by

Brian Broam
(Broam)

the lead siner is really overpowering, however, your samples are -very- nice! it's great to see someone doing a melodic and musical based house styleish sort of tune, instead of thump thump pointless repitition. it's a fun sort of groove piece, unfortunately it doesn't really spark anything truly memorable... however, it's a little bit short :) you could perhaps get a bunch more samples for variety and start doing some variative stuff... go listen to PT-200 By Acell from Cryptic Stench Records for a taste of what i mean...

Good piece of work although it's not really original. The rythm is interesting but the trouble is that the leadings on channels 14,15 & 16 don't give strengh to this tempo (but the echo with the panning is well done). It just seems like chords thrown by groups of 3 or 4. Moreover, maybe the choice of sample 0C is too cheesy for this style of music. Anyway, the quality of your samples is definitely good (probably because there are 16 bits samples). You have skills composing for sure. All you have to add (easy to say :)) is more different samples and you must have a melody in mind before composing, not only a rythm and just adding notes trying to find where this will go... And maybe if you use more effects (vibrato, slide, ...) it will make your song even better.

The melody is on the limit of being too simple, but it fits the kind of music. I couldn't notice any major flaw. The "drumtrack" could be improved (make it more complex) Sorry for this VERY short comment but I just realised that the actual deadline is at Sun 10/8 00:00 GMT instead of Sun 10/8 24:00 GMT! I'm terrible sorry.

Although you have good technique and use clean samples, there is nothing very original in this song, as in the form (synth strings + dance rythm) than as in the sound of it (well known samples). Even if you sampled them yourself, try to catch some more-personnal ones. You have potential : good use of stereo, volume-mixing, and construction. But work more on harmony : there were some little tonal mistakes in lead (pat.9-10 for ex.) that makes unprofessional. Same critic about chaining chords : making ones that the listener will remember is not easy. Try to produce less changes, but more melodic ones (that's the Beatles' formula :). Be carefull about ending : don't get the listener out of your song using such of a so fast fade-out, without any special musical part. So, clean technique, but poor style.

Frankly, this isn't a very interesting tune. From the start I hated the strings, they just simply annoyed me for some reason. Maybe you should have used softer warmer strings, dunno if that would have helped. Drumtrack was fairly simple, maybe a little bit unusual beat, but nothing exciting anyway, it really could have used a little bit more variety. In fact, the only I liked about the track is how short it was, it was rather unimaginatively dull all through. The samples are fairly good though, nicely looped and clear.

This piece is a jarring patchwork of disparate musical styles. While the chord progression used could be interesting, it never reaches this potential; instead, it merely repeats with different poorly conceived leads over it. In contrast to the relaxed style of this chord progression, there's a strange bouncy percussion track underneath which just doesn't fit. The hat line, in particular, is annoying. You could have introduced the hat with some kind of variation instead of the exact same thing every time. The main failure of the piece is the lack of musical interest. There's no sense of development through the piece; there is merely a series of short, similar-sounding sections that begin and end without fanfare. The melodies and leads don't seem at all deliberate, but more thrown together. Given the mediocrity of the rest of the song, you should have devoted more time to the melody or leads to have some kind of musical focal point. This should have been entered as a rookie song.