Xtrullor's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[Zambi - Tornadose]

Wtf dude since when have you been on Newgrounds?

Anyway, cool shizzle you've got here. I like the funky compactness, shame it didn't fully reach my musical taste which is directed towards huge soundscapes.

Congratz on frontpage btw. Just give me some space next time alright?

Zambies responds:

Lol always have been. And yea I have a lot of room to improve within the ambience of my tracks. I got front page though? :O Totally missed it.

[Citadel NG Edit]

Pretty nice. There's a common small problem in almost all of your tracks, which is the amount of reverb I hear in every one of them. It kinda washes out the clarity of your tracks, try controlling it a bit more to push the stuff more into the listener's face.

Good sounding stuff, keep on making new shiz.

Scimit responds:

thanks! i really appreciate the feedback, im always trying to improve my mixing.

[Detious - Serenade]

It's 5:00am, and I'm going through your stuff so I'd know what kind of stems I should send to you. This one was pretty good, production wise it was more interesting compared to your most recent stuff.

I wish you'd get the hang of the cool atmospheres again like what you did here. Sounds more professional and captiving and stuff.

Just sayin'

- Xtrullor

[WBCH]

Alright, I've now listened to this track so many times I can't even count anymore. All the things I do for analyzing a single track....

There's a couple key points that popped out while listening to this over and over:

- The track is actually pretty well done
- The bass in the drop - whatever you call it - sounded kind of nasal, "adenoidal" or so.
- The track was very mediocre and forgettable
- The snare around three minute mark was kinda too loud
- The track lacked just that little extra pinch of high frequencies

To add to the last point, I heard the small noise you added into the drop to fill the backstage of the sound image. It was just too weak in my opinion and didn't cover too much of the frequencies I would have preferred.

Really, all I thought about this track that I've heard this same thing somewhere so many times already. I do get it that it's fun and feel-goody to make these kind of tracks, but it lacks so much originality. If you can market this around places very well, I think it would be accepted pretty well, but the reward wouldn't be too great. At a some point I thought people make these kind of tracks to impress, not to express.

But if this is exactly what you have coming out of your head all this time, then fine. Proceed.

So....

Yeah, I think that's all. I have no idea what else there is worth pointing out anymore, so here you go.

So I'll give this...

3/5

Hey, it's above average. Be happy. And do improve further, because that's what we always do as musicians.

- Xtrullor

[Minor Coward]

Crank the volume up. Really. This tune here is pretty quiet and deserves at least a basic limiter in the master to do something for the volume.

Anyway, even though the tune was pretty short, it was pretty pleasing to listen to. You did have a good idea for a chord progression in there, leading up to having well placed additional instruments creating an even more pleasing atmosphere for the tune. Mixing wise it sounded pretty nice, actually. But the tune suffers from being really quiet overall. Learn to master your tunes and you're golden. It's not that hard to do simple mastering after you're done composing and mixing your track.

Also, I recommend getting a better mic, or mixing the crap out of the recorded audio. It had a pretty low quality sound in it, which contrasted from the rest of the instruments later in the track. It made quite clear to me which instruments were real acoustic instruments, and which ones were from samplers. Thrusting some bass freqs would be a good idea to bring up from your guitar too, it's pretty nimble as for now.

2/5 - Could've been longer, could've been mixed better. But it has some potential in it. Just some.

- Xtrullor

[Virus Test]

I guess it was nice. Progressive house-like stuff for three and a half minutes wasn't that bad than I thought, but it was not really rich of features that would've made it exceptionally interesting. It was really mediocre to say the least.

There were two things that especially came into my mind after listening to this:

1) There's some weird clash between the synths and the beat. While synths sound really simple and kind of half-assed, the beat is surprisingly well balanced and thought of. I'm suspecting you used a premade sample out of a sample pack of some sort, and called it a day. I don't know, it kind of helps making the track sound a bit better, but the odd quality difference between your elements throws the track a bit out of the road.

2) The ending. What. The. Fudgegenerator. Just happened. It cut out awkwardly without any reminders in the end, which I suspect being lazy rendering selection at work. I mean, come on, that's really easy to fix, it just left me a bad taste in my mouth after listening to it.

