Final Slumber

You probably thought i was joking when i called this melodic ambient, like when did i make music like that? Well no, you’re actually wrong, because here is proof:

http://soundcloud.com/thebellows/final-slumber

I’m quite satisfied with it, but i had some troubles with some artifacts here and there, maybe my mix could have been better?
What do you think?

The music itself isn’t bad, but I do see what you mean by artifacts. It’s not as clear and clean as the overall piece seems to require.

I recognise some of the symptoms, and if I were you I would go back to the original sound sources and see if you can reduce their volume so as to give yourself lots of headroom, and then amplify each track individually so that you have about an 80% cap on volume … and only then boost your master volume to fill the dynamic capacity of your sound.

Renoise fortunately makes this quite easy, and it shouldn’t take over 30 minutes or an hour, depending on how fiddly it is (but that piece sounded fairly straightforward).

Not bad sounding and I love the concept. Did you use FM?

The main synth is a bit too resonant or maybe just too loud to my ears and maybe you should add some more dynamics to it and play with the level of reverb throughout the track. Perhaps this will make it sit better in the mix.

Also I think whatever reverb you are using on the strings that come in around the minute mark doesn’t sound optimal in terms of blending the whole thing together.

I like the random sounding building up of notes in the background leading up to the end, too.

Thanks for your comments and tips guys, working a bit more on it now hoping i can at least get rid of the artifacts.
It doesn’t seem to be the volume that creates these artifacts though, there should be plenty of headroom. The M-Phasewave synth that creates the strings seem to have some aliasing issues or whatever it is. It seems to create these artifacts randomly and i can’t seem to get rid of them, so i guess i’ll have to replace it with another synth.
I’m used to work with “dirty” music where these artifacts rarely becomes an issue, but i think it totally ruins the flow in this one.
There are some subtle distortion, which is created in the master, but i’m not shure if i prefer it with or without.

There are some FM in there, i used the synths Alpha-Ray, Mono-Phasewave, 4Front Bass, Crystal, Wollo Drone 2 and Bassline.

I agree on the resonant synth, not shure why i didn’t do something with it in the first place.
I haven’t really been playing too much with reverb levels before, and i’m not shure where to begin, is there a certain technique or something that i should start out with? Or simply just use LFO’s on the wet parameter?