At the moment my equipment is old sound blaster live sound card, pair of philips headphones and an old sanyo aplifier. So advanced critique about the sound/music picture welcome
(I’m also looking forward to upgrade my equipment bit by bit, I currently look at the Yamaha CS1x keyboard, what do you think folks is this really bad investment or is it good enough for a beginner? thanks)
sound qualitywise I can’t see any reason to complain… sounds good overhere…
eq’ing, mixing and mastering can often be taken a bit too seriously and be overdone and in the end of the day You have to be the judge of how you want the finer detail…
drum-sounds and other instr. seems to be of high quality… but, the excessive use of toms in the intro-part is way too much imo… and Im sorry to say that the intro didn’t spark much interest for what was coming… maybe you could tone down the drumwork a bit and program a simple melody-line which is easily picked up and implemented with various variations later in the song…
if you really want the repetitive toms then try too vary volume and, if possible, velocity on hits…
the toms in the second part is used more to my personal liking…
in the stereo-field build-up I find the drums a bit too far away and the strings way too close… maybe a slight shift there?
and I miss the bass… lift it forward a bit more… it’s quite essential (in it’s simplicity) to this type of music, I think… otherwise, not a bad first renoise attempt… and as always… these are just my personal thoughts and suggestions… hope there’s some worth in them for you…
thanks for the serious review - after reading this, I listened to the song once again and discovered some additional faults in addition to the sound problems (i.e., the cymbal stuff should have far more wider soundarea). i’ll go on with the new tune soon, meanwhile i try to check out the forum to find out some good stuff from the members here.
Doesn’t sound too bad at all, hmmz your use of toms are a bit over the top to say so. In some styles this is the way to go, but not in the style of song you put here. (It’s not grunge or so).
Chords and string instruments sound more at ease when changes fluently crossfade from one strike to the followup.
hey… hmmzz… .what’s that in the distance… do i hear a base?.. yeap could probably use a volume-boost or the other tracks could use some volume decrement.
Actually, base-volume could be raised a little, your chord-instrument can be lowered a bit, it’s ruling throughout the whole song where it should not rule that much.
folks many thanks for the kind critics!
i think time to go on with the new track now.
hope the next one is better both technically and also its sound will be better, and also its concept. and a bit longer, too
i do not wan’t to do new topic,
so i dig up this year-old one.
times have been hectic, but i stealed time from here and there, and here’s my new baby. i miss new instruments, but i promise i’ll use them in my next tune, which is hopefully coming not with the one year delay.
here’s the link, hope you have a minute to listen (actually, it is 3:30)
nice to hear some emotionally expressive music come out of renoise… someone who actually composes i like the chord progressions. this song should be about 3x as long as it is… guess i will have to listen to it multiple times to get my fix
keep up the great work man… and hopefully it won’t be another year before your next one! i know how that can be
as with the style/type of the music, funky beats & drumn’base is probably easier to create, also easier to listen - more like entertainment, than some more serious stuff. that kind of “easy” music also does not need your attention to listen to it, therefore there are not much to discover from that kind of tracks. so most of the potential listeners prefer easy stuff to other mishmash melodies.
i also think that renoise is not so widely used for more “composed” music than it is for funky beats and loop-based music. perhaps it is because serious musicians prefer to play the instruments, then later to join the single tracks to one full composition. i personally do not play any istruments, except the small yamaha keybard (S-03) which is good strum to get ideas…
creating music needs time - you have to find time to experiment with the samples, how do they sound, how do they sound together, how to enrich the overall sound, how place interesting sounds/instruments/melodies here and there, and how to get this all in balance so that your potentional listener do not have a headache later. unfortunately time is something we can’t stop, so if we have a choise whether to eat or to create music, we prefer to eat. etc.
but any appreciation for the artist is always a great step for the next tune to be composed - so the more one gets them the more inspiration it brings.
true… what i am hoping to do is be able to combine hard dance oriented music (jungle for instance) with composed melodies, harmonies, chord progressions and make something greater. it seems like such a simple concept and i wonder why nobody has really done it yet.
makes me think of my friend lugnut… we both started tracking around the same time in 1997 … but he never wrote very many songs after 1998 … and probably hasn’t even done any songs at all in the last 4 or 5 years. a year ago, i did a remix/remake of one of his old songs that i LOVED to try to get him inspired to work on music again… unfortunately, it didn’t work
heh I started in 1996 first with the SoundClub, then already the famous fast tracker II … oh was that time, my 486 DX2 66MHz could not play more than 8 channels with 16bit samples…
heeh. yeah i got my start on a pentium 100 laptop… and then i stopped working for the company that i had it through, so i had to downgrade to a 486 sx 33 for a year… and that was in 1999 so my shit was HIGHLY outdated by that time.
Hi Bright. I downloaded The Painter track first and I won’t critique that as this thread is for your second track, but suffice to say yeah it’s a bit heavy in spots but it’s on it’s 4th repeat now and I find myself in no hurry to turn it off
For Indian Summer…
The piano is a bit too much, the sample doesn’t perform well in the lower registry and there doesn’t appear to be much volume modulation so it’s like someone is hitting every note with the same consistency, makes for a dull lead after a few seconds.
I much prefer when the track slows down, the whole piece sounds more cohesive there.
That snare is way too dominant.
Good work with the base and accompanying chord structures. Also there’s some nice emotive parts in there. Honestly I think with a different lead instrument this could be a completely different piece. Piano is a tough lead to work with because it’s so common and, because of that, even harder than other leads to get just right.
One point for both songs - the sound levels are a lot lower than most mp3’s. This is something you have to be careful of because people will add your music in with thier commercial tunes and whenever your tracks come on they’re going to have to increase the volume. What I tend to do before starting any new track (and while testing as well) is load up some commercial band’s and then make sure my volume and sample volume levels in Renoise are set to produce the same volume.
Good work overall though, writing this kind of track in a tracker is not easy! I hope you post more
i like the chord progressions. this song should be about 3x as long as it is… guess i will have to listen to it multiple times to get my fix 
so my shit was HIGHLY outdated by that time.