http://soundcloud.com/pselodux/first-renoise-demo
It’s unfinished, but I thought I’d upload something anyway. Still finding my feet but I think it has potential!
i like it! but you know what i like even more? 
finished songs. 
jokes aside, i think the mixing is a bit off for me but other than that it’s a very good first experiment. i like the melody.
It could have been a million times worse though, too!
The melody here is just insane. Super upbeat, and catchy like a Ronald Jenkees tune up unto the change up at the 0:44 mark. For the intro, I enjoy the combination of what sounds like a sawsynth piano for the bass and a stuttering, filtered synth line slaps you in the face. That synth… as said, it’s so incredibly reminiscent of RJ, and even a bit of Homestuck what with the wicked funkiness making you bop your head to and fro. Whipping my hair back and forth, only a little preturbed by the blockiness of sound, when the wall of a drop dropkicks my ears like a mofo. It’s totally unexpected, yet oh-so-cool in its gruff n’ crunchy boominess.
But yes, there are complaints to give about the sound of it. The bassline has almost no crunchy high end. Me, well, I’d just make another track to cover the rest of the sound spectrum with a brutally folded melody on the high register, possibly lightly altered in melody to create some airier harmonics. The snare… biggest issue. You’ll have to snap it up and crunchify it considerably by either heralding a different sample or decreasing the heavily scrappy midpass filter. The hihats would probably need a light boosting if you did so, too, as they’d be lost in the slew of increased high frequency shenanigans.
But holy hell this is good! Great concept, really good execution, but the tune as a whole is bogged down by a raw drop and light ‘blockiness’ of sound. Nothing a bit of remodeling can’t fix though!
Ooh ooh, and would you mind enlightening us synth seekers on how to fashion the one you just made? It’s too cool to not want to recreate for your own (nefarious) purposes.
Thanks for listening guys! Yeah, I have a lot to learn in terms of the sounds, for some reason when I switch to a new program my sound design skills reset to zero.
The snare… well that was supposed to be a nod to late 90s EBM (VNV Nation etc.) but I agree it doesn’t quite work with something like this. I think I’ll replace it with a more snappy electro snare.
And yeah, I’ll work on that drop, it’s the first time I’ve ever really tried to execute a raw drop like that, usually my ‘drops’ are just the addition of a big beat to the existing melody. I kinda like that it cuts most of the melodic content out, but yes I agree that it needs something more in addition to that bassline (which is two tracks already—I still haven’t quite cracked thick single-track basslines yet!).
Thanks for the tips, what do you mean by blockiness of the sound though? If you were referring to the compression, I’m still learning how to use it really, though there’s not as much on this track as on the stuff I made in Buzz!
As for the lead synth sound… Well, that’s just a slightly tweaked version of the ‘Basic Sync’ preset in Reaktor’s ‘SoundSchool Analog’ synth. I’d been looking for a sound like that ever since I heard it in ‘Let’s Go’ by The Cars (not to mention a whole bunch of demoscene tunes). When I stumbled across it in Reaktor the other day I just had to resample it pretty much as is. I’ll probably use it in 90% of my tracks from now on, haha!