http://soundcloud.com/s-wrong/wrong-vermin
Made with Renoise 3 + Fender Strat and Zoom pedal.
I meant to make something more laidback and brooding, but the beat kind of took over.
Nice tune. My biggest gripe would be the breakdowns. They didn’t seem to add much to the tune other than interrupting the flow. Like the first one around the 1st min, hardly anything happened so far other than the intro and we get a large breakdown. The 2nd one also drops the energy to pretty low levels and after that when the beat finally gets going it doesn’t really pick up the pace. Also add in the intro and the outro, you get a lot of low energy parts vs driving moments. That didn’t sound right to me.
The beats could be faster/rolling (more shuffles/hihats/fills etc.) The acid synths (or were they guitars?) and bass could use more distortion/saturation and be louder in general imo. But other than that (and the beats being a bit meh) the mixdown sounded pretty good.
In general I like the tune. Nice composition and production overall but the arrangement was a bit weird for me like I said. My 2 cents.
Hey thanks for your comments. I agree on what you say about the first breakdown coming too soon, without anything really having happened before it. I might just lop off those first 40-50 seconds of the song, or do something more interesting with them. It’s also true that the second drop isn’t very hard - it’s more of a gentle transition. But that was intended, because it makes the third drop all that more efficient, I thought. There are two beat patterns in the song. One big beat/hip-hop thing and one motorik/disco/bell-end four four beat. The latter isn’t meant to be interesting in terms of detail and lots of stuff going on (shuffles), but I might want to make the contrast between the two more pronounced. I don’t know what the tune sounds like at a very high volume, but I wanted to make some room for it being played loud without the bass taking over. I may have turned the bassline down too low because my monitoring is crap. And they are indeed guitars, not synths (if we’re talking about the same sounds).
Thanks again. I really do enjoy a bit of constructive criticism.