After a pretty big swell in production and some very positive feedback, I figured it was about time to make another blog post and share a fourth batch of my original video game music pieces. This time I'm also including a new area I was kind of experimenting in and that would be 80sish/80s-inspired music (I have two of those). I'll put those at the end.
I welcome all feedback and constructive criticism. Just know that I am fully aware that my mixing/mastering end of production is quite lacking, as I am very much still learning. I've also had zero musical training and can't name a single note by name. I'm just a guy that takes sounds, puts them together, and then watches as things happen. I hope that, regardless of the technicalities, my music can speak for itself and please some ears. Thank you for your time, as always.
The music:
Standard cave tunes.
I was going for a more authentic old school SNES/Sega era kind of sound with this piece and I think I pulled it off pretty well. It's definitely a rocking jam. With wolves. Can't forget the wolves.
This is a very mellow, peaceful piece where I included all kinds of different elements, including a strings portion and some live instruments (as opposed to just straight electronic). I also tried something new with the end of the track and I think it turned out really nice.
This one came out of me yesterday and, while it might not be one of my best production-quality-wise, I really love the way it turned out in terms of the melody and feeling of the track. It gives a cool mood.
Pretty standard, but my first with a legit and pretty serious solo in it. I still don't really know where it came from, but I'm glad it showed up. It's pretty beast.
Artsy fartsy.
Don't forget your sunscreen and bikini-clad girlfriend.
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And the additional two 80sish/80s-inspired pieces that I threw into a separate project:
Just a happy, feel-good, fun little track that got a lot of positive response. It's pretty basic, but it gets the job done well.
This one is meant to be more cinematic and work as an alternative to the soundtrack piece used for the hospital/Plague scene in Hobo With A Shotgun. I took elements from the one used in the film and created something of my own in ode to the greatest duo in grindhouse history. The bass sound I pulled off is monstrous. :0
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Thank you for your time and I hope you enjoy at least some of my work!
This might be a matter of tastes, but personally, I found every one of them painfully atonal. It's hard to describe, seeing as you have zero formal training, but I find literally all of it to be excessively disharmonic, dissonant or chaotic. This isn't necessarily a problem, but to me it makes the music sound tense, alien, disturbing or horror-esque - in the same sense that painting a face in only hues of green would look disturbing. I'm not sure if this is what you are going for.
This extends to the supposedly feel-good track. Particularly, the off-pitch slides make me grimace - it evokes something, but rather unease than feel-good as far as I am concerned.
As far as I can tell by ear, you are using more different pitches together than what usually makes sense. If you want to write music which I find more appealing, you would have to structure your music around chord progressions - if you don't, I'm not the right person to comment. Regardless, chord progressions are probably the most basic and useful thing you could possibly study if you are interested in writing music.
On July 29 2013 02:37 Darkwhite wrote: Listened to most of it.
This might be a matter of tastes, but personally, I found every one of them painfully atonal. It's hard to describe, seeing as you have zero formal training, but I find literally all of it to be excessively disharmonic, dissonant or chaotic. This isn't necessarily a problem, but to me it makes the music sound tense, alien, disturbing or horror-esque - in the same sense that painting a face in only hues of green would look disturbing. I'm not sure if this is what you are going for.
This extends to the supposedly feel-good track. Particularly, the off-pitch slides make me grimace - it evokes something, but rather unease than feel-good as far as I am concerned.
As far as I can tell by ear, you are using more different pitches together than what usually makes sense. If you want to write music which I find more appealing, you would have to structure your music around chord progressions - if you don't, I'm not the right person to comment. Regardless, chord progressions are probably the most basic and useful thing you could possibly study if you are interested in writing music.
You phrased this a lot better than I probably would have been able to, and I trained in music for half my life. The thing is, people do have music preferences, but there is something intensely scientific about what people in general find satisfying and pleasurable about music and I imagine your songs are missing those basic components.
Cool initiative. I will echo what the others have said. However, your work ethic is inspiring.
To give you a start on mastering, here's a simple version. Get a nice pair of headphones (i.e. ones that don't rattle at any specific frequencies) and go to each voice separately. Play/synthesize an exemplary note of your song (e.g. "that one") and allow it to fill 4-5 bars. Now go into your equalizer, and mute all the sliders. Now turn up one slider to about 90% volume. Listen to how the sound of the instrument changes.
Now do a sweep of all the frequencies of this instrument's range, with the single slider active. Make a note of where the voice sounds purest, and keep the equalizer volume highest at this point. Now try to make the sound of the instrument sound like it originally did, without the equalizing, while keeping the highest volume at the purest point.
Do this for all the instruments. You may find that some instruments are more pure at different frequencies.
Now you will have each instrument taking up its own pocket of space, or sharing it with similar voices. This is good because it allows each sound to feel purer in the final version, rather than all instruments colliding where they aren't really necessary.
EPT
