DavidOrr's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[Rucklo - EmoBitch (NoVox)]

Nice Work!

I loved the glitchy feel of the track, it felt like a hybrid of dnb and glitch music, which I really thought was a nice change from the typical dnb. Also, loved the strings scattered around the piece.

I felt as though there was no real climax though. The music kept building and building, but it never seemed to really bust out and smack me in the face, which would be a nice addition to the piece, and add diversity. Having a thicker drum beat in places would help quite a bit.

Great work overall, keep it up!

5/5

Rucklo responds:

Glitchy, eh?

The first half of the song actually IS the climax. The full version (too large for NG...) is 1.30 BEFORE this version starts. If you or anyone else would want it, just PM me... Check a lower quality version on my myspace www.myspace.com/rucklo

But you´re definintely right about this song not "smacking" hard enough. To get that I would have to build the song differently, and then mix it alot better. It´s actually something I´ve been thinking some of last few days, so thanx for brining it to my attention from outside my head :)

Thanx for the good review mate!

[_-={The Spread of Chaos}=]

Nice job!

Nice job, lovely feel. You have less dissonant notes than you used to, which is good to see :)

I have two main complaints here. One, you have too much reverb. The second is that the piece is a bit thin. They go hand in hand, actually.

I would recommend taking out some of the reverb to give it a cleaner sound. You will then see that there are parts that are very sparse. Try beefing the piece up by adding harmonies to the piece. It seems that all I hear is drums and a melody, with an occasional counter melody. Adding more underlying parts will add a level of professionalism to the piece. Try adding some long tones in the bass to give the bottom end a little more presence, which could help compensate a decrease in reverb should you decide to try it out.

As always, nice melody work, and the piece had a nice flow to the piece. Certainly sounds like it could be a tribal piece, you've got quite an imagination. Maybe you could add some tom hits to give it a more war-drums sound?

Once again nice work, keep it up!

5/5

MaestroRage responds:

brilliant advice David, as you have noticed already, due the insane level of reverb that I used, adding any more countermelodies was not really an option, originally there was so much more, but it became a mess, a huge... huge mess. This I can attribute to those heavy drums at the beginning, it just sounded so good all reverbed and delayed that in order for the other instruments to... merge with it (if you know what I mean), they too had to be reverbed. However I will have to try all of these ideas out, for I was pretty stumped on how to go around equalizing and arranging this.

Thanks for the review David, truly it helped me out, and hopefully it will solve the issues at hand here, and I won't make the same mistake again. I'm glad you enjoyed it ^^.

[The Purest of Winters]

Great Job!

Hey MMD glad you came back to submit another piece! The sound quality definately improved, no doubt because of the use of Reason 3.0. It sounds as though the piano is from Reason, too.

It was a very gentle, inspiring piece. Everything flowed together extremely well. Also, it's neat how all of your pieces have that "MMD feel" to them. Very nice!

My biggest complaint is that you didn't use quantize your stuff! Many different parts were off very slightly. I'm guessing people aren't picking up on it too much, but you should really use quantization. Now that you have the ability to snap everything into perfect time, you can bring everything to a new level of professionalism.

Other than that, I don't really have any complaints. There are a lot of subtle parts in the pieces, which is really the sign of a maturing composer. Well done!

Keep it up man, I'd love to see you submit things like this once in a while!

5/5

MilkMan-Dan responds:

Oo... this is a treat... I love your work David... simply envy alot of it.

You'll have to pardon my lack of the use of quantization. I'm waaayyyy to use to writing all the tracks to a piece in "real time" and doing it over and over to achieve any level of guantization. Having just gotten familiar with Reason... I'm still trying to figure out how everything works. But I promise... if there are ever any future pieces on my part... I'll learn how to use my new euipment properly in that regard.

Fortunitley... unless your ear is trained to search for that kinda thing... it generally doesn't take away from the piece (I hope).

lol... I am glad I still bring that ol "MMD Feel" to my music... I don't do it intentionally.

Happy Halloween and later a Merry christmas to you Mr.Orr

MMD

[Lethargic Colours]

Very beautiful!

You are quite a good pianist, better than many of the ones I've heard on Newgrounds, so props for that. The piece was very calming and serene, I can certainly see this being written about someone you have feelings for.

I would suggest you work on your finger control more. Some of the notes seemed a little too loud (sudden spikes in loudness here and there). If you digitally recorded this, it would be quite easy to go into a piano roll and just notch down some of the offending velocities.

Great quality, great piece, great work!

5/5

Sevanimation responds:

Hey thanks for the review!
The way I recorded this was non-midi... You see, I hooked my MP3 player up to my keyboard, so the recording quality was not too great, and I could not hear what I was playing, so it was a little difficult to have COMPLETE control over what it sounds like, but you know...
Thanks so much for the positive feedback man! It means so much, especially coming from you.
Cheers,
Clayton

[_-={The Epic Christmas!}=]

Hahaha!

Props for originality man, this piece is very unique! The laugh is hilarious! I actually half expected you to throw in a few "lol tanks" somewhere in the piece somehow.

Very colorful percussion, it gave me the impression of elves working on toys vigorously. I think I heard a dog at the end, which I really didn't get. Perhaps you could shed light on this one?

This had an electronic sound to it, which kinda disappeared as the piece progressed. I think the strings could have been a little more forceful when playing.

