Tangerine's audio Reviews on Newgrounds

[ROCKSTAR]

Ah yes, a classical piece...

[You Make Me Happy]

(Smiley face)

[Ancient City Valialur]

Haha made me feel like I got transported a couple of thousand years ago in the shoes of my ancestors. Sounds amazing! You really hit the point with this. Did you use real voices or realistic synths for the vocals in the harmony? I find that in my music, the voices can't say actual words or grunts.

DanJohansen responds:

Thanks! I use real voices, but they are sampled into midi. there are a lot of crazy good voice VST's out there right now!

[Second Home]

This sounds really nice. The beginning is a little bit long though. Maybe mix things up by adding some arpeggios to go with the chords. For the center section of the song, it would have been really nice to hear something like a jazz guitar solo to compliment the strings. I like the ending though, but once again I feel that it may be a little long. Most people don't have a very long attention span and having a long intro and outro may ward people off. Sounds really nice though. You have a lot of potential. Keep it up!

[Gum Waltz]

This sounds amazing! I really think it was a good choice to make this into a waltz.

00:37 This part is really good and I absolutely love how you spiced up the chord progression. I believe this would have hit harder if the last note went an octave up instead of staying down. Just to give it a looping feel and to warn the viewer that it's going to loop.

01:17 arpeggios going the opposite way would have enhanced the feeling of insanity that I get from this section of the song. The octaves really set the feeling of insanity and mental instability.

01:52, I like what you did there but there's just one thing. I know, I mess this up too but it's a good skill to have something that prepares the viewer for a change in the music. Something like what you did there really needs something like a cymbal clash so that the viewer isn't expecting the same 1, 2, 3 but gets something else. This section sounds really good but a warning would have made it even better.

02:10 really gives me the feeling of a spinning carousel. Like I've been drugged in a carnival and I'm about to get beaten up by a bunch of clowns. I really really love 02:36 because it makes the song infinitely more catchy.

I absolutely love this piece. Keep it up!

[Virginia]

I really like this song. This song definitely sounds much different from your other songs. Very nice and peaceful and I really like how you added the ambient swooshing sounds. You really went for an atmosphere for this one. The very thing that I fear is all of my songs sounding the same. I try really hard to make every song unique. You really went for a much easy-going vibe with this song which I like. The melody is very repetitive and boring (I know you stated it in the description) and I feel like if you spent a little more time on the melody then you would have been able to make this song hit harder than it already does. For future compositions, a good idea to think about is adding some arpeggios to compliment the melody. At the moment it's very chordy, (Which isn't a bad thing) but it seems to have very few layers to it. A very tricky thing to do is to add enough to where it sounds good but to leave out enough to where the melody is the main focus. I tend to struggle with this because I always become too ambitious with my compositions. Overall, this is a very nice piece and I'm glad to see you experimenting with other styles a bit.

50Steaks responds:

Couple things:
1. The “ambient swooshing sounds” you mentioned, that was supposed to be the wind on the mountain range Virginia is kind of known for.
2. I agree with the arpeggios thing, and maybe that would have made the song better, but I did purposefully keep it simple in an effort to retain the traditional vibe I was trying to go for. Otherwise you bet I would have drastically shifted the melody like I do in most of my other songs halfway through to introduce a new musical idea.
3. I’m glad you liked it, for a while I was worried that I under-did myself in musicality for the sake of the atmosphere which wasn’t the goal at all.

[Wooden Wall]

This is an amazing piece. A good idea to incorporate in your next composition is using larger varieties of melodic rhythm. The melody is amazing but it's really repetitive. maybe adding a mini trumpet doing its own thing to go along with the main brass entourage might sound great. A big thing that I see in this piece is lots of repeating. Perhaps the idea of a bridging phrase to make the song feel much more progressive and less repetitive feeling. You can see an example of this in my most recent song https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/1030261. You can see that I begin off with the primary melody for just a little bit in the beginning then I switch to a brass bridge then I revert back to the pain melody to give the song a sense of conclusion and progression. I do admit, my composition isn't perfect but there are still things others can learn from it. Enough of tooting my own horn. Going back to your horns. A good transitioning phrase would to lower the volume of the horns and have a trumpet solo and it slowly ramps up in intensity then the main chorus comes and it really makes you feel nervous like there are a bunch of guards patrolling the area looking for you. Over all, you have a very good melody and a very nice snare drum pattern. Keep up the good work!

Gothorlagee responds:

Yeah, this was meant to be a very short one since nothing is usually happening around the wall. Its well guarded, but its just the same patrols day in and day out. I do have another "Wall" piece in the works that is a lot more involved and is based around a sneaky night time break in. Hopefully that would be something closer to what you described here.

[Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Orchestra cover]

I completely agree! Putting stuff in the authors note feels so annoying. Like, I guess it is important so that I can show all the songs that I completely plagiarised... but still. Also, neat song. Really gives an eery atmosphere. Maybe adding some brass, wind and choir might help the atmosphere a bit more. People often think orchestra to just be violins and cellos, but an orchestra is so much more. To really sell the orchestral feel then maybe do something similar to my most recent song, just not as high tempo and all over the place. A song that I'd really recommend for a slow orchestral style is https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/1030526. You can add your hip hop drum beats along with the orchestra for a little more pizazz. Overall, really nice piece. Sorry if what I said doesn't really fit into your vision of the song.

[Nap of the Catgirls]

This song would have sounded so good with a light orchestra and a vibrato heavy cello and violin playing minums through each bar while the kalimba does its thing. Maybe even another kalimba to harmonise and add some rhythm. Also, the first half is dangerously similar to another piece I've heard. I'm thinking it sounds a lot like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v712NiVK5uY but there's one that has the same melody as your piece but I just can't find it. It half reminds me of a battle block theatre song. Maybe one in the lobby, I'm not sure. Even if it's intentional or not, there's a song out there that sounds incredibly similar to this. You're just lucky none of us knows the name of it.

Response: Hmm, I don't think it's those that I'm thinking of. That melody sounds really familiar. Like that one song with that weird frog riding on some robot thing running from robots (I know, very descriptive). I'm not sure. Some knowledgeable wizard of a person will appear from the dark and discover the song that I'm thinking of.

Nabella responds:

I just realized what it sounded like after looking at some of the recommended videos in your video link, lmao.

https://youtu.be/IkOK8tdEsFY

I swear I didn't intend this. While I was making it, I was trying to mimic all the music box songs I've heard from these YouTube channels.
https://youtube.com/c/R3MusicBoxEnglish
https://youtube.com/user/AirplaneFoods

I guess I subconsciously inserted a part of Toby Fox's 'His Theme' into this? Or maybe, because of the lack of instruments like you mentioned, the melody doesn't stand out very well from other music box songs?

Honestly, thanks for pointing this out. I don't think I would've noticed the similarities on my own.

(And yeah, I'll be sure to add some other instruments down the line.)