Colonelel's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[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

[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