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drat, nice work. 4:40 worth of music is a lot more than you’d think! I’m a sucker for strings, and this is making me want to muck around with strings VSTs. Maybe after I do more synth stuff. I’m a big fan of the idea that comes in around 3:17, it sounds almost pentatonic to my ears I think? Pentatonic scales sounds great on strings, IMO, I’d love to hear it more often. (ngl tho i was expecting those run ups to turn into the zelda theme  )
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Nov 6, 2021 17:18
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 16:55 |
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Woolwich Bagnet posted:Finally finished this one, which I've been working at off and on for months now. It's my take on an epic boss battle or something like that. Has several different segments with some different styles in it. At nearly 9 minutes it's definitely the longest thing I've made. You do mine if I do yours? Despite me being intimidated. Keep in mind that this is going to be entirely subjective because I have zero objective experience and authority when it comes to arrangement, composition, and instrumentation. Also I have no mixing or mastering advice because I’m a deep loving moron when it comes to that.  Spoilered so as not to color other people’s expectations. I like this a lot! As an avid fan of Koshiro and Uematsu, I love me some orchestral work and symphonic rock. And I’m impressed you managed to get almost 9 minutes of music down, I struggle to get 2. Interesting to hear that it took several months to get down. My track I put together over the course of a long weekend, and I most certainly did not expand it nearly as far as this or pick over it as meticulously. Making music takes a surprisingly long time What was most of your time spent on, regardless of it being off-and-on? Coming up with progressions and musical ideas (composition), putting the progressions and musical ideas together in an interesting and appealing fashion (arrangement), choosing the right instruments and harmonic content for each progression and musical idea (instrumentation), or making sure the harmonic and percussive content of each section plays well with and doesn’t overpower the others (mixing and mastering)? 0:00 - This is rich coming from someone who’s infatuated with The End of Raging Waves, but I’m not sure how I feel about going full blare right out the gate. If I was fighting a boss and this is how the first 25 seconds go, I’d be like “oh drat we’re doing this now?”. I personally would start off with the lower strings, and then ramp up to the high strings and the vocals - maybe first go into the section at around 0:44 and delay the ramp into the high strings and vocals for a reprise a little later on as a bridge to 1:31’s section. It’d help add some dynamics to the track by giving it a gradual buildup of energy. But that’s just me, honestly. 1:15ish - Minor thing. One piece of advice I’ve heard from lesser known composers is to even out the workload across all the sections of your arrangement. In general, the track does this decently well, though I’m not an expert at vetting it. Still, I think it could be valuable to work in a little later on (we’ll get to that). Try to give each section, if not necessarily each instrument, something to do across the entire work, even if it’s a small part. You’ve got a whole orchestra plus a rock band, put them to work! However, you also don’t want every section’s contribution percentage to be totally flat across the whole song. Imagine if this were a real orchestra, and the string section loses its poo poo for a solid 30 seconds then puts their bows down until like a minute and a half later. Or if the string section spent 5+ minutes doing a simple pad or stab pattern over and over with no chance to really break down or take a break. Both would be pretty boring for the players. An ebb and flow is actually rather desirable - and that’s where this whole thing becomes a creative pursuit instead of just “do this do that to be right”. This is something both I and composers like Koshiro and Uematsu sometimes have trouble with (okay well usually in my case), and it’s a good piece of advice IMO. That said, this ain’t gospel, and I’m a moron, so don’t feel like you need to do this. It’s great as-is, too. 3:39, and again at like 3:45 or so - I would emphasize either the onbeat or offbeat of the falling/rising guitar with some sort of percussion. IMO it will have much more impact that way, if your intention is to draw attention to that. It’s a little hard for me to back this critique up, because I can’t justify it any better than “I sort of expected that to happen and I think it’d sound dope”, so consider it my own personal preference. Maybe do something fancy like punctuating it with stabs from the string section instead of with a snare drum? 4:01 - This is beginning to feel a bit more like a medley of themes and motifs than what represents a singular boss. Which is perfectly fine if that’s what you’re going for - the whole Dancing Mad suite, for example, is segmented as such because the final boss is multiphase. It works if the big epic final boss theme also incorporates the main battle theme, the protagonist or love interest’s theme, and the theme of the requisite ancient lost civilization if we’re going full RPG. But if it’s meant to be a singular thing, my answer to “how does the theme of Final Boss go?” would be “uhhhh I’m not sure”. So I assume it’s the theme of Big Epic Final Boss Fight, not the theme of Final Boss. 7:11 - Pursuant to the above, to me this track is a sequence of independent musical ideas with not a whole lot of interplay and bleedthrough. A stylistic choice of course, but with all the disparate styles and motifs in the song I can’t help but expect some exploration and crossbreeding of these motifs and progressions. I think the best example of this is 2:46~3:53, where you really get some symphonic rock going. That feels like a natural evolution and extension of what’s come before. Everything from then on feels very self-contained and almost forgets about what came before, which I’m very much not used to. Post-listen - I would love to hear more about how you produced this, since I’ve always wanted to make some more orchestral works but I’ve only gotten as far as writing short string sections with some lovely orchestra VSTs. The quality of the instruments could definitely punch at the weight of bigger name video game soundtracks out there. I’m impressed (and a little overwhelmed) that a single person can do this now! —- I made this track over the long weekend (I took Friday off  ).Please rip it apart. I’m still very new and there’s so much I’m not thinking of or realize that I should/need to do. There’s a lot I could talk about not doing or that needs a lot of help, but I’ll save that for further discussion. https://soundcloud.com/retrocombine/chugga Spoilered so as not to influence the initial listen: Made almost entirely in Vital, except for the percussion (samples from the YM2608). I started off by writing a bassline, chuggy riff, additional punchy taps, lead melody, and backup/complementary melody as a four-track composition. Everything was one sine wave oscillator to begin with, until I had roughly the first half or so of the track written and the musical ideas were worth voicing further. Only then did I started designing the sound for each part. I don’t really know what rules I followed for what each voice would/should sound like. Making patches was by far the most fun part. Percussion was actually almost the last thing to be added; the bassline originally kept the time and cadence. I tried not to use too many voices as once. I think there’s only a maximum of four out of the five or so tracks used at any point in time minus the drum track, and often it was 3 or less. I use Renoise, so a lot of the musical ideas, motifs, and progressions were programmed as independent phrases for each voice, or “instrument”. Each phrase could then be easily transposed, repeated sample-style (though sadly not chopped up), and copied by other voices. This was fun and revealed a lot of interesting progressions and variations on musical ideas. I can talk more about it later but I gotta focus on work right now.
