by

Carl Norfair
(Norfair)

"Hey, is this the annual WAVE tune?" ... Well. I think this says almost enough about the originality rating. In fact, this song is so awfully reminding me of WAVE's "Versions" (the drums, the background guitar to the instruments, usage of FT2's "set finetune" command noone practically knows of :) etc etc etc), and its totally non-subtle "vote for me" message (which even beats m6v-tlb) is a reason for me to not give a particularly high originality rating, as in my opinion, it's just a style ripoff. but well, now to the more positive things... considering the artistical content of the tune, well, there's nothing more to say than "almost brilliant". the chord progressions are kinda strange, but fresh, and the lead instruments' melody fits perfectly and doesnt hit a single "wrong" note while happily jumping around. Rhythmically spoken, it's definitely groovy enough, though the speed changes could better slightly differ from the triolic 4-2 pattern to give this a more natural feel. Anyway. As far as the technique is concerned, it's really "efficient" (i'm happy to still see decent 16-channel modules around), THOUGH this efficiency almost kills the beginning, as the chords played by the voice pad sound fade in way to slowly and are cut by the next chord, which leaves a quite disturbing feeling at each bar's beginning. It would have been better to sacrifice four more channels for the sake of sound here. The rest of the tracking is well done, no serious flaws, good echoes, well done panning and no "watch how many effects i know" passages. Also, sample quality is quite good, not too noisy (in fact, as noise free as 8bit samples can be), well looped, only i'd wish some better frequency balance in here, some EQ postprocessing really would have improved the samples. Ok, to come to an end... this is a really decent, if not great, tune, if you see it as a single musical piece of art. It's only problem is that it's style is so typical for ... well, we know :)

Funky. Good intro but the pads from the 4th order onwards need to be properly faded - you've got 32 channels to play with, remember. Excellent bass and percussion/fill-ins, lead is at times off-key and whiney. Good mid section with the flute but it needs portamento. Bell sample in the last section is slightly too loud. Well chosen sample set, style could be more original and the tune gets almost absurdly cheesy at times. This is hyped-up Jeroen Tel meets Radix, and it's well-trodden ground.

Swing tempo, string hits, funky guitar, those leads and drums.. yes, we've heard this many times. The sample set doesn't help the bid for originality, ripping heavily from Radix and other major composers in this genre. Good samples they are, though, with modulating leads, etc. The bass line is poor - it does in fact seem to be just one short part copied and transposed over the whole song. Why didn't the composer spend a bit of time over it and do something that varies? The synth chords are not well tracked - each chord cuts off the previous one, and some more channels should have been used to allow them to fade when the next one comes in, instead. As for the panning on them, I wish people wouldn't insist on using panning slides or left-right swinging envelopes on string sounds used in chords. Spread them out and give each note it's own position, sure, this is good, but please no more panbrello-esque panning. The leads are pretty good, leaning towards the chaotic. They sound quite complex at first, but in reality they are just a series of quick up and down movements, made to sound more impressive by the modulations in the samples. Sometimes the composer does manage to hit something very funky, though. About half way through, the song changes, the slow string synth chords go out, and some nice bouncy synth chords and flute comes in, which is probably the best part of the song, and works well, although the single note string hits are incredibly cliched. The drums are the standard thing for this style, and sound quite decent, but not particularly amazing. With this song, I'm wondering how much of it is original thought and how much of it is copied from the same place the composer got the samples. It sounds rather generic for the style, so I'm guessing the latter is the more influencial. On the surface it sounds very impressive, but the closer you look the more it seems to be just a mix of the standard elements in this genre, without an identity of it's own. That may sound a bit harsh. But it's like the composer looked at songs by Radix, etc, and said "so, it seems like he does his leads like this", and "he uses a funky guitar like this", for the different elements of the song, and just stuck down a load of imitations of them all together. The first time I listened to it I thought it was very impressive, but it moves so fast it pretty much flies by. After I listened to it again I started recognising a lot of the ideas. The composer's got some good things in there, but there are some obvious holes - some of the technical things, like stopping the chords from being cut off, are things you'd expect a veteran composer, particularly in round two, to not even have to think about, and to handle automatically. The leads don't have any real direction, it's not working on a melody, and the bass line is, as aforementioned, very odd. The song needs more of it's own identity.

- good beginning - pads are icky.. need to x-fade into each other more - organ (?) doesn't work with the fun funk style you started with, melody doesn't fit right - pat. 0D Good change! (had a nice full sound in this section) - nice detail in the percussion with the little snare-brush patterns and variations - lead is too busy, needs time to flow - end snuck up on me, didn't expect teh song to end there.. need more of an outro -

Originality: You don't hear this kind of music ever day on a radio. The style is kept on throughout the tune, which is very, very good. The leads are variateted superbly. Form: I think you have broken the tune into too cleat sections. But I also think that the progression is great. And again, you vatiate superbly Technique: Extremely good technique, the flute solo and other leads isn't easy to do. Well done! The effects are briliant, and just in the right doses. All this done in very few channels. Samples: Also here you score high. I don't think i've heard any of the samples before, which are used in a very clever way. Overall Appeal: I simply love this tune, everything is great! The solos are of an extremely high quality. I'd just wish the tune could last longer.

In the samples area, two things surprised me the most. The bass drum selection was very weak and the flute's quality was substandard. So, the bass drum comes out weak against the two channels you used for the bass and the flute appears slightly scratchy. I also played around with that warm flute/synth pad (Ins 01) and it had a relatively soft decay. By contrast, it just kept getting cut off in the song. So you hear it build up for a couple of bars and then, wham, it gets zeroed which led this rather uneven feeling. If that was the desired effect, maybe giving it 1 echo on the decay (so the volume is lowered in steps) would have lessened the emptiness. The flute solo is very spirited but there are no breaks in it---just one very very long phrase. You might insert just a breath break after every 12-14 bars to make it come off more natural. Other than those picky things, the song was excellent.

One of the best tunes in this contest and definitely the best in the second round! Great melody, great mood and perfect understanding of fusion music (my congratulations for the percussions - one of the best I've heard in a module). Tracks like this make the time spent on contests like this worth it!

Not bad of a tune the samples were misused in some places but othere than that the song was good.

Great jazzy funk tune. The direction and flow of this tune is kept at a constant the whole way through. Although sometimes with tunes like this one, the listener starts to get lost as the main theme is a bit vague. Too many notes in a start and stop fashion gets a bit annoying at times, though I do admire the author's application of music theory. There could have been a better melody than simply running up and down the scale over and over. The panning was a little questionable in places, the only thing giving much panning to the tune was the chords using pan slides. The rest was a little too centered, however this was really not that important. Breaks were well placed, and the bridge was well written. I liked the use of the lead synth sample. The drums could have had a bit more punch in them though, but were still quite adequate for this tune. Good luck! :)