Quarl's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[Bossfight x Ephixa - Subside]

Perfect mix down, amazingly creative ideas. Dank intro, kept the beat, kept the attention going from start to finish. Clean synths, dank drum builds <3 <3

Everything that followed the 2:11 break down curled my toes, all nine of them.

[Rain Dance]

I second the "I just wish it was longer" feeling from wilbert. This track has a great breakbeat vibe to it, just ends way too soon.

You can always fluff up a track 30-60 seconds with an ambient intro. Just take what you already have, copy & paste it, then subtract the drums and move it to the front. You can also drop those ambient pads minus the drums at the end to earn another 15-30 seconds of track.

Bonus round, add another 30 seconds by copy and pasting the second half of the track but add a 2 OSC lead or another pad of somekind. A decent 2 OSC could be a high portomento gliding sinewave and the other OSC a quite triangle, square, or sawtooth. That pitch bending effect from the portomento would sound great in this.

I seriously have no idea how you manged to write something so cool and then only let it loop for a minute :p

St0mpy responds:

Wow I really never thought this one would be felt this way. I'll take your notes and consider them for the future on other tracks like this. You have all inspired confidence in myself to make more songs like this with longer "storytelling".

[Inception]

In an attempt to avoid the hypno animation, I focused my attention on the tags instead. Giggled at the "not-chiptune." I listened to so much chip music and looked at so much pixel art, I went to the bathroom the other day and shat a perfect cube.

Dank breaks, funky dial tones, seducing amen drums. I swear this reminded me of an Evol Intent track but I couldn't find it scrolling through my files. It's not fair, I found other Evol tracks with dial tones and amen cuts but the specific one eluded me. Toss in a few NWA samples and this would get lost in that playlist too.

[Stormy Soul]

Can't believe I favorited this but didn't leave a review. This track has the melodic DNB vibe that got me into producing in the first place. Look up "Just a Minute" by Ben Sage. Got those breezy pianos, some grinding reese bass, driving breat beat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ1exshtORw

I've noticed over the years how many DNB fans immediately get turned off by piano. Never made any sense to me. The instrument is made for the genre, timeless sound fighting new age grooves. I love how you decided to turn the second half of the track into an ambient breakdown. Literally, three minutes of sweeping pads and atmosphere. That was a power move.

[Poppin' Pixels]

"my CPU is dying"

Time to backup your files and folders to an external to free up some space on your hard drive? You running any background programs you could stop to free up memory? Hard to believe a short song like this could overload your machine. How potato of a computer is it? Maximum potato? Wall-Mart potato? I had to use my mom's laptops in my mid 20's, I had no idea why anyone would even buy machines so cheap. She had two extra laptop I could use and they both sucked. Literally upgraded the situation by spending $300 and building my own machine, ran Windows XP. Handled Reason just fine, no slow downs. Ran on it for years.

Money can be tight, sorry if you're in that stage of life where paying rent and chasing dreams collide. It can be a fatal combination that feels depressingly challenging. Keep in mind that music can always wait, survival can't. Feel free to hit me up Nacho.

The melodies had a cool progression. Starting with that driving bass line, into the reverb lead, followed by the soft attack and decay sawtooth, and working into the arpy saw progression... perfect. Only critical feedback I got would be that final saw lead, it's the same at the end as it was when you first introduced it. An easy direction to go would be to jump some of the notes higher an octave or experiment with a few pitch slides. The last four notes on that lead melody could echo into higher octaves...

I'm sorry your machine held you back but I'm glad you got to join in on the pixel day festivities darling. Track bangs <3

EDIT: my pc was lagging a lot during games. Was caused by my desktop wallpaper, set it to change every five minutes. Turning that off fixed my problem, wish I thought about it sooner...

[tree ~ keeping up the good fight!]

WOOHOO, track has some solid upbeat vibes. I'd have embraced the fakebit more and used a high resolution jazz drum kit. This has some high energy anime drama to it. The drum fill into a key change at 1:25 made me want to weeb cry. Chiptune purists might sad-about but I prefer genre cross ups. Newgrounds artists take the old school video game vibes to a whole new dimension.

God I love your melodies in this. Ditch the over-compression and deliver a version of this with more fidelity. I'm a fan.