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Jun 1, 2022 17:01
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Yup. Here’s some more examples of virtual orchestration (minus some flute and choir). https://youtu.be/n9RLgRCGhhQ vvv Yuzo Koshiro is the absolute loving bomb and he needs to get more attention, so you are very welcome! Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 02:53 on Jun 2, 2022 |
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Jun 2, 2022 02:48
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Now all someone needs is to actually know how to compose for it - i.e. the hard part. 
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Jun 2, 2022 03:56
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Woolwich Bagnet posted:I like it, and the beat is great. No idea what I'd classify it as either. Oooooh I like that guitar a lot. How did you discover that progression/modulation on it? Almost seem like it’s got a square wave LFO on it or something.
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Jun 6, 2022 03:33
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Woolwich Bagnet posted:Thanks! Nope, just make stuff for fun. It's a nice creative outlet and I've been doing it for something like 10 months now and still love it.  I really need to dedicate myself more to music.
Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Jun 18, 2022 |
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Jun 18, 2022 15:37
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I could not begin to tell you what this is. https://soundcloud.com/retrocombine/scung Edit: on listening further I hate LARGE sections of this. That first screeching…sample…thing isn’t well used at all, and is basically pandering towards the latter of half the track. No complaints about the closed hi-hat track, the bassline, or that cool cyclical synth thing in the background., though. Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Jun 18, 2022 |
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Jun 18, 2022 21:18
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You mean the stand-in for the hi-hat, the percussion at the beginning? It's some sorta random cowbell sample but not the TR-707 cowbell, mixed with a pitch-shifted jangly tambourine sample, then some second-order LFO (i.e. LFO-on-LFO-rate) fuckery on the ADSR decay to generate some weirdass rhythm. I'm glad you like it!  I won't deny that it's fun as hell to make all of this, but I can't help but feel like I've got a long way to go in composition and music production. Another reason to keep doing it, I suppose.
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Jun 20, 2022 04:45
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Leeeet the water hold me down I was half expecting one of those Wild West whistles to come in at some point. Feels kinda cowboy. Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 02:53 on Jun 30, 2022 |
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Jun 30, 2022 02:48
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I spent my entire Saturday on this. I still don't know what I'm doing, but at least I can get something after a day or so. https://on.soundcloud.com/6fz6H Ends abruptly cause I got sick of working on it. Some thoughts in spoilers: The skeleton seems alright, might need a bit of reviewing. The voices clash a bit, ideally they’d be more varied and live in their own harmonic space (or something). As is, it feels a bit muddy. In retrospect, I would probably not introduce the raw-sounding wave loop while the lead guitar and the shimmery pad thing are still going. Give it a couple bars on its own so that the listener gets used to it without juggling the other parts. Too much at once otherwise. My big-picture skills are still crap. I don’t quite get how to arrange or develop ideas over time. There’s no rhyme or reason to what I put down, it just ends up being whatever kinda sounded good in context. Maybe professional music producers have a plan going in. edit: Slightly updated version: https://on.soundcloud.com/kqRuh Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Nov 27, 2022 |
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Nov 27, 2022 01:04
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You are not wrong! It’s kind of a natural consequence of its cadence, beat subdivision, the voices I use (lots of samples and simpler waves), the relative emphasis on short but sweet/awesome per second, and the fact that most of the musicians I’m influenced by were in video games (Uematsu, Koshiro, Kondo, et al). I think I actually use a module based on the VRC6 for the little melody partway through the song, so it’s Konami-flavored for sure. Believe it or not, the second voice that comes into the track is actually a sample of a rhythm guitar.  But because I put a snappier/more percussive envelope on it, and because it plays in chords and doesn’t ring out much, it sounds like a piano instead.I’m not sure how much of this is because of me, and how much of it is because FM + samples + 8bit-style techniques. I also am not sure what I want to be - I’m gonna have to mull over your thoughts for a while. Edit: on a relisten, parts of this remind me of Sonic CD for some reason. Maybe cuz I’ve been listening to its soundtrack a lot. I also think I have a fair bit of 80s pop influence. Compare my melody/harmony lines to Maniac or something. I actually really like 80s pop, prolly cause I’m so into synths and video game music. Feels gross to say I like pop tho cuz I grew up with (not on) 2000s pop 
Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 15:57 on Dec 1, 2022 |
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Dec 1, 2022 15:27
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 16:55 |
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I felt like piano, so I tried writing a little phrase/motif for one of the stock Renoise piano instruments. Seems to be in G, and because I've been practicing the scales it ended up wavering between the Dorian and Aeolian mode. Untitled piano thing Well, I think it's pretty. It would be cool to write more piano works, but  at the thought of learning to play these myself - I'll have the computer do it for me, thanks.I'm also gonna try my hand at mixing and mastering with this track. Wish me luck lmao.
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Jan 16, 2023 20:18
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