Some new ideas floating around in my head...

Here's a new track I just finished last night. Feedback is much appreciated, as I am still pretty new to the whole idea of electronic compositions.

Thanks for listening!

http://soundcloud.com/jeffallenct/the-long-trek-back-to-the

Definitely pretty good for being new.

I guess the melody and chord progression feels a little cheese in parts of it, it feels very epic and ambitious but doesn't sit quite right with me, that being said I tend to enjoy music that has fairly dark undertones best. The sounds also feel a little thin and unpolished, maybe layering some sounds together would help? If your new to using soft synths, it can take a little while to learn how to get them to sound full and more 'alive'.

That said the structure of the song is sound! The development makes sense and the transitional elements are effective, i.e. the breakdown at 2:21, or the crash cymbals and backwards percussion elements at the end of some of the 4th bars, the mono synth that comes in at 3:09. I quite like the chords that come in at 0:15 and end at 0:28, that part could be stretched out into a whole electro song on its own.

There`s definitely promise in there! It's not exactly for my ears, but I can see what you were going for and I appreciate it.

Hopefully this is helpful and not discouraging, you really have done a good job for being new.

Keep it up!

Thanks for the input! Not discouraging at all, I need to know where I need work.

I understand where you're coming from with the sounds being 'thin'. Do you have any recommendations as to some soft synths that might fit well with this kind of style and round out the sound a bit? I understand there's thousands to choose from, but maybe there's one or two that would work well you can think of? I'm currently running through Sonar, so my main soft synths are Rapture, Dimension, and a little Roland Groove Synth.

Well, I've used rapture a bit a while ago and I remember it being pretty good, dimension I've no experience with. The Native instruments Komplete Bundle is great, Audio Realism ADM and ABL are really good for 303/606/808/909 sounds if you are in to those, Spectrasonics Omnisphere is another really great versatile soft synth. I'm sure I'm forgetting lots of them. Running synths through some mild distortion, can sometimes produce really great results as well. See: Izotope Trash, Ohmforce Omicide, -D16 Decimator can be really great for adding some lo-fi punch to drums.

Other than that proper eqing/compression/reverb really make a huge difference. It can take time to learn how all this stuff works and that so I think the most important thing is to just have fun with it and experiment. I definitely still have loads of stuff to learn myself!

Looking forward to hearing your next track!

I'll be sure to check those synths out, thanks!

And I didn't spend much time into eqing or reverb for this track, and compression I only know the very basics of. I'm sure I'll get a firmer grip on all those things with time.

I think for my next track I'll try something a little darker sounding. I'm experimenting with some lo-fi sounding drums and I'm digging it so far, so we'll see what happens

Awesome! I'll keep my eyes open for it.