Music Contest 5 Judges' Comments for "The Two Become One"

This is the E-mail I recieved from the MC5 organizers with the comments that the judges gave for "The Two Become One".


Here are the Round 1 judges' comments on your song. Please keep in mind that these comments reflect the views only of the judges, not of the Music Contest organizers. Unlike in MC3 and MC4, we did not proofread any of the comments, simply due to the large volume of song comments processed.

Before each set of comments is the name of the judge who submitted them. Some judges did not submit comments for their assigned songs.

You can find the Round 1 results at:

http://www.hornet.org/music/contests/mc5/files/mc5-news.003
ftp://ftp.hornet.org/pub/demos/music/contests/mc5/files/mc5-news.003

Email addresses for judges will not be distributed.

Feel free to distribute your MC5 entry if you like. After the contest has concluded, we will make all entries available to the public. The sample text in each song will be changed to reflect that it entered MC5, and who the the author was.

Thank you for entering Music Contest 5!


Ben Grubbs

good for a rookie. sounds like a midi though. nice beat. drums sound amazingly real.

Martin Turner

A well written work. It uses good samples, well, mostly good samples. The tune is easy to get into but suffers from being to long. Why on earth it sped up I will never know and is possibly the only reason this song doesn't score higher.

Patryk Sofia Lykawka

Very catchy song, it uses nice samples and exactly fitting to this style. Also I can emphasize the original form of structure and sequence of melodies and chords enjoyable. Just more one note: I thought the sax reasonable.

Glenn Barnett

The melody and the progression are pretty happy & cheesy, but musically fine, and well tracked. The orchestra hit brass is kind of loud (and out of place). Good variation, and your drum fills are respectable. However, your samples are pretty bad overall and your leads could have used some effects.

Jim Crawford

The samples didn't mix well. The melodies and chords were good. The drums needed more punch. Transitions were strange. The horn bruised my brain. Not too shabby, but not that good either. If it had been better crafted -- if you had more practice -- it would've been much better.

Zac Hilbert

Nice job. Your tune was very well tracked. You arrange the notes and effects together in a very effective manner. The music itself too was arranged demonstrated nice musician ship. I felt just like I was at the mall. <g>.

David Dupplaw

The composer of this piece has made a real good attempt at getting structure, and melody into the music, with a beginning, verses, and choruses. The track is layed down really well using commands to good effect. Some of the samples are a bit poor, such as the saxophone, and the brass, which are notoriously hard to track. The electric piano lead sounds slightly out of place. The way the tempo is increased in the middle helps to lift the tune. A good attempt was made to try and track a guitar line (another difficult skill) and turned out marginally successful. Care must be taken that when the music finishes and loops, notes aren't left hanging around which happened on this piece of music. Although some of the technical skills involved in using the tracker are slightly lacking, the music is really well structured and shows the composer has thought about the music they are writing, and is capable of writing some great music. They now need to work on getting their tracking skills better, and listening carefully to real instruments, to attempt to get better impressions of guitars, and drums for example.

George E. Nowik

Well, the only objection I can come up with initially is that you are cutting off your samples way too quickly before they're done with their run. It helps letting them flow on as long as they want to to add some nice realism to the song. Try using more channels to give your instruments room to breathe while they are being used. The song itself is actually very pleasing to listen to as far as songs of that genre' go. Again, the guitarish chord thing is another example of where you're cutting off the instrument too quickly. Let it flow out. Extra channels help. When using hihat instruments like in your faster part make sure that you are playing the hihat samples at frequencies high enough to match their original sampling rate. It makes it sound far better to listen to. Nice song overall.

Simon Carless

Loses marks initially for the cheesiest hit sound _ever_, but the tune itself is actually rather good. Intelligent, sweet melody (ignoring some overelaboration later on which muddies it a little), nicely blending instruments, and good mixing carries things along nicely. Interesting change into 3/4 part way through provides good variety.

Overall, then, a very good effort for a rookie. Perhaps lacks the defter touch required to make it top-notch, but the song itself and song structure would do a veteran proud.

---

Payton Place
Places Essays Games Music
Countdown Cams Weather Tinting