by

Rob Kain
(Kain)

The intro to this song definietly was too long. The vocals in the beginning were awful, they didn't have very high quality. The sound of the "engine", starting in the beginning, was well too overused, and spoiled the meaning of it completely. The song, in all what it had, simply was too boring. Practically nothing happened in the beginning and in the end. And the song should've been more alive; you could have made it more interesting and you should have used more pannings.

The opening is -exquisite.- Love it. Couldn't be better. A most excellent use of samples... A great soundscape. But the song itself it weak. You make good use of rhythm, but with half-assed samples. Pick some verby, tonal hits instead. There are some freaky sounds thrown in, but they're overused. The soft, silent strings are wonderful--but you should have faded them in over the rhythm... The song is too segmented as it is. It's like you tracked each second at totally different times with totally different moods. (It's a schizophrenic song!) :) The guitar sample could stand to be of a higher quality, although it's used quite well. I really like songs like this... And this is a good one--I can't wait to see you release something with a little more experience behind your belt--but I can't mark you up just because I -like- your song! (Well, I can't mark you up -much,- anyway...) ;) You've got a great grasp of sound, and you engineer it to make a module. For that, I commend you.

*File Specs* [Additional vote] ... [Filename]m6r-redi.xm [Title]Reaching Distant [General comment]Nice intro, the start of the song is a bit pale, the next quiet sections are intresting, you are a bit too exaggerating with your pannings but the most serious thing i could find were your patched .WAV samples. Most of your wav-samples contained the famous WAV data-click (the first 400 or 420 bytes of the sample) you always should cut out before using the wave-sample, these clicks are really annoying. In a whole your song is quite nice an exclusive key-progression, keep going on this way and you will become a great composer but do arrange your samples and instruments before releasing your work will ya?

I have mixed feelings of this one. Intro-part with effects and vocals wasn't too terrific, but I actually liked it when the music started. Original use of samples. The pad part after that one was again a disappointment. Inadequate sound quality in most of the samples. You use only 8 channels, and limiting yourself in that way has no point these days. You could use some crossfading to make the sound smoother. The middle part sounded haphazard and pointless to me. I guess it tries to be ambient background music. As a hint, I recommend checking your use of panning and stereo and modeling of instruments.

This song seems to use a large number of samples from certain popular movies.. it certainly uses a lot of sound effects and speech sounds. Unfortunately it does not have a great deal of melody, harmony or musical content in general, but it is quite atmospheric in places. Technically it is not great. This could be improved by using some more channels to echo the sounds a bit more, and making greater use of envelopes and volume commands, particularly in the part starting around order 10h that makes a lot of use of the instrument number 13h. This part could be improved a lot by some volume commands to give it some feeling, and in fact the instrument used there (13h) was not the best choice for that part - something more melodic and less percussive would have been better. The samples are OK - some of them are quite good although the sample rate seems generally to be quite low. The set is high on movie samples and effects and low on instruments, which is a shame as this limits it a bit. This is the general problem with the song - although it is atmospheric in places, it doesn't have a melody, good drums or even some nice chords, just a lot of effects. More of an ambient sound track than a song, but not a great one. Concentrate on adding melody, harmony and rhythm alongside your movie samples and you may make some good songs. The song was also a little too long for what it was, and I've heard very similar things with much the same movie samples many times. You might want to edit your samples more, add effects in a sample editor and clip them a bit better to get rid of the headers in the sample data. This was a good atmospheric piece in places. However, it does stretch the point a little, and if you want people to listen to it rather than just switch off, you need some melodic and rhythmic content, or something other than just the effects.