not to mention having to denoise the background to create more headspace for the rest of the mix. I'm not sure what DAW you are using, but in FL studio, even the stock FL Keys plugin is surprisingly good if you take the time to work with it. There are other free piano plugins that are realistic as well (I used to use Tascam CVPiano back in the day).

The other tracks were... different. I noticed that there was a lot of dissonance as well. Dissonance can be an incredibly powerful tool but you have to return to some sort of root or resolution to prevent it from simply sounding like random noise. I don't know if you've heard of clown core, but I recently started enjoying their "music" and they are a perfect example of how to use dissonance effectively to convey a musical intention (Don't be fooled by the clowns! These two guys are extremely talented musicians).
 

Take some time to find some sheet music and pick apart your favorite songs to analyze the key signatures and chord progressions. From there, read into the main melody and the accompanying harmony and see how it fits into a cohesive whole with the intention of a specific expression. Music is hard to understand and even harder to compose in a manner that is artistic because there are rules that you should follow except for when you shouldn't follow them. Quite the conundrum.

And hey, you can also try learning an instrument! Once you know how to play an instrument or two it becomes much easier to understand how to write music for any instrumentation.

Best of luck and don't give up!

Edit: I took a look at your youtube uploads and just wanted to say that I really enjoyed Recusion - Black. Very nice ambient feel and a perfect fit for a menu!

Edited March 18 by 100_PERCENT ROEMER