la-yinn's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[Why Do Anything At All]

You exist so that others may appreciate you being your existential, wacky, groovy self.

Stay groovin, stay existing. Cut the meaninglessness though. Youre better than that. :-)

Side note, it's cool to come back to this place and still see familiar names around. I really need to pop in more often.

Quarl responds:

I'm better than nothing, the next blog I write is gonna be a cascade of videos and pictures of our cat that just passed away. Allow me a little sadness right now la-yinn, I'll be manic again in a month :3

edit: theres a sense in comfort seeing them old names <3

[Keep (ft. The Emerald Ruby)]

When we got paired up in the same pool I immediately remembered some of your music from years ago and how even back then you made some legit beats. Kind of saw you as the main competition.

Things have only gotten better since then, eh? This grooves like mad! Its wildly different than what I thought you'd post since I remember you posting more electronica / EDM based music back then.

Keep the beats flowing and GL in the deathmatch :-)

midimachine responds:

thanks! i have access to a lot of goooood stuff thru my job now so that has changed things for me a bit :)

good luck to u too

[3 AM]

Dude. Tune! I feel like between the mixdown and the arrangement, the mixdown is the real winner. That break is very crisp and tight. Maybe a bit too overpowering for the rest of the track though.

I feel like the intro could introduce some bass elements and have them stick through the bridge to fill it up a bit more though. And the piano is kind of out of place; probably FL Keys? I hate FL keys. Only way to make that work is to layer itself with many notes octaves up and down and to seperately adjust the volume of the notes to 'pick the right frequency' if you will. Oh, and a fuckton of reverb. And some volume attack on the notes. And pre-transients. Really, it just sucks. Dont use FL Keys.

Tune though! Dont expect this kind of work on NG but sometimes you land on nice exceptions.

5TanLey responds:

It's actually the giant piano library for kontakt 5, but I managed to make it sound like fl keys lol.. too much compression maybe.. or I could try some other vst

anyway, thanks for your thoughts :)

[CRX - DEBRIS]

With the kick in the 4x4 rhythm at the start, it did remind me a bit of old ut99 tracks like 'Run' hehe. But the main theme is a bit too light for gory shooters, blame the trance-y synths ;-)

I like it, the parts with the pads feel really fleshed out and I definitely like the way you EQ your break, feels crisp and tight! I feel like your arps could use some sidechain next to the slow uplift/downlift qualities to them because they feel slightly dry and repetitive, some more modulation would do them justice, or change up the pattern a bit. This can be best heard in the intro, where there's not too much variation.

Feels more at home for a galactic / space-themed game rather than a shooter imo. This would fit really well as a battle theme in FTL for example, but it'd need some more background ambience like the rest of that particular sound track. Anyways, cool beat.

[Sonic Forces - Sunset Heights]

Im usually scrolling down the DNB page for anything industrial or neurofunk related, but a part of me remains impressed with videogame remixes. When they're done *this* right, at least. It could just be me but I feel like the lead melody during the drop could've been ever so slightly louder.

Either way, this was 3 minutes well spent.

PaulyBFromDa303 responds:

Thank you very much for that input that really means a lot! Yeah the volume was actually something I really struggled with. Once the full version is up on my page you'll hear the Hawaiian guitar a lot more prominently as well as the steel drums. But even then I still had to compress the guitar +60% and somehow, I too feel like it wasn't enough. Perhaps this will be something to investigate once I get a chance to use those instruments again

Thank you again for your honesty. I love reviews like this

[Exentryx - Hollow]

Damn, quite a banger.

But I feel like the drop actually loses quality compared to the intro because the wobs do not fill out the frequency spectrum aswell as the intro does. I'm quite certain you can beef it up by layering the wobs with a higher pitched synth, maybe modulate it to sweep downwards a bit; the second part of the drop sounds like you had more of that stuff going on.

Yeah, dunno if I have more to say. Maybe some finetuning on the individual EQs cause sometimes the sounds overlap and it turns a little bit muddy. Anyway - Shit's dope for sure. Really dope.

ESHRR responds:

I was kinda intending the wobs to only be the mid and low frequencies, making sound hollow. I do agree it's a bit muddy, but that's how I liked it. It's subjective, I just like those muddy frequencies. Thanks for the feedback though!

[I Love Him]

145 and 183 BPM? Stay you, Quarl.