[PixCotton]

"Frontpaged, January 24, 2021," at least you should be getting an influx in traffic. Honestly, there is so much great PixelDay content I'm getting lost trying to view it all. I'm noticing a lot of artists did the last minute thing. It's like we all collectively were like "fuck, today is Pixel Day. Time to get to work."

FYI, white people can pick cotton too. It has a racial connotation because of American slavery. I wouldn't have even mentioned the race thing if I were you, can still change that. Personally, I like Pixel Cotton, gives a really fluffy vibe. Could have alluded to cotton candy but you had to mention race and now all I can see is a bunch of sad African Americans in a field getting whipped, YOU DID THIS TO ME. THANKS CHRIS.

Track is great by the by. Has an old school funk vibe flowing to it. Arps twinkled something nice, track changed up every few bars to stay interesting. You flowed from one melody to another in regular change ups. This is some inspired work. Thanks chris :p

chrisbasso responds:

listen hereee Quarl, I was like half asleep writing that description, as soon as i thought of the title i was like what if someone misinterprets that for something it isn't but you're not wrong, i was just overthinking it, either way should've probably not put that in lol. Anyways glad ya liked the song <3

[Curtain Call on the Beach! (Pixel Day 2021)]

"Use this in your game! Please! I just really want to make music for your game!... Please! If I keep asking I'm gonna start to sound desperate or something LMAO ;^)"

I legit asked if someone would use my music in hentai themed anything. Begging gets us nowhere. I keep seeing animations and games that use commercialized music. We'd have better luck making music for newgrounds content creators if we ironically got off newgrounds. Someone might even start uploading your music for you! Wouldn't that be awesome?

TeraVex responds:

Lmao I make all this music and I just think to myself "Gee how cool would it be if I saw it in a game like this?" But now I've gotten to this point where I think to myself hmmmm maybe I'll just make a game and then make some tasty beats to put in it! Galaxy brain fullproof plan

[Chippin' Dancin' Desert! (Pixel Day 2021)]

I missed this when it was frontpaged, glad I checked out the pixelday 2021 tag. So much good chip music, I have to keep refreshing my front page to see new tunes and everytime there are more pixel day subs.

Would love to hear this unchiped as it appears in your mind. I have a hard time translating the idea but it sounds like you have a good idea where to start. I could imagine the chiptune on a Pharaoh Man rockman stage, pyramids in the background, quicksand traps, and hieroglyphic themed Dr. Wily robots.

Honestly, Wily never got enough credit for all the robots he built. Sure he was evil but maybe if he spent less time beautifying all his robots with random ass themes he'd actually find the time to make a robot that could defeat megaman. Nope, "I NEEDS TO MAKE PHARAOH MAN. HE RESEMBLES EGYPTIAN PHARAOH Tutankhamun, AND CAN LEVITATE."

[Underwater Bitz [Pixel Day 2021]]

Loved all the ideas coming into this. Breaking up the rhythm from time to time felt super organic. The house vibes meeting dubstep were nice and clean. Had some old Metroid atmosphere to it.

Mix sounded a fair bit over compressed. Might be something on the master out? Someone recently mentioned to me that the default in FL is to limit the master out. Turning off one button will give you way more room to mix with. I use Reason and when I started in Reason 4 they had a similar function. The limiter was automatically turned on and it took me like 15 years to realize that.

Happy PixelDay XTeckmo! Can I call you Teck for short? Te???

Teckmo-X responds:

To be honest this song was made in under 24 hours. I wanted to make sure I had something to present for both Pixel Day and the VGM Contest this year since I haven't taken part of these events for a while. I got the inspiration from 1788-L, Gluk’oZа (ft. ST) Ju-Ju, and "Fairy Fountain" from Zelda. As for the mix I do agree. I have always been aware of the limiter in FL Studio but I always choose to keep it on. The reason for this is that every sound in my songs goes through a huge amount of processing and with the limiter there I can finish adjustments to the master volume after I'm done. It also helps against higher frequencies that might override lower pass and high pass sounds, especially in basslines where every sound counts. I've tried a few other DAW's but Fruity Loops just hits that really good spot. Happy Pixel Day! and yes, you can call me Teck :)