ClockworkNick's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[My Fondest Heartache]

The claps are way over the main mix which makes it kinda hard to concentrate on what going beyond that. It's a really nice mellow composition idea you got there, although repeatable it keeps you interested. The melodies are a bit too ambient for my taste but i can see you got the potential to make nice tracks. So my proposition would be to experiment a bit more with your beat sounds to help your tracks come forward. Very interesting ideas tho.

sleepFacingWest responds:

thanks!

[Armada]

Nice and heavy. Composition wise it's cool. I think you should work on your mixing though. because you have too many things going on in the same frequencies and the track gets way too busy at some parts. And your hi hats are kind of all over the place and also your kick is too thin for a heavy track.
Nice effort overall tho. Wanna ask, did you record the bass yourself too? that bass part kicked ass

TSRBand responds:

Thanks :) always looking to improve the mix. Yes, bass is usually my favourite track to record as I've been playing it a bit longer than guitar, always feels much more straightforward and natural to lay down some heavy bass. Glad you enjoyed it!

[Gunpowder]

Ezdrummer 2? What kind of kit did you use? Anyways, It's pretty standard heavy rock stuff so i don't really have anything to say on the composition part, it's OK. I will comment however on your mix, which is very muddy. Your drums have a very mid tony thing going on and they don't cut through the mix because your heavy guitars are on that same mid frequency as well and the whole song gets swamped. Ezdrummer comes with a mixer as well, so try fiddling around with that for better results. I would also suggest trying out Superior Drummer 2 which is essentially ezdrummer only better when it comes to creating custom sets and parameters you can adjust to get the most out of your drum vst.

TSRBand responds:

Hey, thanks for the response! I'll be sure to examine that mid range a bit next time and look up some tutes about the built-in mixer. I used the Metal kit at pretty much its default settings out of the Modern range here. I have had a look at Superior in the past but found that it's a bit out of my price range, packed with a lot of detailed features I don't quite see myself using at this stage of learning. EZ by comparison seemed more like a quick and beginner-friendly set up, and sounded good enough for my purposes (in the perfectly mixed ads/demos of course lol).

[Hard Love]

Nice idea, you should fiddle around with it some more. You got a nice vibe and nice string etudes going on there but it feels like you did it in a few hours hence the 2.5 stars. Overall you have a nice and coherent structure but i know that you added an extra chorus just to fill time and use that crescendo on 2.53 somehow heh. It was a nice touch but overall it felt like a time filler more than something that really adds to the song. Keep at it mate!

Earel responds:

I write something about your comment two years after, when i understand english a bit more than before !
So first, thanks ! It's my first real track and i'm glad to know there's some things good in it.
About the extra chorus. I didn't want to use it as a time filler. This is the way I wanted the song to finish and i really wanted to use the crescendo strings. When I heard that i had a sample like this, i was "Wow, this is what i'm looking for !"
And you can hear the same sample in other songs i made ^^
I really like this sample, so i wanted to use it, and about the end, i wasn't thinking like "eh, it's too short, let's add this here and it will be okay"
Sorry to answer two years later ^^
And thanks again !

[Sacrifice]

It's almost spot on, the only problem i found is that it's a tad repeatable, i think you could have experimented some more on where you can take this, your crescendo builds up to the same thing but the melody i believe isn't strong enough to get it home on its own. To better understand what i'm saying you should take a listen, if you already haven't, to Zbigniew Preisner's Lacrimosa (Tree of Life) In Lacrimosa Preisner found a strong melody that is so captivating that allows him to drag it on and on, not saying you should be Preisner, but when you're talking war you're talking sacrifice and i think you covered only half of your theme's potential. I love your choir samples, what did you use for that?

SoundSpectre responds:

Hi, thanks for listening and thank you very much for the feedback, i have had a few people now tell that perhaps it is a bit repeatable but at the time i was so much in the zone of what i was creating and liked the chords so much that i repeated them adding new elements stemming from the chords every 4 or 8 bars. When i first started to produce music years ago i was into electronic music and i think i carry over the methods a bit too much i think, trance was one of my main styles and imo trance is the art of repetition and when done right can be hypnotic, but i think i am starting to learn a bit more from this style and will continue until i master it but also i will still experiment and use elements of my electronic love as well, i don't like to limit myself to a genre box too much as i like to just create from the heart, and i used symphobia 3 lumina and shevannai for the choir samples.