by

Josh Falco of Ophir
(Falco of Ophir)

A very simple and limited piano-based tune with no panning nor any other effects. The sample quality was quite bad, especially for the piano sample and the samples didn't even fit together. There weren't any rhythmic nor other changes in the song, just the same piano base, then drums and the changing lead piano. The composer still has a long way to become a good tracking artist (but he/she still seems to have some musical abilities, so keep practising!).

The song starts with a piano introduction. But the composer just used a single sample for about 3 to 4 octaves. A good piano sound need at least one sample for every octave -> therefore the piano part sounds not natural at all. The human sample is very bad looped and clicks awefully. All samples are played at maximum volume and are not balanced between each other. The composer had some nice ideas about the melody line, but the song is technically bad.

A question to the tracker: Is this your first song? Not a good idea to join a contest yet. First thing,to play a piano in this way can't be done with just one sample. Going too high/low makes it sound awful. The melody hurts.Really. The female choir is really annoying. It should have been left out. The lack of effects makes it hard to listen through this even once. The rhythm is wicked (not necessarily a GOOD thing). The only positive thing about this song is the filesize,thanks to the bad samples.

You had a whole 1,000,000 bytes to use, you really could have used better samples. I'm especially thinking about the piano sample, which just plain is a bad sample. You are also using it out of it's useable range. With the range you were using that one piano sample at, you should have used a multisampled piano at a much better quality, and it would have sounded much better. The piano lead tends not to mesh with the rest of the song, sometimes it's even dissonant with itself. I'm thinking about orser 15-18 when I write this, except you also hit a few dissonant chords throughout the song. I really didn't like the ending patterns.... what did you try to accomplish by putting the two themes together, but off beat of each other? Also, as a technical note, don't play more than one of the same note of the same sample at the same time, it makes it sound bad to GUS users like me, and perhaps people with other types or wavetable cards too. Mosty important thing is the meshing and dissonance, though. Sometimes dissonance can work in a song, but not in your case with a song like this.

*File Specs* [Additional vote] Lucky author [Filename]m6r-gold.it [Title]Golden Stairway [General comment]Hmmz, if this Golden Stairway would be the stairway to heaven i would rather choose the elevator instead. You miss a lot of variaty in your song, not only instrumental also in concept your song doesn't cover an intresting story. What you could have done was extending your vocal "aah" track to a various chords like you did with the pianos, then you could have add a baseline, if you try to change your baseline very often you also have the chance that you create your song-difference level in a good way without needing to change your chord-progression. Ofcourse that also doesn't work forever. Here in this song the author focussed him/herself too much on the melodical lead-track that's why the rythem and chord vary very (what a nice combination) little and the song is very pale. The samples do not all seem to be in harmony in the overal timbre neither have they been arranged to at least sound like they should be in harmony. This song is very surfacial in sounding and very monaural. It will take some time for this author to get along with the big bunch but:practise is the everlasting key that always works. Listening to a lot of other people's work will help to and not only listening, compare your own work with other people's work and see what you miss in it.

Poor sample quality (mostly the piano), also out of tune, WAY WAY out of tune. No Panning what so ever, lack of effects, lack of proper volume control.. HOWEVER, It does sound like you had good meaning to the song, so you got some good form and good originality. If this song were in tune had had effective panning/volume/effects this could DEFFINTLY go somewhere, most definitly...

ack. First of all, since the piano is one of the major instruments in the song, please find a better piano sample to use, it's too grainy/noisy and that gets on the nerves. The drumline badly needs a lot of reworking, it's simply annoying, and the choir sample is... well, less said the better. In short, terrible.