by

Wan

The lead trumpet gets quite annoying about halfway through. Consider multisampling. The song starts off well but doesn't really go anywhere. Consider using a different sample for the main lead instead of the trumpet/brass hit, better suited for the background. The transition leading up to the ending seems very out of place, as does the ending itself.

It had a good beat at the beginning, showing some real potential for an OK song. Just a couple of things I could pick on in the beginning. The samples were horrible: they didn't mesh together at all, and even the individual quality of them was really bad; they were noisy and pretty harsh. Very little effort seemed to be put into making the music "life-like", meaning that I was hard pressed to find -any- meaningful dynamics. It sounded like a .MID for gawd's sake. Especially when it first breaks into the main tune at order 2 or 3, and all you hear are those whiney pad things (don't get me wrong, they didn't sound too bad), the bass-line and the drum trak. Everything seemed to be playing at full volume with no variation between or during the notes. At least put some volume envelopes on if you're going to be that lazy. I'm glad the song was short, because there wasn't a whole lot to it. You tried to break it up into different sections, like bridges and choruses and stuff, which is a good idea, but they way you did it it seemed really disjointed and spontaneous. There was nothing leading up a change in the mood, and consequently the listener is left a little disoriented. It's hard to break in a good groove this way, despite the fact the drum trak was pretty elite B). The ending was awful. Right around order 20 or something, when all of a sudden there were like cymbal crashes, and instruments disappearing, and the tempo slowed down it seemed to cease being a song. I hate to say but just a standard fade-out would have been better than that. Slow downs for an ending have to have some sort of impact, and therefore they can't drag on for five patterns with nothing new coming out of them. The bassline and melody were pretty catchy. The drum trak was groovy.

Fairly interesting to listen to, don't like the orchestra hits though. guitars are nice, has a good general feel to it. (mm video game?) some nice harmonies later on in the song.

*File Specs* [Additional vote] ... [Filename]m6i-face.it [Title]Twofaced [General comment]A nice song-concept, different repetoires, good rythm, two beat-motives, the musical aspects seem to come over as synthetic:fake trumpets with unnatural slides, unnatural use of guitar/piano samples it makes it almost a wild musical piece with lack of note-balancing. The overall idea is great but the use of samples is solid but not virtuos and with style in all cases, your stereo-environment is okay.

Pretty good effort. I like it's dark Castlevania-like feel and the choice of instrumentation. However, two things stand out most: 1) sample quality and 2) transitions. The samples (e.g. brass) are not clear and sometimes played outside of their range. Maybe passing the samples through an equalizer would have boosted the clarity. But, given the limits of the competition, you did well. The one thing that kept catching me off-guard were the transitions. There doesn't seem to be a common theme flowing through it and the song goes from slow to fast to slow to fast to ... There was no common melody, though there were common instruments. At the end, it just leaves you hanging as well. You did manage to create a nice surround feeling without the use of panning envelopes.