Kwing's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[The Dangerous Path to Home (NGUAC 2018)]

This piece starts strong but doesn't do a whole lot with its potential. You have mostly one phrase up until 2:26, then switch to another one and stick with that. You also pick up the pace a bit at 3:19, only to simmer back down to the slow tempo that was used for the buildup at the start of the track.

No one part of this song is bad, but the repetition and lack of payoff is what brings it down. The tune is dramatic and suspenseful (good layering and sound quality too,) yet the entire piece feels like it's building to something that never actually happens, which leads it toward feeling kind of boring on repeat listens.

[The Last Defense - Jessie Yun [NGUAC]]

"Took about 4-5 hours to create this track."

... WHAT?

This sounds outstanding. Good synergy between instruments, fast-paced, dramatic, and pretty much anything you could want from this type of song. Very minor nitpicks would be that the same core melody is used from start to finish, though the layering hides the repetition extremely well. Also, the high-pitched chirping sound (can be heard at 0:37 as well as throughout other parts of the song) is just incredibly bizarre and doesn't fit with the rest of the piece.

JessieYun responds:

Hello Kwing,
Thanks a lot for the constructive comment. I'll make sure to give more variations and better instrument choices in the future!

[Gaero - Heart]

Even with my bias against trap music, I can recognize that this is pretty well done. The audio sounds clean, the melodies are pleasant but don't distract from the driving beat (which really makes this song bump,) and you have a nice little bag of tricks to play with to keep the same few themes from getting redundant.

[The Endless Struggle (NGUAC 2018)]

I like what you're trying to do here, but somehow the impact doesn't seem to be getting across. The simple melody that the violin plays throughout most of the track is probably the biggest offender - some variation would have sounded nice, and also more short, stabby notes rather than the long, sustained ones you used would have given this piece more of a punch. The drums aren't bad, but for this really high energy moments (1:53, 3:00) you should have some deep, explosive drums that the listener will feel through their whole body. Beyond all of that, this is a good cinematic piece with a lot of energy, but the biggest drag for me was again having that one violin track carrying the same melody through the whole song.

FateModified responds:

Hi, thanks for the review! I just got the violin VST a couple weeks ago and so I'm still learning how to use it properly to get the best sound. I wasn't too sure myself about how the violin sounded in the first half of the song, but I kind of ran out of time to figure out how to make it better. I just knew I wanted violin in this piece. I'll get better with it in my future songs.

One of the last things I tried to do was to change the legato orchestral notes to short, stabby notes just as you said at certain places, but at that point my project was using way to much RAM and would not play properly and even crashed. So I gave up at that point and went with the last bounce I made from it. It's unfortunate, I'll have to manage my computer memory better when using Albion One and the Joshua Bell Violin VST's since they are memory hogs.

I spent quite a bit of time to get the drums sounding the way they did. My previous attempts were not cutting through the mix when the orchestra was at it's loudest. I also realized that they didn't have as big an impact at the points you mentioned, but again my computer would not cooperate with me at that point due to memory limitations I guess.

Know anyone who might want to buy me a new computer by any chance? Just kidding. I'm gonna have to save for a better one. My current mac is 8 years old, lol.

Thanks again for the review, and I'll definitely keep in mind what you mentioned for my future projects! :)

[A Summer's Dream]

The piano. Wow. Not sure there's much I can say about it that will do it justice so I'll just say the playing is outstanding. Though I'm almost positive I've heard the exact melody at 3:04 in some anime. Even if I haven't, it - along with some less serious offenders - is fairly generic in composition.

The singing is somewhat hit or miss. I like that you're not belting - you have a good mix of being soft and resonant, the harmonizations sound excellent, just the right amount of vibrato, but you sing a bit flat at times and hearing you draw in breath is distracting at certain points. There are also a couple points (not consistently) where I can hear some vocal tension that makes you sound a tiny bit strained.

I don't want to say much on lyrics - years of rapping have made me obsessively picky about rhyme schemes and complexity, and without having a firm grasp on what this song is really about I think it's fair for me to try and point you in one direction or another.

Taken as a whole, this is a really pretty piece. Nothing about it strikes me as really groundbreaking, but there's an emotional depth to it that's very alluring. A few quirks with the vocals broke my immersion once or twice but this was genuinely a great listen.

etherealwinds responds:

Thank you very much for your review! :) yeah the part at 3:04 isn't exactly a groundbreaking melody, but it fit the part nicely! It's probably in quite a few songs; not any that I can pick out off the top of my head though. I'm glad you liked the piano!

I do like to minimise the gain on the individual breaths by about -6db and often-times I'll remove the breaths completely from harmonies so that they don't clash with each other - I don't like to remove them completely though as the vocals would sound super unnatural. ^^

I'm happy you enjoyed it for the most part!

[Summer Night]

The first half of this works as an ambient piece. The second, not so much. I really like the slow building intro. The piano melody at 0:55 struck me as rather simplistic and boring, and I feel like a few alterations to the chords would have made the whole piece a lot better. The guitar outro was really nice, but with all other layers of the track fading away, it felt like a complete non-sequitur, especially since that instrument isn't heard until the last 1/4 of the song.

EdKempeper responds:

Hi !
Thank you very much for this very detailed review.
Yeah, there's a problem with the last part of the track. There's a lot of problems with this track.
I had some ideas, but with my "tools", it was hard to make them real...
I chose this song for the KO round because it was different from my other tracks. I'll try new things, new VST and new way of composing and mixing for the next ones.
Thanks again for your review.
Ed

[The Broodmother]

It sucks to be harsh here because I really like the composition, but the audio quality just isn't that great and it really brings the piece down. The lack of dynamics also make this piece sound somewhat stiff and get in the way of what should be a suspenseful or climactic piece. Adding a bit of reverb on the percussion (maybe using deeper sounding drums, too) and playing with the choir fading in would have made the buildup feel a lot more intense. With that out of the way, there's a lot you did RIGHT. Subtract my gripes with the mixing and mastering and this is a really exciting and engaging piece.

Cethic responds:

I'll be honest, I didn't give this version a proper mix or master because I had other things to attend to that were more important haha.

[Paralysis]

This sounds really, really nice. I'm mostly impressed with the dynamics and the mood, which is really spot-on. If there's any issue with this piece, it would be that the tempo, mood, and energy all seem to pick up between the 1:25 mark and the end, and since that's really only about 20 seconds, that's not enough time for you to develop the idea you're playing with. It might have made more sense to make the entire piece more consistent or otherwise develop it into something longer so that the resolution could feel more comfortable.

[ALESDA! - Memories]

Something about this just seemed off. I like genre fusion, but somehow the guzheng and trap snares did NOT go well together at all (I really wasn't expecting to say that about this piece, since I usually like weird instruments and genre fusion.) I felt like this track was at its strongest right after the drops, when the song fully embraced the electronic sound and there wasn't a clash of different timbres. The beginning of the song seemed a little weak, but everything from the 3:20 mark until the end felt well-executed and uplifting.

[Until Then]

This is interesting, for sure. It's hip hop, but you've got melodies that span the whole track and prevent this from being one big sound loop. In that sense, this really is a fusion of jazz and hip hop, rather than hip hop sampling jazz. The thing that annoyed me a bit and got redundant fast was the rhythm (or lack thereof) of the piano chords. It's clear you put the most forethought into the saxophone, to the detriment of the other instruments (this is fine for drums since it is hip hop, but really shows with the same few chords over and over.)

acxle responds:

thanks for the notice!