Quarl's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[Let the Wind Free the Leaves]

I love the sound. Those guitar melodies are lovely! Aux drums all sound like they have their own little panning settings and homes in the stereo field. I'd love to hear this with some rock & roll drums but I'm a drummer. I will always bias for harder drum sounds D:

Now for the tough part, you got a lot of work to do with fidelity tools. You need to play with some compressors, equalizers, and filters to get some pro mix quality! There's a lot of space you're not using in the mix, a maximizer can help you cut off sounds before they clip out, peak, and start causing distortion or muddiness.

Regardless of the genre you write, a compressor can help you boost stuff and should also give you a sidechain input to send drum signals to if you want to move things like bass momentarily out of the way. Sidechaining is just using the levels of one signal to control or mitigate levels on something else momentarily. Most people use kick drum or snare signals to control bass and pad levels. It's really noticeable in dance genres but it's a technique every producer can make use of regardless of their preferred genre. Pro technique and super easy to execute once you watch a tutorial :)

A compressor and a maximizer working in tandem can help you find a larger sound but the EQ can do all sorts of silly things too. You can boost and cut the best or worst tones from an instrument. You can also use automation lanes to get really weird modulations out of your EQ, I've been using an EQ with quick modulations on my snare drums to get really weird tones out of them :D

I don't see that you tagged any live instruments. Impressive if it's all digital, this sounds just like a really fluid live jam session, down to the not so good mix down that always comes with cheap one mic recording set ups. Something in particular that reminds me of the live recording is that constant white noise tone going on. I'm sure it's the cymbals making the noises but it kind of sounds like the wires on a snare drum resonating because of the guitar amps. Around 1:02 it's really obvious. I'd EQ the fuck out of that sound, maybe even tap a filter onto the instrument to aggressively make it disappear :p

Not sure I want to spend all day on this crit but I saw "feedback and critique appreciated" and figured I'd just go hard into the fidelity talk. At a certain age everyone needs to get the fidelity talk, there's nothing to be embarrassed about. We all fiddle or flirt with our fidelity tools at some point or another. I remember my first fidelity tool, high school prom. Garage Band broke my heart but it was the start of a long and happy relationship with sound production that I still enjoy decades later. Wear protection.

PixxlMan responds:

Thanks for your critique! Glad to finally get the 'fidelity talk' haha.
It's really cool to hear that you thought it sounded like it was played live, that was kinda my goal, I felt like a bit of an imposter making jazz fusion purely digitally lol.
You're right about the cymbals making that white noise, should have tamed that!
Thanks for all the tips and suggestions!

[Oscillator]

Hella techy, that second half around 2:20 grooves so hard. Loved the slow down burn, finale is tight :3

[The Court of Defeat]

Big bass, creative melodies, loved the atmosphere synth patches. Two and a half hours? Efficient use of time, takes me about that long to get snares I want D:

[Curse of The Wicca]

High energy drum and bass, sick breaks. There are certain things I could nit-pick but it's the rough edges that make dnb such a cool genre. This is making me want to throw down some breaks, I've been having creative issues with the dnb genre as of late but it all starts with a killer drum kit. Your kit is killing it PandaPanda :3

PandaThePanda responds:

Wowow! Thank you so mush! Yess there are a lot of problems or thing that I would probably do a bit different now. I remember being really happy with how it sounded so I got on a high after I finished the song and couldn't wait to release it so because of that I was a bit to fast with quality control hehe :p

[Daru925 - Who drank my coffee?!!]

Wonderfully epic Daru. Powerful percussion, high quality horns, massive strings. Only problem I had was the song length but there was so much variety that I didn't really care. This song went places. That section at 1:56 contained so much frothing rage. This track isn't a boss fight so much as a boss victory. I started writing up some weird scenario where your enemy is trapped under a burning pillar in a dojo while you monologue about a master plan but the action sequence @ 1:56 changed my vision up. Maybe the hero got out from under the burning pillar for one last hopeless sword bout. He totally loses though. This is season finale music and I'm gonna have to tune in next season to find out what happened to all the characters you didn't kill. The hero you're torturing is gonna be so bad ass in season 2. We might have to start out season 2 without the hero only to reveal half way through that the building collapsed under the stress of fire and the hero was swept up in a river, found by a small tribe of forest sprites, and nursed back to health? Or maybe you just decapitated him and his younger siblings are taking up the sword to avenge him? I don't know but this music deserves to kill every hero that fights against it :3

Daru925 responds:

Nice, i'm glad that the music evoked you all this. Very interesting. I like it.
I wanted the final chords to sound like victory, but then merge into uncertainity.
You know, for the sequel when evil returns^^

[Let me feel it deeper]

Very creative, loved the glitchy leads. Bass is coming through my lame tablet speakers demanding me to give it more listens later today on my computer! Viscous grooves, brutal melodies :3

[FUCK THE WORLD]

Love the glitch breaks. Sorry about your cat but you did the creative thing and found inspiration from it. My oldest cat is currently developing cataracts, the day will come :'C

Sorry I'm in bed on a tablet so I can't speak to the mix but it sounds and looks great. I'll probably grab my headphones later today and come back to this for a full bodied listen. The guitar chops were creative, drum rhythms were absolute fire, cool vocal edits. I can't pick out a story but the track is very enjoyable! Sorry again about your cat Barry :c

edit: imo needs compression and drum side chaining, I came back for more listens! Track went harder on my tablet but it's sick music for an evil monologue. As a huge attack on titan weeb I can honestly envision Eren stomping the world to this <3 <3

amen chops so goooood

[promising.]

tbh, I'm actually not a fan of the complete and total lo-fi filter wash. Sounds like there's some gold textures hiding behind the effects.

A high fidelity rapper on top of the track and I'd probably be a little more forgiving but without a rapper it just sounds like the entire track has a filter on the master out and too much pad tossed on top. I'd love to hear a progressive take on the lo-fi genre where you pull the filters and wash pads off every so often to let the track shine with a fuller fidelity. You could pull it off at climaxes like 00:22 and 1:48, then reintroduce the filters during the break downs?

Blending lo-fi and hi-fi probably goes against what you wanted to accomplish. My two cents but I'd never filter a track through a can and string for three full minutes if I didn't have to :p

G2961 responds:

Thanks for the extended review!

[Dare to Dream]

Gorgous UwU

GameBoyFireworks responds:

Thank you for listening 🙏

[Leviathan]

Beautiful cacophony <3