DavidOrr's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[Hero's Theme (w.i.p)]

Not classical, but well done nonetheless!

Your piano part was very nice, although the sound (as arbiter said) was being choked by the limited polyphony. Very driving piece, and certainly worthy of a 5. All of your stuff has a lot of potential, all you need are better sounds :).

What do you use as a sequencer and what are your samples?

cornandbeans responds:

:D

I use FL studio 6, and I used a pianissinum?.. I think for the piano. I have a ton of soundfonts, I mostly use them for samples. Thanks for checking it out! :D

~cornandbeans

[{Event Horizon} fixed]

Nice job!

The intro didn't do it for me, but the rest of the piece, wow! To be honest, I was expecting a beginner, unpolished sound judging by the intro, but once you kicked in the melody I was hooked.

You have a knack for writing driving melodies, they all are catchy and very easy on the ears.

Great work, can't wait to hear more from you!

cornandbeans responds:

:D again

The intro, yes it was bad. I'll have to work on that. Usually the beginning and end of my songs are really stinky. :P I'm glad you stuck around for the rest of the song :D Thanks again for the review!

~cornandbeans

[Night Strike~]

Great job again!

You use FL? Most FL songs have that FL Studio sound to them, but not yours. This stuff is top notch! Someday when I get my own sound production team (hopefully) I'm going to drop you an e-mail!

It's funny in one of your reviews that you mentioned StarCraft, because the opening voice sounds like a soldier from the game. Am I right?

Anyway, great job on this song, can't wait for more stuff from you!

cycerin responds:

Close, it's an unused sound file from CnC: Generals (same voice actor as for the Aurora Bomber)with some spastical flanger and shit on.

Sound production eh? I'm currently doing sound effects for CnC: Shockwave, a highly popular mod for that game. If you need anything you think i can help with, just drop me an email or PM. I dont have enough soundwork to do these days anyway. :)

Thanks for the compliments as always.

[Racstraw]

Awesome!

This is really neat, it's hard to find words to describe it. It has so many elements from so many different genres in it, it's a really refreshing piece (or perhaps that is just the water)!

5/5

[Ion Force~]

Nice stuff you've got here!

The intro sets the piece up really well, kudos with that. I'm glad I checked out your music, it's pretty nice stuff. I liked the melody with the guitar-like synth. You've got a great style, it's industrial and ambient, with some really catchy melodies.

You're using Reason, right? Some of the sounds sound like Reason. Great work, I'm gonna go and 5 all of your songs, you could use some more exposure.

Can't wait to hear more from you!

cycerin responds:

Wow, thanks man :D your appreciation is very uplifting. I intend to keep making songs with this style.
And no, i use FL 4, but i spend a lot of time tinkering with samples and generators so many of my songs use my own sounds.
Thanks for the exposure too! :D

[§Arbiter§ - Arise of Loth]

Hahaha

I was half expecting this to be a Pirates of the Carribean spin, the beginning had me thinking "Oh great, here we go". You possess some of the same qualities as Hans Zimmer, but have your own style, too. You certainly love the percussion, that's for sure.

My biggest issue with this piece is that it doesn't develop. I try to ask myself "Is the piece bringing the listener somewhere?". This would be perfect for an intro to a movie, or even a trailer (if made slightly more intense at the end, with a signature orchestral hit at the end, haha). At the end, I could see you going to a Bb major chord, with a choir in there, introduced by a suspended cymbal roll, and perhaps a tam-tam hit? Now I'm just telling you what I would have done though, that's not what reviews are really for.

Percussion still has that reverb a little strong, but not quite as heavy as Dark Winds. Still, I would follow the same advice and increase the reverb size, but dry it out almost completely.

Great work once again, I'm going to be checking for more stuff soon!

Now that our pal Winterwind has taken a stab at orchestral libraries, it couldn't hurt for me to make my guess, too :).

I'm thinking Reason Orkester, simply for marcato basses, the sound very much like your samples. And the percussion also sounds similar, but that may just be my ears. I am pretty certain it isn't East West Orchestral Samples or Garritan, but perhaps some Gigastudio package? I'm not too familiar with the "Giga-sound", so that is basically a complete guess. Whatever you use, your samples are alright, but your music could benefit from better ones.

Again, great work, I can't wait to hear more from you! I would check out Winterwind's stuff also if you havn't already. If you go and check the classical page, you will find all sorts of great arists there, it wouldn't hurt to take a look!

5/5

David Orr
www.davidorr.net

[§Arbiter§ - Dark Winds]

You're a welcome addition to Newgrounds Audio!

Great job! This music reminding me of Warcraft 2 music towards the beginning, but I think that has to do more with the brass samples you have. Nice Motif, would certainly work well in a movie or game, hence the "SoundTrack" label.

You've heard some of my music I know, and you probably can tell I love throwing in epic strings and choirs to my epic orchestral pieces (although most of my trailer and videogame soundtracks feature that more than anything else). It sounded like your choirs were intending to give the piece body it needed, but I think they came in too abruptly and were a little middle-heavy (gave it a nasal sound), I would recommend separately EQing them and bringing out the low and mid-ranged sections, but reduce the higher end. That should give you the full sound without breathy, awkward sounding noises (assuming you're using some decent choir samples). You may want to simply add choirs an octave lower to supplement the existing ones, that may fix this problem.

Also, the reverbing seemed off too, I believe you put more reverb onto the drums and held back on everything else a bit. I would put reverb size to the max, but keep it almost completely dry. The choirs could have used a little reverb too.

Don't get me wrong here, this is a great piece! I can tell that you're not very new to audio, I can also safely say you are already among the best of the Audio Portal. Every one I've heard on Newgrounds has improved as they add tracks and gain experience (which you would hope to be the case), so I can't wait to see where you are a few months from now.

I'm going to try to check out all of your pieces you upload and at the very least vote a good score for them all. Great job, I really hope you get some reorganization!

David Orr
www.davidorr.net

P.S What programs and samples are you using?

[One Last Goodbye V.2]

Very well done Dinero!

I've only listened to your stuff a few times, but I'm gonna have to check it out more. Nice playing, and you make the piano sound in Reason really shine. Maybe I'll try to record one of my own piano-solo pieces using Reason and see how it sounds. Hopefully I can get a quality to match this, but that sets the bar pretty high!

Great job, I'd love to hear more of your delicate side :)

[~|RMXP-Battle01|~]

Hmm

I'm trying to figure out if you just took the midi file, ran it through your samples, and put it in mp3 form. Although I am pretty familiar with the music from this game (I used to use it personally for game music analysis), I don't feel that I am personally in the position to call you on this or not. If you rescored it all out you did a great job, and could find yourself a job in the cellphone ringtone industry. I'm not sure why you would rewrite this though, because it is extremely easy to throw the midi into any notation program or sequencer and work from there.

I put a 5 in all the ratings because I don't know exactly how you went about this, so just ignore that. I didn't cast a vote on your piece to raise or lower the score. Just be aware that if you just ran this through a sequencer that is copyright violation (in fact, it most likely is already), and violates the Newground submission rules.

At any rate I am interested in hearing more original works from you!