Hi Everyone,

I'm new to the site and would love to get some input form you guys on some new material of mine.

Please give my work a listen and let me know what you think!

http://www.soundcloud.com/adamva

Cheers!

In The Woods - Nice opening. I like your sound and mix, has depth and impact! Effective piece. These are not the kind of woods I want to be in.... The ending drum figure at 50 seconds was a bit odd to me. Perhaps prepping that or changing samples instead of a strict repetition of that sample would help? Something's off there to my ears. Overall, though, nice stuff!

For You - Evocative opening. Piano's a bit too dry for my taste and the solo violin is awfully exposed for that quality of sample. As is the trumpet. I know we (or most of us) have to work with what we have but I'd really consider hiring a solo violin and trumpet player to record those parts. It will really add SO much! This is an interesting track, going in directions I'm not really expecting and fusing together several ideas. Curious to know your vision/intent behind this track.

Prepare for War - Mainly one major critique: you're over using that celli ostinato. When you're forming a piece built over an ostinato consider your audience and how long they can take a repeating figure. The problems I have with your ostinato is that it appears in the same instrument throughout the piece and is in the same voicing as opposed to inversions. The human ear starts to automatically "mute out" repeated figures if they last long enough. Also some of your mix is a bit out of whack, especially the percussive elements around 1:15 or so.

Some great starting points - now dig deeper to see how you can bring these pieces to work. Better, more dynamic mixing, variations of tempo and dynamics, less quantized MIDI data, etc.

Thanks so much for your critique. It really helps!

You know, I went and bought Native Instruments hoping it would take me to another level and I feel it did since my previous sample bank was from Reason. But I understand that there are even more professional sounding samples out there and I'm guessing that at some point I'll upgrade, but not in the near future since I just spent $1000 on NI Komplete Ultimate 9.

The song 'For You' was written for my wife a couple of years ago and really did go through a lot of changes.The Version you heard is miles away from where it was, I'm actually very proud of that song. I thought the Violin in that song soundded awesome but .. what do I know? :)

I see where you're coming from on 'Prepare for War' maybe what should have happened there is have different instruments go in and out of the ostinato to change things around.

Over all, really great critique.. Thank you so much. Will be posting more work from time to time for more. It's the only way to improve!

I thought the Violin in that song soundded awesome but .. what do I know?

What killed it for me was the steady, omnipresent vibrato in the patch. Some samples have variable vibrato using the mod wheel or another CC parameter. Maybe look into it and see if your samples have that? Something where the start of the note is pure tone and the organically adds in vibrato as it's held. Or vise versa, start with vibrato and have it even off as the note is held. Something to make that patch sound more humanistic instead of programatic.

again... thank you! This is great advice!