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The Producer's Area • Re: Libre Music Challenge #28: Octasine

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Here's some feedback from me on this month's submissions:

LibreMusicChallenge #28: OctaSine - Review

A-Lin - Revolution

  • Composition
    • Chord changes simple but with enough unusual choices to keep interest
    • Main melody doesn't stick in your head much but is pleasant, maybe too many big interval jumps. The melody from ~ 01:52 and ~ 03:00 is a good hook.
    • Bass parts are a bit un-inventive.
  • Sound Design
    • Some obvious FM-y sounds, like the bell at 2:30, which is fitting for the challenge.
    • Nice saw strings/pads
    • Vibrato on the lead sounds gives them a nice melancholic quality.
    • Snare has too much noise.
    • I like the snare rim-shots with delay.
    • I think I know were these toms came from ;)
  • Production
    • Striking but clean reverb sound
    • Good subtle use of panning
    • Drum fills bring some liveliness into an otherwise very quantised feel.
    • Good progression of density of arrangement and weight of parts
    • Generally many (too many?) high-frequency elements and not much in the mid-range, so it all sounds rather pristine and maybe somewhat cold.
  • Atmosphere
    • This sounds melancholic but bitter-sweet to me.
    • Maybe "elegiac" is the right word.
    • I don't understand the relation too the title, though ;)

MyLoFy - Rusty Waves

  • Composition
    • MyLoFy is a master of bringing interest to a simple chord vamp or progression, but I sometimes feel his songs are going nowhere and I do like music with a story.
    • The lead line introduced first at ~ 0:45 is the most memorable element and it's good that we get a few variations of this.
  • Execution
    • Flawless.
  • Sound Design
    • This is just excellent, so many SFX, bleeps, sweeps and stabs...
    • Especially that crash sound!
    • Some sounds have a grainy texture to them, which I like.
  • Production
    • There is *a lot * happening in this track, IMO too much, it gets too gimick-y after some time.
    • All the individual SFX are great, though.
    • A lot of work must have gone into the precise timing of all these effects.
    • Too much loudness optimisation for my taste
  • Atmosphere
    • This is very playful, even showing off.
    • Interesting mix of vintage sounds and modern "hyper"-production elements

Trumpetrespas - Idk What To Call This Song

  • Composition
    • Lead melodies don't leave any space and are meandering without any pauses.
    • Hi-Hit changes from quarter to eighth notes at a seemingly arbitrary point.
    • There is some sense of progression as additional arrangement elements come in and drop out again, but it all is rather aimless.
  • Sound Design
    • Very basic
    • More effort should have gone into making the sounds less penetrating.
  • Production
    • Lead sounds way to loud.
    • There seems to be no post-processing with any effects at all
  • Atmosphere
    • Look ma, I bought this old Soundblaster keyboard at Walmart!

Nyx Eles - Rapture

  • Composition
    • Atmosphere more important than composition here, I think.
    • Simple scale or interval-based lead elements, which gain interest by layering and juxtaposition.
  • Sound Design
    • Most sounds instantly recognisable as FM
    • I like the combination of the droney pad and the pitch-bendy lead starting at ~ 00:57
  • Production
    • Good sounding but rather bare-bones
    • Seems more a sketch than a fully fleshed out track.
  • Atmosphere
    • I get a feeling of despondency rather than "Rapture".

Spotlight Kyd - It's Late

My submission was put together rather quickly (for me) in two days without much pre-planning.

The inspiration, maybe somewhat surprising, came from one of Chopin's Preludes. I was trying to find a similar minor-chord-based bass line as one of the slower preludes has and for that I needed a piano-like sound in OctaSine. Wurlitzer sounds are rather easy to make with FM synths, so I quickly came up with a rather good sounding one, I think.

If you add chorus to such a sound and play minor chords in eighth notes, it automatically sounds like Supertramp, so I followed that avenue and decided to use mostly sounds, which try to emulate "real" instruments.

After I had a basic chord progression and arrangement for the intro and verse, I experimented with different instrument sounds for a lead melody, e.g. some saxophone or oboe-like sounds and synthy leads. For that I tried to use my Akai EWI wind controller, which ended up being used for the horn/synth-brass sound in the intro.

I then decided to try to make some guitar sounds in OctaSine and when I put that through Neural Amp Modeller with a Fender Amp model, I got this Telecaster-like sound, which "clicked". I tried to use my Fishman TriplePlay guitar-to-MIDI adapter, but it didn't work that well and since I was in a hurry, I played the guitar parts just with the keyboard of my Yamaha MODX and its pitch wheel.

By that time it was already late Monday evening, so I had to finish up quickly, which is why the production and mixing is very rough and basic. There are still lots of timing errors and sloppily executed edits, and if I have had more time, I would have probably done many things differently (e.g. the drums sound much too electronic for the style of the track, IMO), but it is what it is now.

Statistics: Posted by SpotlightKid — Sun Apr 07, 2024 6:22 am



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