HoboKa's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[A Halloween Tale [Short]]

Well, this is gonna wind up in a movie or game, whether you like it or not. And no, it won't be by my hand. I'm not talented enough to make movies or games rofl.

Reminds me of Adam's Family and Danny Elfman. Keeps evolving too, like a Hollywood classic. Before Hollywood started to suck ass.

[Music in My Heart .♞]

It's alright. Bit muddy lower end.

[Another small track in major]

Not enough weeeooooooowwwwws. 0/10

[Inktober #28 - The Groove, The Search]

Annunciation and inflection feels a bit rough at parts. But I struggle to speak normally. So I can't really cast stones there.

Side note: this reminds me of Massive Attack big time. Nice work.

Cyberdevil responds:

Thanks for the feedback. Annunciation is definitely one thing I still need to improve on, seems to be part accentual and part physical - just don't have the ideal jaw for optimal articulation, but there's a lot of great artists out there who manage even with some real kind of speech impediment. I'll get there!

And that's an awesome comparison. :) Thanks.

[Getsix - Pulse]

This needs to be in a DDR game right naow.

[Spirits Lament]

Loving that ambience at the start. Ruh roh - spooky vibes... Nice down-tempo distortion!
0:43 is cool. Sample-work here is not too shabby. 1:43 is a good breakdown/transition.
1:52 good countermelody section!
2:08...love that german pluck...can't remember the name of that instrument atm.

Jxudo responds:

Thank you for the details and feedback! I love comments like these.
And it's a harpsichord ;)

[Spirits Lament RE]

Reminds me of Castlevania meets Legend of Zelda OoT (the windmill). Samples are a bit crusty, but they do the job more or less.

[Depression]

Doesn't make me want to kill myself (more than usual). Not dark enough imo. Still. Nice tune.

RealMrSnuggles responds:

Thanks. It's not dark, thats for sure. I personaly find it sad though.

[Jockeys]

I think this is more synthwave than experimental. Might get more views with that tag too. Oh, it's a clitbait song. Ha. That's why it's good.

ClitBait responds:

hahaha, if I tell you the truth, I only make music because I like it. I don't know if it's one genre or another.
I put experimental for all the meaning of the word, not because it is specifically the genre :)

[The Weather in Saskatchewan]

Hey fellow Canadian. Did you mess around with parameters or just slap on a preset? Nice wintery drones. Could work in an isolation-type horror game too.

chronoquest responds:

But alas, I am not canadian! What a loss!

Messed around in Minisynth, this was originally apart of another song, but I couldn't salvage it and it ended up being its own thing. The tune itself's really bullshittingly simple. It's like baroque-era music but instead of trills it uses delay.

Minisynth is actually a really, really good VST to toy with. It can produce some great ambient junk in my personal opinion. Randomizing its parameters leads to some odd, harsh results, that can be easily reworked into a decent sound.

I believe most of the sound for it comes from the LFO, and the Filter itself. I'm in a godawful typing mood so here's some useless bullshit to go along with this information! A copious amount of context is probably needed regarding minisynth because there's a bunch of shiny turnable knobs for it so I'll try my best.

Please do keep in mind that I basically know nothing about music theory. I know I am typing way too much as a reply to a simple question so please don't kill me in my sleep.

If I can recall correctly, here's what I did to make it.

Randomized it (IIRC it originally turned into a harsh godawful mess of a saw wave.)

Transposed it to -10

Turned it into a 'Bell' waveform

Put the filter on (X-2, -Y1) X being Cutoff, Y being Resonance.
Explaination : MInisynth's filter's kinda weird. It has an XY Coordinate plane. Probably sounds stupid but most of the time, this kinda sound results from it.

Did some minor editing for the effects (Phaser's mixed very low, Chorus is mixed high, but it is really low on the modulation slide. There's alot of built-in delay, but it's low on the feedback / filter slide for it.)

Then I set the rate for the LFO 16 bars and the amount for it to -5~. It made the sound go real slow and kept it in the background, rather than the foreground.

I set the Keyboard and Velocity on 'Filter Tracking' to 14.1 and 27.0 respectively. Think of 'Keyboard' being a secondary attack knob for the filter. 'Velocity' radically messes with the filter in this case so I can't describe it.

Then I added an EQ to it, and added some external Delay and Reverb. All three of these being built-in FL 20 plugins.

There's probably some extra junk regarding the Filter Env (I think it's full word is Filter Envelope?) and the Osc Env, but that's generally how I got to this weird sound. I know you probably werent looking for the full barely-legible explanation that probably made no sense whatsoever but i have too much free time.