These are… not great, to be honest. Have you looked at taking any kind of music theory study at all? I think you could really do with some help in that area. A lot of these compositions have no sense of progression at all, which is really important in JRPG-style music. Your instrument choices could also be a lot better.
I appreciate the honestly, and I’ve only really ever looked up scales. I do plan on learning more though. Do you know of any sources online that could help me out (free ones, preferably).
There are some really good YouTube channels. Michael New is really good for the basics. Once you understand what chord progressions are you could probably move on to 8-bit music theory. Alternatively, I am certain there are plenty of free online resources for the basics of composition.
Title Screen: The melody really needs some space to breath and some new rhythms, like dotted rhythms or triplet rhythms - it’s all very on-the-beat and lacking any kind of momentum. The notes/harmonies are all kind of clustered in the same register; you might consider raising your strings to be higher up than the brass melody so that the melody stands out a bit more. As it is, the melody is difficult to distinguish (think What Lies At The End from FE15 for reference). It also needs a bass line, which could be accomplished by using timpani or bass guitar. The harp is making the harmonies a bit murky as well.
Valiant Remembrance: This one has some lovely textures and I love the close harmonies of the string section. You could again do with adding a stronger bass line in some of the repetitions so that the harmonic progression becomes clearer, but I think it’s quite nice as it is because it gives it a more ambient feel.
Late, but to be fair to your early works, Derpin’ is basically perfect and is literally me when I’m trying to sleep but some meme song keeps me up until 2 am.
On the subject of music theory (which I am a novice in, but love to geek out about), would recommend Adam Nelly and Trevor Wong on youtube. Neely has some exploratory/experimental stuff for different styles, and Wong focuses on emo/math rock. Not sure how relevant that’ll be for GBA hacking (although an emo FE soundtrack sounds neat to me). These two are a bit more advanced and niche, but fun (For me at least) to learn about.
I actually would advise against watching Neely’s videos; they’re very unstructured and don’t really go into proper analysis, which is not a good foundation for beginner music theory. They’re fine if you want something interesting but you won’t gain much practical music theory from them. He’s more interested in shocking/engaging viewers than he is in teaching them.
Yeah, I wouldn’t recommend them to a beginner, but interesting to watch if you get more advanced. Agree that his stuff is less instructional by nature.
Genuine suggestion: consider remaking the soundtrack you did for THWD. Even though Agro’s scathing review on them was fairly accurate, you’ve since clearly learned and grown as a musician and I feel you might like to consider remaking the THWD tracks with the things you have learned. There is honestly some potential in them with some fairly sick beats.
The project is done, if I did go back and redo any of them it’d just be for shits.
However I did make like 19 tracks for Fractured Realm (project link here) over the past few months if you wanted to check those out. Most of them are in the current public build (and for the time being I’m too lazy to share them here).
