DJ-Ultimus's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[The Sun Run (2004 Event Mix)]

Great Job

First off, let me say that you definitely know what you're doing (unlike 99% of the trance artists out there). You've got skill and potential to make it big. You've got sequencing and mixing down pat.

However, I can't help but hear that the track seems a little chaotic and unfocused at points. Your compressor does a great job at squashing those bels down to a reasonable level, but unfortunately, this causes a lot of the channels to be lost in the noise of the track... The same effect that you'll get out of bad DAC's in your hardware. This does give the track somewhat of a more professional feel to it, but try feeding this through some amps and blasting it out of generic speakers in a large hall full of reso... and you won't get much but noise. Add in a the sound of the crowd, and you've got chaos led by a beat from the woofers. It would do you well to accentuate the higher end, and cut out a bit of the middle to make the track more portable and to increase clarity. If you want a reference as to this "clarity" I'm talking about, feel free to check out the highly unfinished track of mine (and the only one I've put onto NG), Beholder.

Transitions seem a little coarse, but this does not have any major reprecussions for the track as a whole, as it is fast paced and unpredictible in itself, so I won't complain.

However, I do hear what seems like a load of unaltered presets that have been done a million times over. If you built them from scratch, then I would recommend that you develop them more fully and give them a little of your own flavor, as opposed to trying to immitate the sound of the big names in the biz. If you simply fed some midi through factory presets, I should really recommend that you try developping your own synths to add a bit of spice to your tracks.

Nevertheless, like I said, your work looks very promising, and I would love to do some collab with you. Should you be interested, my email/MSN tag is ultimus [at] gmail [dot] com

Good job, and good luck in the future.

-DJ Ultimus

Marchorizon responds:

Thank you very much for your detailed review and I thank you more for giving it a "fair" score..It only deserves 4 for originality..lol..All of the problems that you have discovered with this tune, I have already fixed myself as I have made a newer remix recently..but its good to know that you've spotted the same things..dead on about most of the presets..as this was the first track I made after I had got a new VST..so I cracked out all the new presets and put them into an old tune..As you wish to hear some of my "originallity"..I shall upload a tune that you should check out..Its "my" style..not generic trance, not generic anything..It uses all of my programmed synths etc..Most people say its like "nothing they've heard before"..Well thanks for the good luck..

..about colaboration, what software do you use for production?

..Marc Horizon