5/5

Ahahahahaha!

MaestroRage responds:

You like the laugh too eh >:)? I as well enjoy the laugh, and for some reason I especially like the very beginning, I feel I did a damn good job being Santa's voice. I was totally seeing him stroking his beard while he was saying that, a twinkle of black anger in his eyes :O!

The percussional work, ugh, the song was fun to make, but how the percussionals made me suffer. There was a total of 5 different percussional kits not including the anvil and bells. I think this may be my most advanced percussional work to date. Yes they were indeed meant to give the impression of overdriven elves.

As for the dog sound... this is news to me. There wasn't actually any dog sounds. Maybe the beginning of the whip sound? I don't know what to tell you man, but you're the second person to mention dogs so I suppose thats what it sounds like.

There was not actually any electronic instruments, perhaps some poory used synths :P. The kick and some of the snares did sound a little electrical so reverbed up, they may have been amplified.

As for the strings, you're probably right, however I wanted the percussion to stand out more above anything else in this scenerio, and so the strings had to remain quieter.

I'm glad you enjoyed the piece, thank you for the review ^^.

[The Friday Night Blues]

Very neat!

Nice job with this! I can see the silent film statement. Nice piano playing, too, although I would work on your rhythm.

Great clarity, what samples are you using? It sounded pretty realistic. I'm going to look for more stuff from you!

Keep up the great work!

5/5

Take a look at something of mine if you get the chance!

Sevanimation responds:

Hey thanks for the positive review:D
About the recording, it was a direct recording from my keyboard to my MP3 player, and then I transfered it from my MP3 player to my computer...
I will be sure to look at your stuff as soon as I'm done this review.

Sevanimation

[_-={An Ambitious War}=-_]

Nicely Done!

Great job again Maestro, you're music has really come a long way!

I loved the rhythmic motion in the strings, I thought it really gave it a strong feeling. Also, the vocals sounded very nice as well.

I would suggest you have a stronger beat in the beginning, perhaps bass drum with quarters and snares with some pattern. I get the feeling this is supposed to sound like a march of some sort, but it really neads the snare and bass. Other than that, I'd say you have another great piece of music!

5/5

Keep it up :)

MaestroRage responds:

Hey David. Always appreciate insights from you. Anyways, this song in particular wasn't designed with marching in mind, but I can definately see where you are coming from. The stronger bass hits were originally planned, but my lack of equalizing knowledge made it dificult to properly pull off, and the overpowering led to a great loss of power from the instruments side, and so timpini and bass hits had to be reduced/removed.

I will definately try out these ideas though, if only to learn off them.

Thanks for the review David, means a good deal to me.

[Cold as Fire]

Good first submission!

For your first piece, this is very well done! This is a lot better than some of the stuff on the Audio Portal, so you should be proud of that.

My main complaint is that it's too repetitive. As you progressed into the piece you helped fix that, but the beginning dragged on too long unchanged. I would suggest adding in another part to help keep the listener interested.

You've got some great musical ideas, and nothing sounded out of place here, which shows you've got some potential.

Keep at it!

5/5

Check out my piece Meltdown if you get the chance!

ListenToMyMusic responds:

thank you, I know that is repeatative, I could add some more leads, this is my first techno/dnb or whatever it would be classified, I've made one other, completely different type of song, i will upload it someday

[Vampira]

Nice Beat

I really enjoyed the overall feel of the piece, it has a great hip-hopesque sound with an almost ambient twist to it. Every part blended together very nicely, nothing sounded out of place at all.

I would have tried to introduce a new melody to help keep the piece fresh. Towards the end it began to feel monotonous. Adding in strings to give body, or another synth to help add to the complexity would be very beneficial to the piece. Besides that, I don't really see anything I don't like about the piece!

I'll be watching for more stuff from you, keep up the great work!

Thanks for your vote, DavidOrr! You voted 5 for Vampira, keeping its score at 5.00.

Hope it will stay high up on the charts as long as possible so you can get even more feedback!

If you have the time, I'd love your opinion on my track "Meltdown"!

Always-Dark responds:

Thank you so much for the review you gave me. Usually i get the "wow nice song, make more" review, which is good, but id like to hear what i did right, what i did wrong. Yea i thought i should've added strings at the last break but i really wanted to finish it today so i could hand it over to a friend of mine who's going to rap over it.

Thanks for the vote, and dont worry ill check your track out, i have to now lol

-Allen aka LeN

[For the last time]

Very Nice!

You've got a lot of potential, this is great stuff. I really enjoy your ideas, I can almost see how your brain works when you're writing this music. This sounds VERY close to the Batman Begins soundtrack, I'm not sure if this was intentional or not, but bravo nonetheless.

You could really benefit from new orchestral sounds. Your best bet would be to go with the EWQLSO Gold samples (you can find them for $400 if you look in the right places). Your music would come to life so much more. There is some percussion in the collection I know you would love.

Keep up the great work, I'm going to be watching you!

5/5, along with a 5 to all of your other stuff. I hope you get some more attention!

madboss responds:

Well first of all: thanks for the review and the listening! About the melody: it's my own idea and creation altough I love the Batman Begins soundtrack.
Yeah I've heard about the EWQLSO and if everything goes alright I'll get the silver edition... at least I hope so...
Thanks again for your points and your attention!