Lich's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[MJFarts EPIC electro track!!]

420/69, gr8 trak m8

midimachine responds:

solid review
m8/10

[4'Lich]

420/69, would drink and dance to this! Thank you :)

DESHIEL responds:

glad you like ;)

[Datsmik]

Dat sexy CD Label

Anyway, I'm digging the subtle and smooth(ish) sounding Arpeggio-Saw sounds in the background and your SuperSquare-driven sequence just before the middle of the track (I have a thing for that kind of sound, especially when it's saturated, naturally!) Does sound like you are missing some high-end in the track though but that might be Newgrounds weird-ass track compression which plagues many of us.

[Abyssal Depths]

Pretty much displaying a near-mastery of sound design using Sytrus. You are probably the only person I know who actually uses WaveShaper efficiently.

I do agree with Rahmemhotep below, this would be very fitting in either Earthbound or even Mother 3 but for some very strange reason it does remind me in it's atmosphere of the Cave before fighting The Pain in MGS3: Snake Eater.

Mastering-wise, it's spot on. Sounds beautiful coming through my ADAM A5X's and even on my cheapo headphones it sounds pretty damn decent aswell. Can't really fault it composition-wise although I do slightly question some of the notation which is introduced just after 0:54 in, it sounds inappropriately off-key compared to the rest of the elements going on but then it might be done like that on purpose?

Oh I do have something special cooking up, it's just now down to cutting it down to uploadable lengths (It's like 11mins long cut down), not killing my vocal-chords and getting some Dialogue sorted out by either myself or a special voice-actor ;)

JRob responds:

There's still quite a bit I need to learn with Sytrus, though. WaveShaper's an easy one, however I usually use it just for distortion - and even just a little bit of it can give any synth more "oomph," which is especially great for basses (there's one just for that purpose on the droning bass).

Sadly, I haven't played any Metal Gear Solid either :(

The only game I can think of that may have had some influence on the way I wrote this would be The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (it was something of an influence on my writing style when I first started writing music using computer software/DAW's - and when I first got FL Studio and pulled up Autogun, I really loved how some of the synths reminded me of some of the instruments in the game), but it's been years since I last played it, or even listened to any of the soundtrack.

About half of the layers I used in this song are detuned to some degree; I made the custom bell/chime synth at ~0:53 in Sytrus using frequency ratios of 3 on the first operator, 8 on the second, and 8.1 on the third, which is why it sounds off-key. There are quite a few dissonances in the song, all of which were intentional - I really love the use of dissonances at appropriate times as they can really make a song sound even more interesting and dynamic.

11 minutes? I remember the days when it was difficult to get 6 minute songs up on here without reducing the quality.

[CryptDisease(EBM)- Mastered]

The intro heavily reminds me of the opening to Soilbleed by Grendel (back when they sounded awesome). I fucking love that Monstrously de-tuned Supersaw lead used in the opening, any chance you could pass on how you designed that sound?

Anyway for the actual track I'm sorry to say but the Mastering sounds abit crappy EQ-wise (to be fair, my earlier stuff sounds even worse), I can't hear anything below 200HZ or anything above 12,000HZ from this track at all which is a shame. It could do with being Stereo-widened some more aswell. Plus some individual parts of the track sound like they don't go very well together (the composition is still pretty decent & sound in general though).

I may have to check out your newer stuff, see how that all sounds!

[Discretionary Contention]

As individual elements, your arrangements included go well individually but sounds messy all combined into one track. I have also notice on both my headphones & my ADAM's that your drum samples used keep ending up being drowned out by everything else. It would be worth introducing some more stereo widening to them & making them slightly louder. Apart from that, Mastering is fairly decent; I can hear everything nice and clear & you have some interesting sound design going on in your pieces.