Colonelel's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[OTHERWORLDLY FOE (Instrumental)]

Way too cool for thoughts. Like a 70s jazz funk track ran thru a blender. I'm not sure what the tie-in between a funky song without lyrics and "the memory of lives and people of the world suffering from discrimination and injustice", is but it probably makes lots of sense and I just haven't picked up on it. Easy 5.0/5.0 tho.

[demise.]

Yeah, this is one of the one's where there's not much to say. Just make the ending a bit more satisfying and this'll be a 5.1 or something. Idk just keep making good stuff. If I had to give you something to work on, it'd probably be to try to create something a little bit more distinctive - this sound relies heavily on 80s and 90s nostalgia and hardware/hardware-emulators like the Fender Rhodes and vintage saturation/compression tools. Maybe for the next one try adding something more 2020s?

G2961 responds:

I stopped writing lo-fi, I don't think I need to change anything now, but if I go back to it, I'll change it

[Rain of Tears]

This is super creative. It's way too easy to go minimal with lofi and chillwave - I guess some people think being relaxed/low-key while making the music makes it somehow more relaxing by proxy (?) - but this nails it. I especially like how you give the track plenty of breathing room by dropping stuff - subtractive arrangment > additive arrangement every time. The only real problems I can see is maybe a bit of sameness on the horizon. When you're using lots and lots of gear and VSTs, I often find you end up with kind of similar stuff - especially if you don't branch out much. It gets easy to fall into the trap of installing a new plugin every time you think your music's getting a bit stale, which is really no good - financially or creatively. Really dig deep into what you've already got - the reason some oldheads swear by MPCs and DAWless mixing isn't cause those tools are better but because they've got 15+ years of experience using just that gear. But also the Kilohearts Mixing Suite is omega-based (and free), so automatic +0.5.

[ALL OUT (ft. gaptoothv4mp)]

Cool song. I love your cadence (I don't know much about rapping I think that's what it's called (?)), and that sort of energy/presence is exactly what you need to make industrial beats work. The only thing holding this back for me is a lack of contrast. With this sort of abrasive sound, a clean section is much needed. Even the most lo-fi black metal and punk groups have breakdowns to help give the track some drama. Keep going with this sound though, this rock-tinged experimental sound's the next wave for sure. I get a feeling the rap-rock apocalypse is coming soon and I'm kinda for it.

[brawlerthing/thistown (unfinished)]

This was really cool. I love the use of small samples, feels very Bomb Squad. I don't see that style being done nearly as much as the Dilla/Madlib type-beats which is such a shame. I have to agree with GoofyNutNightmare that the second beat was the weaker one. I think it just needed some heavier drums/kick sidechaining to help blend with the first beat better.

[Small Dick Type Beat]

The drums on this are great, and there's some really strong elements here. Keeping in mind that stuff like this is pretty subjective, I think you might have too much going on from 0:11 to 0:50. In a sample with so much instrumentation (choir, piano glissandos, organ, and synth pad) pretty much everything else has to be super simple, and I'm not sure that's really what's happening. The second sample chop works much better, even though the drums and bass are the same, because its much simpler - only really having vocals and keys.

I'd recommend arranging that second beat into its own thing, and probably ditching the first thing. If you want to keep that first part, I'd mess around with different instrumentation, or even try un-chopping it and finding something to loop (this is great because a loop is pretty much guaranteed to make musical sense).

This is pretty strong, and most of the sampling "mistakes" are musical rather than technical - all your chops are on-beat, and they make musical sense together. This is super close to being great, but it definitely needs some tweaking. Hope this helps!

Bklass11 responds:

Thanks for the feedback

[ａｂｓｃｅｎｃｅ ｏｆ ｃｏｌoｒ <loop>]

Super lively beat, especially love the drum samples and the funky quantization. My only major complaint is a lack of dimension - there's the sample which is in stereo, and there's the drums that are completely mono, but there's nothing that's hard-right or hard-left. As a general rule of thumb (keeping in mind that there's always exceptions) multiple elements in the same general frequency range should be panned in opposite directions to help add some life to an otherwise 2D beat. I'd recommend finding some isolated instruments or synths that occupy the same frequency range and sprinkle them around the beat - I especially like using one-shots and random foleys for this. Not having those kinds of details makes it very hard to arrange a beat into a full, interesting song. Hope this helps!

sliggnaut responds:

thanks for the advice man!
i actually sampled the drums from one of my favorite ng artists and i believe they were just an mp3 file so that might explain the mono-ness