Buoy's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[KVM]

fun

I'll give you points for variation, creativity, playfulness and originality. Very unique sound. The jumpy happy synth along with the swingy drum beat remind me of Gorillaz. The way you change to a straighter beat occasionally is an excellent way of creating contrast in a subtle way, so you 'feel' the change more than you 'hear' it.

I can't make my mind up about whether I like the goofiness of this tune or not. I'm leaning towards not. Same with the synth bell kinda thing, playful and childlike and also rather cheesy I think. And I feel the various sounds just don't sit that well.

Not something I would come back to and listen to a lot but definitely a cool set of ideas and probably very suitable in some kind of laidback game.

InvisibleObserver responds:

"Tell SBB what you think of his review!" that line makes me giggle. A lot of the time my thoughts are "useless nit-twit". Or Knot-twat cause its the same sounding but more amusing.

Anywho, I was writing with a few goals in mind, one of which was to write a more playful, upbeat or 'catchy' song if you will. From the feedback I've got, people either like it an awful lot and get it stuck in their head or they shy away from it. I've had several 'goofy sounding synth' comments, and my mom thinks it is 'chineese-y' (thanks mom). So you've certainly hit something prominent here in terms of stylistic approach and likeliness of an audience.

While I don't think I'm really the 'write catchy happy music' kind of guy I think its been a valuable track to have done. Past 3:40 is where it is more native to me anyways.

Thanks for taking the time SBB to leave some thought out comments and critiques, I appreciate it.

[Sordid Avenue]

Enter your summary, rating, and review for: Sordid

I'll start with the lyrics- I don't understand what it's about but the words look amazing on paper. Not so much when sung though- I just really don't like the vocals. Singer is out of tune and sounds prepubescent (which is especially noticeable when he's singing the lowest notes).

But I must say the sound quality is much better than the other song that I just reviewed. The guitar sounds very nice and clear in the beginning, though I'm not at all a fan of that type of guitar sound (the distortion is pretty tinny and when you're playing chords the the individual notes aren't really discernible - which is too bad because the chords are pretty nice actually. I would have preferred no distortion at all really)

And the drums sound a lot better. Still a bit undefined and drowned out though (I generally prefer a superdefined and punchy kick and snare so that's just me).

I found the song itself to be quite... well, forgettable simply. Straightforward punky indie song without anything that makes it stand out from other straightforward punky indie songs. In that regard I like that other song a lot better.

Sawdust responds:

Haha thanks for the compliments on the lyrics! My voice is pretty prepubescent, which is pretty annoying at this point.

As for the sound quality, well, you can thank the magic of compression for that. And as for the distortion... well, I put that on the song to fill in the gap left behind by the other guitarist not being at the session. :P

And yeah, I agree, at this point, the song is pretty forgettable at this point. Much work needs to be undertaken to improve it.

In any case, thanks a lot for the reviews! I'm glad you were completely honest.

[Tethersong]

well

it's like it could be an amazing song but then you'll have to fix up your singer and rerecord/mix it properly. MY main gripe: the voice is pretty terrible, except for the line "Send my regards to the kitchen", which actually sounds pretty cool. On all the other lines, the singing is VERY out of tune- and the fact that it clips so bad in the chorus makes it sound very amateruylike.

And also you probably need some new recording equipment or something, cause it appears to me that the drums and guitar DID sound pretty good originally, but became muddy and undefined somewhere in the recording process.

But still as I said I think it does have a lot of potential if you redid it. The lyrics make no sense to me but they certainly don't hurt the track. And the guitar chords are pretty cool. And the bassline really brings this up a few notches- there's something about how the bassline interacts with the guitar chords that makes this quite interesting harmonically. And the title is cool

Sawdust responds:

Haha thanks man I suck I know :(

This is still a demo right now, however. And I completely redid the lyrics :P except for the chorus though

We're definitely gonna redo this, make it something like Weezer's Only In Dreams.

Thanks for the feedback, however! I appreciate your bluntness.

[-*CaSH*-Daft Funk]

man

most delicious bassline ever. Not very much else happening though. Doesn't feel like a complete tune at all. Needs some guitar rhythm track, perhaps a pad or keyboard thing for some whole note chords, and better mixing would help. And also since this is a 128kbps mp3 it sounds like cat poop. Submit a 320kbps version instead.

camoshark responds:

Lol, thanks for the review!

I imagine it more as an atmospheric loop rather than a song, I want to incorporate it as a song at some point.

As for rythme guitar track, I guess you mean a fuller comping, because the lead you hear is guitar comping.

And now, for fuller chords, they're actually VERY complete (Fm9(b13) for the A form, and F#Maj7 for the chorus), maybe they're just not prominent enough, thanks for pointing that out.

Mixing and kbps, I'm not much familiar with Reason, so I guess I need to work on that. I actually did the mixing last night at 1 AM, so maybe I should re-check. I'll try to de-compress too.

Thanks again for constructive criticism, I thoroughly enjoy actually learning something from reviews!

Cheers,
Samuel Hébert

[[JohnnyCrysis] VeVe's Song]

Enter your summary, rating, and review for: [Johnn

Yeah I checked the original and while the original may be just a collection of mixcraft loops, that doesn't really matter when you edited and chopped up the loops and all that- the only thing with mixcraft loops and that kind of thing is that we don't want a load of songs on the audio portal that are nothing but sequences of unedited premade loops. It's not a legal problem or anything.

I can't say I like the song though. It's ridiculously repetitive- I can skip to any point in the song and I'll hear that organ thing and the drums. Sure there are variations in melody and patterns and all that, but it's just tiring to listen to after a while. And it's lacking in the sound department- some reverb would be great on all the instruments, and also as others pointed out it needs a bass, almost any kind of bass would do in this song I imagine.

JackRocker responds:

Alright, thanks a lot.

Repetition does seem to be a real problem in my music. Something for me to work on, I guess. Bass... *sigh* ...that's something that's going to take me a while to get down. I agree with everyone on that though. I really need to practice it. I appreciate you taking the time to review this. Any feedback I get helps me improve. Thanks again!

[SR - Awwh Yeah]

man

I love this kind of music, you should just stop everything you're doing and only make songs like this from now on

SineRider responds:

me too man. I would love to but i don't want to get sued D:

[Veela-Night Vision(KroweR]

yeah

It was pretty good. Not fantastic, but somewhere between nice and great, I reckon. On a scale from 4 to é, I would rate it something like d/dx.But yeah.. good music-related song, especially in that part which had sound in it. At least to the extent that our world is not the imagination of a virtual being.

KroweMusic responds:

Damn it...I was going for at least a {r} on the 4 to é scale :(

I tried to make it as music-related as possible by adding sounds to it. I think I did good job :D

[In Mist She Was Standing]

hah

awesome two first seconds. The rest of the guitar part was a bit well, I didn't like it as much. But it would be beast-ass as shit if you added the guitar melody one octave below. Unless that interferes too much with the bass. Still, the awesome low riff in the beginning is too much of a false proimise for me to forgive.

Really nice melodies though. And nice tunage overall. Though I agree that the hihat sounds like shit. I'd just ditch it and replace it with something else.

I enjoyed it at this tempo despite what you say, after hearing this I'd probably think of a -10bmp version as too slouchy.

seel responds:

Yeap, hihat definitely sounds like ass in a can, can't argue with that. Gonna use Superior 2 for drums when I remake it, I used EzDrummer in this for some reason. I kinda agree about the tempo, I'll probably bring it down by no more than 5 bpm.

Thanks for the review!