This had better not be the last thing you upload this year! The audience demands 76BPM moody synths on triple speed breaks. Bonus points if there's a cat with shades on providing riddim on them tambourines.

On a more serious note, belonging to a job ain't the hell hippies make it out to be. Speaking from experience; that shit beats being broke and depressed any day of the week.

Edit: cat with shades on, with the shades being broken down the middle. (As if that needed mentioning ...)

Quarl responds:

I just printed 100 hard copy CDs for a new album and plan on uploading a digital version to soundcloud as soon as it comes in.

The process of remastering old rsn. files meant I didn't have a lot of spare energy for new tracks but now that it's behind me NEW TUNES SOOOOOOOON OLOLOLOLOLOL.

Keep it fresh la-yinn <3

[drift]

It's a bit of amen break with a badly mixed synth looping over and over again.

No, as in, thats what it is.

Do better mate.

SchattenDnB responds:

sorry that i'm late but i just want to thank you for your response. i will do my best to get better at this sort of style

[The Tower]

See, I was just gonna check up on whether regulars from years ago were still around but then you go ahead and mix in them mario coin blings into a breakbeat and now I've been stuck here for the last 15 minutes.

C'mon now. Just riddim-queue-loose.

Quarl responds:

haha, I haven't seen your name in ages. It sucks how artists and creatives can sequester themselves into anti social microcosms, myself included. FYI, a few golden oldies...

Parathile is now owning face in the DNB scene under the name Emperor. Cornandbeans became Space Laces and did work with Excision/Datsik. Look up his soundcloud page, his shit is filthy. Haywirehaywire is now just Haywire and is doing quite well as well. Stan-SB is rocking out as Fox Stevenson, still doing his pop drum and bass thing but he's obviously the best at it.

There are plenty of other NG oldies that are active and such but for drum and bass, those peeps ^.^

[It's Unfair (Original)]

This is pretty legit. I love the halftime, calm intro to the track but do feel like adding some background pads would've helped fill out the piece a bit more, especially if it would be layered with the low-tone bassline. The sweeps leading up to the drop was great and the drop itself is exactly what it needs to be. I particularly like the drumwork in this, it's a very solid break you've put together. The square-wave synths coming in at the drop were a very nice touch but could've used the slightest bit of volume adjustment because they're more of a filler element and don't come to their own due to the somewhat 'basic' sound design. Maybe layer that up with something else aswell.

Were you to extend the track to offer a second drop and a little bit more effectwork in line with the melodics, to fill in the end of each 8 / 16 bars, you wouldn't be far off from being on a professional liquid dnb artist's level. Very well done. Seriously.

pichuscute0 responds:

Thank you! This is fantastic feedback!

I think I spent less time working in the low end than I probably should have looking back (I kind of wanted to accent that low end just a bit already, but I like your idea better). The piano portion of the song is a sample, which is what I was attempting to layer with the bassline. This is why I saved pads for later in the song and kept them in the midrange, but it meant I didn't revisit that portion of the song like I should have. I may have been a bit scared to mess with it, if I'm honest (I'm a little tone deaf in that frequency range, which doesn't help). This is an ongoing problem I have, so I need to remember to revisit the bass range often haha.

I'm glad you enjoy my sweep/drum work. Drums in particular is what I tend to enjoy working on most and tweaking, particularly in DnB. It can be very hard to find the right sounds for the job sometimes, but after something like 10 years of attempts, I'm starting to get quite good, I hope haha. The production is probably something a bit closer to what you'd hear in Neurofunk, but I like to apply that style to Liquid. It makes a nice contrast (and rhythm), in my opinion.

I hear your criticism of the square-wave arp synth loud and clear now. Unfortunately, I didn't realize how relatively thin and quiet it was at the time. Layering it with something phasing or with chorus likely would have been the way to go, or just an entirely different type of sound. I totally agree.

As for the length, I like to keep my songs short and sweet. Part of the theme of my work is the attempt to capture a melancholy/nostalgic feeling, which I think is reinforced by songs that end just a little bit sooner than you might want. My hope is that this also makes re-listening happen more often. No clue if I'm right or if it's working, but that's my ultimate goal and why these are shorter than you might otherwise see.

I'm glad you think I'm finally honing in on that professional level of quality. I've spent a long break away from DnB to try to improve myself in other areas and types of music (two or so years now), which seems to have paid off. Coming back to DnB briefly meant I was back with a purpose resulting in much better quality than I've gotten in the past in the genre. So glad you had the time to give this a review!