Anyway, keep improving. You've done some alright work before, now that I've listened to them. I guess being simplistic is nice for making tracks for fun, but that's not really what I like most of the time personally.

2,5/5 stars, because it's in the middle of the scoring. Mediocrity gets a mediocre score.

- Xtrullor

tritonle responds:

Thankyou for taking the time to write such a detailed review. Much appreciated. You're absolutely right the beat is from a sample pack. I got a Access Virus C delivered today and chucked this together. I think I'll end up trying to finish this now, and these comments will definitely have been useful. It's nice to get some contructive criticism.

[ORACLE]

Pretty effin' cool stuff you've got here.

You should really step up and make this a whole track, it has the potential for something really cool. It works pretty just like this too, but I was waiting for some more. Even the length of this thing is rather lacking, and it sounds like you just didn't want to finish this for whatever reason.

Step it up and produce man. You've got it.

[Load]

I was expecting you to hop on to the big room house train while you could, Lock.

And so you did.

What a shame, really.

Anyway, while the genre is indeed pretty simple and somewhat fun to make, I must tell you first that I despise the genre for what it's doing to some good artists like you. I just really hope they don't latch on to this simplicity just because it attracts the most attention at this very moment. Alright, fine. I did that with dubstep, but just because of the sheer interesting complexity and difficulty that genre proposed to me. Add in some dancy elements and you've got complextro, the favorite genre of mine. Of course I shouldn't be the one telling anyone what they should do just to please me and the minority of people on top of me, but really, I dislike this genre for bogging down the production level we're used to till this point.

Anyway, while that's sitting right there, let's begin the whole autopsy of this whole thing right here.

People seem to have some issues with the excessively long intro you've got here. It spans about for two minutes before the genre's typical disappointing drop kicks in. But what the hell, I enjoyed it. It didn't feel repetitive at any point of it, so I have no complaints in the arrangement for now. The whole track is pretty solid composition wise, while still sounding a bit minimalistic mixing wise.

Now that I mentioned the mixing... where is the bass, man? I checked the frequencies of this whole thing and the bass is just nonexistent starting from 40hz or so. The low ends just aren't there.
On the other hand, you've done a very good job with the stereo image, especially in the intro. The buildup was kind of weird though, having the synths on top of each other a bit. The drop was fine, switching the atmosphere from cheery to... what, a bit eerie kind of a feeling? I don't know, but how you handled reverb in this particular synth was kinda... off. Like it tried to create some 3D space around it, but produced a wall of 2D instead. It sounds odd, but just alright to me.

All in all, it's ok.

It sounds like a track that was still made by you, so props to that.

Let's see where you're heading after this one, mate. I'm honestly getting sick of this genre already.

- Xtrullor

Lockyn responds:

Ahhh, coveted Xtrullor reviews. Much love <3

Aye. 'Tis quite the shame. Honestly, this might sound like I'm hypocritical since I've made the track already, I hate big room, and I hated the idea of making a big room track. Why did I do it? Well... I guess the bottom line is I wanted to see if it was as easy as so many producers said it was, and if I could put my own sound into it/if I could even make it in the first place. Granted, it was definitely an easier track to put together conceptually since big room is essentially the same format every single time and there's not much room for movement, but I did feel like I managed to put in some of my own flair in there. All in all though, I agree with everything you've said, but now that I'm said and done with this genre, I hope you'll excuse this lapse in judgment ;)

Don't fear Xtrullor, I'm still staying true to my beliefs. Even though it doesn't look like so at the moment. LOL. Really appreciate that you've said what you've said above though. Thanks for pointing all that out.

The thing about the bass... Man, I just think I suck with bass. I don't know when enough is enough, subbass just confuses the hell out of me, and I'm mixing and arranging my track with laptop speakers. It's probably a combination of my inability and my poor equipment that's producing the nonexistent lowends. :( I'm sorry man. I'll try harder on that next time...

I was sick of this genre before I made this, but again this probably sounds hypocritical. Oh well. Hope you got my intention anyways man :) Cheers!