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The Olympian Conscript

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2 comments, last by nsmadsen 5 years, 9 months ago

You've been chosen by the gods!

The last tune I'll be sharing for a while; it was inspired a fair bit by the music of the Soul Calibur games. Hope you all like it!

 

 

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This is very good! A nicely developed and catchy motif and a very cinematic feel.

The only thing I would criticize is the dynamic range of the song; it's excessively quiet at times. It would be a pity if this became, for example, a mobile phone strategy game's music and the song felt like dissapearing every now and then. Maybe you could compress the master a lil bit, or maybe play with individual volumes. My opinion anyway ^^

Great job!

Musician • Producer • Teacher

www.alexcalero.com

hello@alexcalero.com

I second the volume issue noted above. Upon starting your cue, I had to bump up my speaker volume level a decent amount. I think some light mastering to pull up the over volume up some more would be of great benefit. 

From a composition stance - I felt like there were too many stops or stall outs in your piece. Looking at your piece from a high level: 

0-31 seconds - slow(er) tempo with long tones. Building a scene and mood here. This is a great intro! 

31-45 seconds - action starts up here! Some really nice building of tension and adding more sections! This is going great! 

45 seconds - complete stop. All of that momentum is suddenly killed off. The next section isn't as big and doesn't have as much impact. That could be alright depending on what follows. Let's see.

1:02 - back to legato section. Builds back up some at 1:15. 

1:29 - another cadence and big hit. Not sure how much this stop and super brief pause then swell really serve the piece. Followed by a section very similar to the 31-45 seconds section. GREAT chromatic movement at 1:42 but then the section it gets to isn't as large. 

Nice retard at 1:57 but then the next statement of the ending tag felt rushed through. I would've kept it somewhat slower there. 

To me, your piece never quite gets to the final level. The writing is great! But the stopping and starting or the building up only to have the following section be smaller than that crescendo or smaller (in impact) than the previous section makes it feel like this piece is trying to get off the ground but doesn't quite succeed. Which is a real shame because the writing is so nice! For a piece at about 2 minutes long, there's a lot of evolution in the theme and some of it... I'm not sure suites the piece as well as it could. To be honest, this feels like a trimmed down version of a much longer track. Maybe you had so much that you wanted to say and were trying to cram all of that into a 2 minute long demo piece. For example, that section at 1:42 could really benefit from some high, soaring strings making a lovely descant to your melody that's returning. Or chorus! Also going back to an earlier point I mentioned - at 45 seconds with the complete stop. I get what you're going for here - having lots of action then suddenly stopping it is a great way to build suspense and pull the listener in more. But it works best when it's done at the right spot. Consider the fact that you've only given the listener 15 seconds (or so) of action-y music and then you pull the "all stop" move. That feels premature. That kind of stop would work much better later in the piece once the listener is given more time to understand and appreciate what you're composing. 

I only offer up this critique because I see lots of potential in your writing. I'd consider reworking things so you can feel the piece rising and rising (both in terms of harmony and arrangement) and then tweak the production so it have a nice full, arcing story to it. I hope that helps! 

Nathan Madsen
Nate (AT) MadsenStudios (DOT) Com
Composer-Sound Designer
Madsen Studios
Austin, TX

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