Music Help?

Alright, so I’m trying to make music for potential would be hacks or whatever, and I realize that I need to stop sucking at everything and get good at some finer aspects in general, so for this bout of time, I’ve decided to attack… Music. No one ever talks about it, and I wish that more people would… I don’t just want to borrow music all of the time, and I have to have SOMETHING original.

So without further adieu, I present… A package of songs that I’ve created from various time periods that I’m considering as viable for any potential would be hack that I make. Please… I’d like some various opinions on the music.

LET’S USE A LESS SKETCHY SITE!!!

Thanks again. Although, I’ve been told I need more percussion, so I’ll take that into consideration.

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I’d listen but I can’t open on my phone

Thanks. I put it into dropbox to make it work better for people to get.

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Okay, some feedback:

1stEnemyMapTheme: Cool concept but there is no progression and the percussion comes in too late. Needs a diff riff.

2ndMapThemePlayer: Again, the opening is really cool, but it sounds like it builds up to something, and then doesn’t. The rhythm gets a bit repetitive, too.

Armory: Sounds like a PokeMart theme, which I guess is what you were going for.

BackStory: Reminds me of “Conversation 1” from FE4, which again, is not a bad thing. Hoping you change up the instrumentation a bit. This is also DramaticGarbage I guess.

BigBoss3: Again, the rhythm gets a bit repetitive and the first part goes on for a bit too long. The song is over a minute long, and it’s highly unlikely your boss battles are going to go any more than 40 seconds, so I’d recommend making some cuts.

EarlyBoss: There’s no distinct melody in the song, just a bunch of chords and sustained notes. Again, too long for an FE boss theme.

I didn’t really like EnemyArrival or EnemyAttacks. EnemyArrival is more scales.

HealBot: Sounds more like a dancer song to me.

PlayerPhaseEarly: Those opening notes seem a little off… Did you put some accidentals in somewhere maybe? Again, this song builds a lot of tension, but there’s no release.

Recruits: there is literally the same tune over and over and over and over and over.

I’m out of writing steam so I’ll stop here. Overall your compositions aren’t bad and you have great concepts but you tend to recycle the same motifs in each song leading to them sounding very repetitive. There’s rarely a distinct, hummable melody in any of them so they are a bit flat. I don’t think that you should throw away what you’ve made but there is definitely room for improvement.

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Excellent, this is exactly the type of feedback that I wanted. I feel like I have good base concepts, but I needed a bit of push and advice to fix all of the problems with it. This is really helpful. Keeping this is mind, I’m going to try to fix one of them each day based on some of the feedback.

Thanks. I really, really appreciate this. Overall it sounds like I need to work on some more original motifs and I need to work on melodies. I’ll definitely keep them then.

I can’t like this response enough, because I’ve always needed someone to sit down with and talk to me about stuff like this, and there aren’t many musicians in my area that are knowledgeable about composition to work with – although to be honest, I just play some instruments and sing, I’m not a composer.

That’s okay! I’m the same. But you can have a good ear even if you can’t compose. It might help to learn a bit of music theory and chord progression too. Remember, even if you’re not a great composer, you can always steal riffs from existing works (this is totally legal and ethical, too!) so that you can at least have a distinct beginning/middle/end.

I didn’t realize it was actually legal. Huh. I’ll have to keep that in mind. Not that I’m totally going to steal songs or anything, but it IS something to take note of!

That said, maybe not everyday for a song as that might degenerate the quality too much, but here’s what I’ve got for one of them so far. What do you think?

Well anyone really. :smiley: I’m actually enjoying this quite a bit more now that I have another set of ears potentially. Cheers!

The percussion is great! But the melody or lack thereof is the same as the original which means it has the same problems as the original…

Seems I’m fundamentally just not getting this melody. Are you ever on Discord? Maybe I could try to schedule a time where we could have a better back and forth. Either way, I’ll keep trying to tweak it, I might ask one of my friends about it to see what he has to say.

@Maddox, sorry I didn’t get back to you. I prefer to keep all correspondences public and on the forums as I have very little time to sit down and write responses. Full time careers are timekillers.

No. That’s fine. I was busy too, and tbh, it’s useful to have it that way so if someone else has to come back, it’s preserved. I’m still working on stuff, it’s just I haven’t posted many updates because someone suggested just trying to make a hack from scratch and then putting the custom music in there so people could hear it. A nice short hack would do the trick!