Finishing posting my old projects with this one.

Spoiler: The Ark

This is the first ever mix that felt satisfying to me.

Spoiler: Reach

Contrasting the previous one, the first mix I ever abandoned
But I like the arrangement too much.

Spoiler: Vastness

This project is tragiclaly lost to HDD failure, leaving me only a partially compressed .wav with unfinished mixing and thankfully at least finished arrangement, which I yet again love. One of my favourite works, in fact.

Spoiler: Waves of the Ocean

The ocean in question is Solaris. This is a big experiment to me, since I wrote it from a human perspective and tried to convey human's emotions, instead of describing the scene as I always do. Also tried to convey a lossy transmission over extremely long distance in the mixing.

 

Last edited: Dec 20, 2023

Bonus one!

Spoiler: What Could Have Been

If you chose to listen to it - listen to at least halfway point. No spoilers. Except these two and the four above, that is. And technically one under my every post, but that doesn't count. You can't even see those if you're not logged in.

Spoiler: Bet you didn't notice

...that it's a Pop-Corn cover

Enjoy! Feedback is welcome and appreciated.

If embeds don't work (like they don't for me right now), please open the file in a new tab. It works there.

 

Last edited: Dec 6, 2023

I wonder why exactly this didn't garner any attention :thinking_face:
I mean, the music's good. I think.

 

You've done well the music is well made and mixing is well thought out and balanced even if it is a touch loud for my tastes. It is well made art and I enjoyed listening to them all.

You will find out something about people as you age, they will not respond to something just being good regardless of how well it is made, they will wonder how it was done and shrug while moving on to whatever else they are interested in.

To get attention if you want it, you have to to touch something in them for the better or worse and that isn't as straight forward.

People are tribal, possessive, dismissive and unaware as well. This is the nature of all of us and it is very hard to change even for those who make the choice to change themselves. Especially for the ambiguous, and the non-declared. You can trade a prince a pebble of stone for a palace if you can build a story impressive enough, but you can not buy a loaf of bread for a mountain of gold if the baker isn't interested.

If it was bad, they would tell you and offer myriad good and bad advice on how to fix things, but if something is good but just not flavour they savour then most will have nothing to offer on the topic. Which is neither good nor bad, it just is the way it is.

There is an old Zen Buddhist story along the lines of this about a man how spends 10 years building a shrine on a mountain top: long story you can search engine if you are so inclined.

 

Last edited: Dec 19, 2023

Yeah I see what you're saying. A lot of my music, I feel, is like this.
The main four tracks are the quietest of my mixes BTW :sweat_smile: And the bonus one is about average.

 

Oh hai Mark.

Didn't see the thread (as I rarely go on the main page), and I'm a bit surprised (and hurt) that you hadn't sent me these before


My general thought : I dig the vibes a lot. The compositions and arrangements are good.

I find some tracks fit the concept better than others. The Ark, for instance, works 100%. What Could Have Been, much less so -and I like the song in and of itself, it just doesn't evoke the aural landscape I imagine when I hear Eastern European Sci-Fi. Let's say I hear too much of your D'n'B and Neuro influences in it, and to me they're not really compatible with that landscape

Overall the mixes are good, but I wouldn't expect otherwise coming from you. I think I only have a couple or three of complaints regarding the mix :

• The lead synth in Waves of the Ocean is WAY too loud IMO. I understand this was an artistic choice (the lossy transmission thing), maybe you went for how those frequencies would pierce through everything else on a speaker in a Eastern European spaceship lol. I mean it could be a legitimate decision if my guess is true, but in that case I'd say things aren't lossy enough.
  
• Some of the drum sounds, I don't like. Granted, that's not exactly a mix issue (although I find the snare in What Could Have Been too boxy, something that can be solved with mixing).
• Some tracks are too dry IMO. When I think of Easter European Sci-Fi, the sentence itself is drenched in tons of reverb.

So yeah, globally I think there's some really good stuff in there. Some of your choices, I don't completely agree with, but it's your music so my agreement has no importance lol.

 

Is that a reference to your opinion about my art?

I was planning to, right after you answered to the previous batch of music I sent your way

WCHB is here because of Pop-Corn. Actually it's Pop-Corn meets Meshuggah, and the snare is shit, I agree. I didn't have anything better at the time and was too unsure of where to move the sound afterwards.

Not a lot of reverb on Waves of the Ocean because it's still meant to evoke a human perspective, not a description of scenery. Trumpet (SWAM Solo Brass) is front and center for the same reason.
Agree about not being lossy enough, unsure how to precisely achieve the effect in my head in fact. Wanted to go for AudioThing Wires vibe, but it's too drastic and there's no in-between for it, putting it on everything sounded unmusical, putting it on only some things made too big of a contrast. Eh.

Not enough reverb on Vastness because I didn't finish the mix before a HDD failure

 

Waves of Ocean is best from 1st post, IMO. If your main profession is doing music and not coding &or graphics as well, this is good!

Shows you slaved away a lot, which is what counts!

Now you can observe these creations from a distance. Later try to improve.

I loved to watch my music teacher playing the sheet I selected for myself to learn. He showed, how it sounded basic, just playing the notes from paper. Then he showed me, how the piece looks, when you start to improvise on top of it. THAT awakened my curiosity for professional music. That and when he showed me the scales and keys. How playing the same music in a different scale and key transformed it. Nearing octogenarian age with his arthritic, swollen hands filled with liver-spots, but when he began to play he immediately was rejuvenated in his finger movements. His pianist colleague as well. :D

He was a traveling band musician in the 70's doing gigs, American-style, they all had distinct shiny white-golden suits for stage, their blonde male hair done all perfect, everything was shining and glittering on those big photos in the stage lights. :D

I couldn't believe my eyes, when I saw him play in amazing style. How a human could move ten fingers on a synth keyboard so fast and all the sounds were accurate! :-o

 

Last edited: Dec 20, 2023

Sick lead in The Ark, gave me goosebumps, needed to power on my monitors and blast the tune loud, you got me!

 

Thanks! My main profession is mixing engineer indeed, and I'm writing music because why not, it's all there in my PC already.
Those are all older tracks actually. I'll post something newer next.
An interesting story. Thanks for sharing it! Wish I also had a mentor like this.

Yes! It's ArcSyn. A preset, believe it or not! Called "Eastern Moog Lead", with only very minimal tweaks.
Every synth sound in The Ark is ArcSyn, actually. I wanted to try it out and didn't notice how a whole arrangement was finished :D

 

Very very nice tracks ! Waves of Ocean is my fav too, but they're all well made. And indeed, when nothing really substantial to say, people will mostly not say anything and I'd say that's probably for a best; it's less "noisy" even if it may slightly slap the ego. Actually we should have ratings to express the overall feelings already ! Anyway, keep it man, good job. Where are your latests tho ?

 

Thank you! I don't want to oversaturate the subforum at any moment, so I'm not posting it just yet.
I did post some newer tracks here tho. In fact, the very first thing I posted was the latest at the time. Here it is if you're still curious:
https://audiosex.pro/threads/so-ive-been-playing-a-lot-of-ballisticng-lately.68518/
It's a thematic piece, a homage to a homage of sorts.
There's also another thematic piece I posted that's fresher than all but Vastness and Waves of the Ocean. But I consider it an older track already. Anyways, here it is, just in case.
https://audiosex.pro/threads/a-track-inspired-by-battletech-universe.70910/