The Dink Network

Yo, homedawgs.

My last school music assignment was to compose a piece of music for a music-less video.

From description of video:
"This is an original music composition I made for a music-less trailer to the old RTS game 'Stormrise' as part of a music assignment. All the instrument parts are written/composed/recorded/synthed and edited by me and all the voices are recorded and editted by me. All the other sound effects are scavenged from various places around the Internet."

I was graded an A+ for this piece and I was dang proud of it and figured I'd show ya'll this shizzle.

Video: Oh yeeeeeah.

I made it as a MIDI then MP3-ised it to make it sound sexy.

I might upload the MIDI if I can find it.

Good work. I wish we got assignents like this instead of just STAADY.

Very nice composition! Good job on that.

If I were you, though, I would have used a better soundfont for the final render. Tried Musica Theoria, sYnerGi, lux or PC51f? I found those to be pretty good soundfonts (especially the first one). As it is, the percussion really jumps out because of the samples (and because it's a little bit too loud compared to the rest of the instruments). Also, some fairly heavy room acoustics would probably have given the song a more immersive atmosphere too.

Try working with soundfonts during the production process so you get a better feel of when a part of a song sounds too MIDI-like, still. The BASSMIDI driver allows you to use soundfonts for all MIDI playing on the system (and it's less laggy than Microsoft's MIDI engine too!).

So the conclusion: the composition is great! But it lacks a bit on the post processing side.

Without being much of a musician and purely from a critic's point of view, I would say that the music was a little too static for my likings - it seemed afraid to stray from a set bunch of notes. Also, the voices weren't dramatic enough, considering the intensity of the movie. The electric guitar came through nicely in the gun-fight scene though and we all know that higher experience = higher quality. Hopefully.

7/10

Good music captures my attention. Good video captures my attention. However, with this I was constantly losing attention and basically waiting for it to end so I could get on with what I was doing. I'm not saying it was absolutely horrible, but I know you could do way way WAY better. I've seen you do better.

I think I'll just give it 5 out of ten.

"Try working with soundfonts during the production process so you get a better feel of when a part of a song sounds too MIDI-like, still. The BASSMIDI driver allows you to use soundfonts for all MIDI playing on the system (and it's less laggy than Microsoft's MIDI engine too!)."

You raise a good point. It is definitely something I've thought about before, but never really bothered to spend too much time on. this BASSMIDI sounds flippin' awesome, and I'm going to check it out right now.
Thanks for the feedback.

That was quite a good composition. I think with significantly better samples, some cleaning up, and maybe some more layering to emphasize the "symphonicness" of the piece, this could be even better.

Maybe I should just hire an orchestra.

Dosnt mr.gantoe play an alto hmmmm. *wink wink*