EmperorCharlemagne's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[Horizontal climbing (8 bit)]

lots of fun

I gotta say in all of your 8bit songs i REALLY love the sounds you use- they're always so damn crunchy and delicious, in contrast to my work which uses a lot more smoother sounds. Of the two, I prefer yours! : )
Love the harmonies on this one. The chords and contrapuntal stuff you put into this piece in particular put a grin on my face. Keep it up.

Anyhoo, as a small note, I've been pretty busy lately, so I'll try to leave some feedback on more of your works (which I have listened to; good stuff!) soon, hopefully.

Always a fan~

Calamaistr responds:

awesome man, yea you use different soundbanks but no biggie i have different soundbanks too but i always prefer the most crushed sounding, took me a while to find a good accurate famicon bank.
Atm i dont have fruityloops on my pc anymore but it will be installed. (my pc had to get new windows cause it died but a friend made sure i kept all my music and stuff.. pfew.. thought i was done)

Ill be looking forward to your reviews :)

[The Frozen Palace]

Nicely done!

Since I didn't listen with headphones on, the high-pitched noise didn't bother me that much, but I don't think it would have bothered me all that anyway if I did.

Always a reminder, and one I don't think you need to worry about too much, is that the higher the pitch a note is, the lower volume you need for it. The high pitch will carry itself, with or without massive amounts of velocity.

I liked how the song alternated between calm and more frenzied/driven; it created a nice dichotomy and made the song interesting to listen to.

I don't have anything really to critique; this is just overall pretty good. Keep up the nice work.

ShatterTheSky22 responds:

Yes, I've just started using that technique a little more in my newer songs (this is over a year old) to lower the volume of individual high notes as opposed to whole instruments.
And I'm glad you liked it. The intent was to be a character moving from the outdoors into like the battleground or something to that effect.
Thank you for the review!

[TSR Audio]

[Not Worth It (Thirteen Swells)]

Nice job

Good percussive-esque stuff in the background, like the metallic-sounding clashes.

Pretty droning, but not in a bad way- the song has a natural flow and rhythm that makes it pretty listenable. Perhaps you could have put a few (FEW) more varied instruments/synths/pads in there at some point, but I think this piece does fine as is.

treyhaur responds:

I spent about an hour trying to find another sound to work in there but I couldn't find anything that fit without overpowering or just completely clashing with the rest of the piece. Perhaps I gave up just a little too soon...

Thanks for the review!

Trey

[-Cadence-]

Nice Cadence

I think you could have done a little bit more fancy work, maybe do something with some quads or whatnot, but then again, that's my old days in the marching band coming out.

Pretty good all the same.

Par0xysM responds:

Actually, there is a quad part in there. It's just extremely hard to hear due to the fact that I had to utilize drum set toms instead of actual quad samples since I couldn't find any good ones. I initially made this as just a listen through so our drumline could get a feel for what I'd written. Thanks for the review!

[Electrical ants (8bit)]

Probably perfect in every way

Well, really, just, wow.

The percussion and percussive effects, and the rhythm section is fucking incredible.

The melody is interesting, progressive, abstract, yet rockin' and groovy the whole damn time.

The sounds themselves are fucking awesome, and there is not a single point of the piece that did not have me thinking "HELL YEAH!!!"

This is highly polished, professional, and just damned incredible. Many lauds to you fine sir.

Calamaistr responds:

and only two soundchips were used (aside from the percussion scratchys) :p
Initially only one even but added the soft chips later.

Yea i tried to keep the track constantly changing in a sense, taking out certain riffs replacing them with something else, sometimes even making a moment of silence in between for the sake of awesome.

Glad you liked it man. :)
-cal.

8 bit forever!

[Cossack Citadel (Mega Man IV)]

Good playing

I always loved the Cossack songs from MMIV, which is also one of my favorites in the Mega Man series.

If I can critique, it sometimes it feels that the melody/lead guitar gets drowned out by the other instruments around. Maybe you can beef up the lead a bit, volume-wise, or tone down the rhythm guitars, which is probably the wiser course.

I personally think it would help out this track a lot to have a very clearly-defined melody.

Other than that, this is well--made and enjoyable.
Great job!

TheJonnyDeath responds:

I noticed this too, mainly in the first half. Thanks for pointing it out!

[-( Wut )-]

Pretty rad stuff

Seeing this in the Advertisement thread, I decided "hey, this looks interesting enough to listen to!"

And I certainly wasn't disappointed.

I know plenty of folks around here don't like experimental songs- they'd rather keep things safe. But I like it when a piece of music takes risks or operates outside of the standard conventions- the latter of of which this song seems to do an awful lot.

Love the effects, the swirling soundscapes, and the synth sounds- it sounds interesting, fun, and most importantly, it sounds like it's a living, breathing thing.

So in short, I liked this a lot. The only thing I can say against it is that the way it loops is very artificial and jarring, and if it wasn't meant to loop, I kinda could have stood to see a more effective ending (maybe something with a fade-out?).

Still, I enjoyed this very much.

Tykwa responds:

:D.

[[39]Revolution[39]]

Well made and fun to listen to

Saw this in the Advertisement thread, so I thought I'd give it a go:
A lack of main theme (if this is such a case) never really bothered me.

However, I will say that this song shows lots of polish and professional talent, which is something that the trance/dance community on Newgrounds has a high deficiency of. I might listen to more of it around here if were as half-bad as this song.

The only critique I can really come up with is that when the piano part comes in the first time, the reverb and volume could be turned down a bit- It's a bit too muddy and remember, the higher notes are, the less help they'll need from the volume nob.

Still, this was really good and I have to hand it to you for doing a fantastic job, at least to my ears (I'm sure you can hear every mistake you made, but that's what it's like to be a music-maker, right?).

flight39 responds:

Thanks for the review! Yeah, I do notice that muddiness now. I'll try not to do that in future songs.
I can hear all the mistakes in most of my songs. It's maddening. Another thing that was more common a while ago is that I would make a song, think it was the most brilliant thing I'd ever made, and spend inordinate amounts of time promoting it on various websites; then come back three months later and realize that it actually really sucked.

[One Metroid]

A few things to keep in mind:

While this is generally solid, I would have liked to see some variation in which synths you used.

The stuff you opened with, you used for the entire song, which to some can seem a little bit boring. Maybe you could've shaken things up by adding a few more voices (while at the same time subtracting the existing voices), giving a different flow at times. Experiment, you know?

Anyhoo, this is not all that bad, and fairly enjoyable, but keep on improving!
PS, Super is one of my favorite games too. I'mma a huge Metroid fan, so I can't fault you for having bad taste!

Cadarot responds:

Thanks for the feedback. I know what you mean about using the same thing constant. Not a whole lot of variety in the Super Metroid Theme though. I'm still tweaking the song little by little, I just uploaded it because I'm happy with what I have now.
Again, hanks for your feedback. I'll experiment a bit more and maybe I'll find something new I can add to this.