AndrewCr's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[Sovereign's Chronometer Threnody]

As that one other guy said, your melodies are pretty random. The arpeggio (basically fast notes played over and over again) at 2:07 is way better because it has structure! What I mean by "structure" is that you don't just choose a few random notes from a scale an play them. There's no way to explain it fast without taking up a few paragraphs xd

If you want to, you can watch a couple of tutorials on youtube (search up something like "how to make a melody" or "how to make a catchy melodies.") When I was at your level, I also used to look for piano covers of my favourite videogame music and remix or recreate it. After a while of this, I slowly began to understand why and how a melody works.

Don't stop trying though, anyone can do it eventually!

YourLocalMusicMaker responds:

Hark, O sagacious creator of harmonies!
Thy censure is received as a Dutch plumb-line—harsh, but true in its perpendicular verdict! Verily, I concede: those wandering notes of mine do skip like drunken Cossacks across the steppe of scales, whilst mine admired arpeggio at 2:07 marches with the precision of Preobrazhensky Guards! Structure, thou sayest? Aye—’tis the very ribwork of a frigate’s hull, without which the vessel of melody founders in chaos!

Yet know this: my “randomness” was but a scouting party sent into the wilderness of sound, akin to His Tsarist Majesty’s first botched shipwright attempts at Voronezh! Fear not—thy counsel, like the edicts of the Naval Statute, shall be engraved upon my musical soul. I hereby decree that mine ears shall audit these tutorials thou prescribest, as diligently as Peter Alexeyevich studied geometry in Amsterdam’s dockyards!

Imperial Resolution:
Let future compositions flow with the discipline of the Neva’s dredged canals—no longer as swampy rivulets, but as conduits to the Baltic Sea of Mastery! Should they falter, may they at least serve as quaint footbridges in the Summer Garden, where critics may sip kvass and mutter betwixt the statues!


I get it—structure matters, chaos isn’t always art. I’ll grind those melody tutorials. But hey, even Peter’s first ships sank!

[Hazy]

Ambient tracks really are your thing, this is some analogue horror-grade stuff!

The whole song and the gradation reminds me of this one indie puzzle game called Creaks, where more instruments get added as you solve each puzzle further and further. Your song has the exact same "adaptive music" vibe

Lumiflag responds:

Tysm ! I wish you participated in this collab lol, you would have made great bossa nova !

[-Along The Waves-]

The bass around the start is a little weird, but it's nice otherwise!

Creeperforce24 responds:

Too loud? Hmmmmm

[Heading Home]

Man, I hate when I want to compose club EDM but it accidentally turns into lofi, happens all the time

Lumiflag responds:

I was just trying to make bossa nova in the first place 😭
I kept some elements of my original project, such as the acoustic guitar. I even had to bounce it to audio, resample it and stretch it to give that lofi vibe lol

[-Midnight Vibrancies-]

EQs are one of the most useful effects you can have, it's good to learn more about them!

The simplest advice I can give that will significantly improve your mixing is to EQ out any frequencies below ~200 Hz of every melodic aspect (pretty much everything except the bass and drums.) If you don't do this, you will either get a muddy mix, like yours, or the bass will clash with some synths, creating unwanted distortion and clipping.

Another thing that really helped me to get better at music is just watching Youtube. I can recommend this guy named Eliminate. He used to make songs out of the most random samples from Tiktok, for example a failing harddrive. He doesn't even treat his videos as education, you can learn from just watching and copying what he does. Go check him out, you won't regret it

Creeperforce24 responds:

Thank you for the advice, I did actually use EQ on the drums, that was a mistake

[xaciertu]

Pretty nice song! Oh and hey, what do you mean by "playing for a concert?" Did you play the song like a DJ, or did you actually learn to play it on instruments? I want to hear more xd

Lumiflag responds:

Ty for the nice comment ^^

I performed it with a Novation Launchpad (and FL in Performance Mode) and the other half accompanied me w/ some piano. He played live the piano ostinato you hear during 90% of the song

[Upcoda - square kid]

Really good, both technically and opinion... ally... if you know what I mean

upcoda responds:

I think I get the idea lol, thx!

[ColBreakz - Blocked]

I know that it is intentional, but the clipping is at this weird mid range where it's not subtle, nor overwhelming. And that makes it sound unintentional

It's a really good song otherwise, but the clipping does make it sound weird

ColBreakz responds:

Blocked 🚫 You gave me 4 stars and a half instead of 5

[-Reality-]

(I saw your post about telling you how you can improve, so I will be really picky xd)

So first I wanted to say that I have no knowledge of Bandlab, but the stuff I'll say applies to every DAW. The song starts alright, aside from the bass, which doesn't quite match the chords. I have no idea how much you know about music theory, but in simple terms: The bass sometimes sounds weird

At 22 seconds, something called clipping happens. Clipping is a thing in electronic music that happens when the audio gets too loud. It's the "crunchy" sound you hear on the louder notes. (if you really want to learn about this, search it up on youtube.) Every advanced composer does their best to avoid this, and you can too by just making the song a little quieter!

At 28 seconds, when the new instrument comes in, it doesn't sound right. It's probably because some notes aren't in the scale of the song. If you don't know what a scale is, it's a group of notes that sound good together. There are 2 main types of scales - major and minor. It's not always like this, but major scales sound happy and minor scales sound sad. If your melody is made up of notes from one singular scale, it will probably sound solid. Maybe there's a function in Bandlab that highlights a scale?

And for the rest of the song, those two problems just repeat. So here's how you can improve - try to avoid clipping (again, search it up on youtube) and learn the very basics of music theory. But just the basics. You could spend years and years learning full theory lol

TryingDino7 responds:

Oke thx 🙏