by Nokanomi » Sun Apr 27, 2014 2:46 am
I'm personally not a great musician, but I do know something about theory, I say as I hide my Jazz, Bossa Nova, Funk and orchestral music I've composed but never bothered to post, so there's not a ton I have to say about the music, aside from: you should look at mixing it, assuming it's not midi, and possibly, learn to make connections between certain notes, adding grace notes, using chordal tones to a greater, and less obvious extent (check out the opening theme from Fringe...That's how I learned to use chord tones)
With those said, there are a few things I noticed about your music.
This is a lesson I learned the hard way, when teaching myself to make Funk. Let your instruments flow together, don't have any one thing overpower anything else. In some of them, I noticed the kick was way out of wack. Menacing Darkness, for example, could have had no kick at the start, or a different, less obtrusive one, at least, until around one measure before 0:15. There's the other thing; I'm not entirely sure you use measures. You occasionally do weird things with the timing (or just had instruments come in halfway into a measure or something), which, while admitably nice when you wish you create an offsetting effect, maybe not the nicest thing for nice sounding music.
The art of video game music is a difficult one, in that you have to have everything follow a primary melody. It's a difficult skill to learn, one that I fully accept I haven't gotten anywhere close to mastering, but you would benefit from a greater deal of command over it, I think. That's not to say that you always need a memorable melody for your pieces, as in certain situations sometimes having no discernible melody is the best option, such as when creating a tense atmosphere, but do keep it in mind.
Also, what program do you use? Assuming of course, that it wasn't mentioned.
In Fighting Spirit, first of all, some of the instruments hurt my ears, not sure why, but you might want to consider that, but you use a really weird "bassline" if it can even be called that. It's just...Weird. And the chords...Don't make sense, due to the unconventional bassline.
My final advice is to check out some really great music, at least at the beginning of a project, so you can build it into the proper piece you want it to be. Sort of like an artist painting via a reference...Or something. The easiest source would be just about anything from Touhou, as everything I've heard so far has some value to musicians as a lesson on making video game music.
Still, take this with a grain of salt, because I'm a wee bit tired today and my advice is probably null since I didn't listen to every second of your songs and you probably countered every single one of my points at areas in your music that came right after I'd stopped listening.
Anyway, let me know if you'd like to collab on something sometime; I might come off as an arrogant prick, but that's just because I see potential in your work, and want you to get great at it, so yeah.