A handful of my recent work

I've been dabbling with reason for a while and I have a few pretty decent tracks to show. Some of them need to be fleshed out a little bit/tweaked but they are all at least close to finished.

the first is a relatively short ambient piece to break the ice:

Next I'll put one of my more pro sounding tracks. Yes its supposed to be Good DownDers.

Nice schizo track in 7/4 timing, this one is sort of a scrapbook version of what the final track will be

Another hip-hop/IDM sounding track like Good Downders, but evolves into D&B about 3/4 through.

Lastly this track is pretty cool, but the 'solo' melody towards the end leans towards the 'incredibly corny power metal solo' type of sound.

Anyways those are my picks for now. Any sort of criticism is appreciated as I'm still not really that good. Thanks for listening if you did.

1. the melodies are ok, but the sounds used to create them are kinda hokey.

2. Better than 1. Again, the patterns and melodies are ok. Not enough impact though with the percussion though. The sounds you used lend themselves to hard fucking bass and a cracker of a snare but for some reason, it's not coming through. Probably a level/eq thing. experiment.

3. This could be good but damn man, again, your synths sound like presets and kind of generic. You need to put more time into your sound design. The percussion sounds are good but again, no impact.

4. Watch the delay. it's causing problems when you turn it up. Not too much going on here. the 1st one i skipped through so far.

5. ehh........ can't do it. No offense.

So what are you using to compose all this with? I think I hear elements of Reason but I'm not sure.

Overall, I reckon there is potential, but you need to work on your sounds. They sound way too run of the mill, and consequently, its harder to take it seriously. I know I'm a prick sometimes but I'm just trying to be helpful here. Hopefully you don't get butthurt, as that wasn't my intention. If you have any questions, ask.

Thx for the input, I'm not butthurt I was actually just looking for genuine criticism.

I know my sounds are a bit generic... I'm trying to figure out how to get something that sounds unique without being so strange and modded that the melody is illegible.

I can't really figure out how to make bass drums/synth sound really low and heavy without distorting everything else. I usually drop most of the frequencies besides the lower ones with an eq but it still ends up getting really soupy sounding.

Also I dont really get how to add presence to a sound, I sort of think it has to do with stereo offset, but the sound I'm talking about is like... when a melody comes in and then a few measures later it comes in much wider/present sounding but there is no increase in volume or anything. A good recent example would be around 1:30 in clarks magnetic mine where the crazy melody comes in and then is strengthened shortly afterwards.

I think the reason everything sounds really generic is that I'm still sort of working on the actual composition/flow/build-up aspects of music making. I generally make a track with sounds that are in the general vicinity of what I'm looking for, and then once the structure is done I tweak the synths but I need to spend alot more time on the polishing stage of writing.

Thanks alot for your time and input though, I'm very eager to improve my skills and while its nice to hear my friends say stuff like "this is awesome, dude" it doesn't really provide me with much advice with where to build.

Also yeah I use reason. Thinking of switching to Ableton though as I'm starting to see where the huge limitations lie in reason. If anyone is bored and feels like offering out help I wouldn't mind sending one of the .rns files so you can see where I went wrong in the actual setup.

  thehauntingsoul said:

Also yeah I use reason. Thinking of switching to Ableton though as I'm starting to see where the huge limitations lie in reason. If anyone is bored and feels like offering out help I wouldn't mind sending one of the .rns files so you can see where I went wrong in the actual setup.

send it this way.

Reason is only as limited as you make it.

will do but i'm at work now, i'll do it later

the first one was nice, reminded me of when you listen to those short intros to songs on amazon/last.fm or whatever and think, yeah that's good i'll buy it... with a bit of developing that could be sweet.