Here are your rankings from Evermind:
Read on for Evermind's reviews!
General advice:
“Every song is a journey” - A song should go somewhere. Taken to an extreme, if you repeat the same 30 seconds of song for 6 minutes, that’s not a 6 minute song, that’s a 30 second song 12 times. So we have to keep things moving, we have to have change, we have to have some kind of progression. That progression can take a lot of forms. We can add intensity, layering new layers on as we go, or we can progress lyrically, telling a story or revealing more information. We can grow from a whisper, crescendoing into a cacophony of intermingling parts, almost too much to process at once. We can go in the opposite direction, starting out big and petering out, a small spark dying in the dirt after a raging fire. But static is boring. Ask yourself how your song changes from one section to the next, from one moment to the next, and if it doesn’t, figure out how it could.
Stacking Theory - Sea Change
Missed a golden opportunity for your R2 song to start the same way your R1 song ended. (no I’m not taking off points for that)
Heart / art rhyme feels forced and a bit cliche.
Song is about change. I didn’t get it at first but as the song evolved and the entire vibe changed alongside the multiple key changes it hit me like a sack of bricks.
Great approach to the challenge, multiple downward modulations into a very different section
Everything is a treat to the ears. I thought the buzzy power-arc sounding synth was going to get really old but it’s so pushed back in the mix that it never tires on the ears.
Wonderful track, amazing job.
Mandrake - Chaotic Thought Process
The sound of the sine bass and the claves is so nice.
The vocals suffer from the same boxiness and bored-sounding delivery as last round, they’re good on timing and pitch for the most part but get a little pitchy in the second steve tm (verse) section. I think I can hear you enunciating a lot more and really making an effort to not sound bored. I think you have a challenge to overcome with what I think you mentioned was a headset microphone: some EQ work to boost the highs and cut the lows (or maybe try an exciter like La Petite Excite?) might go a long way in making your voice sound less like it’s trapped in a cardboard box. The harmonies are really nice.
In your song bio you write that you think maybe your voice is just dull and that’s how it is, but the reality is that your voice is kind of a fleshy trombone and if you’ve never put in the time practicing with it or you never really learned much about how to play it, you might have some unconscious habits with the thing. Check out the appropriately named Pink Trombone (https://dood.al/pinktrombone/) and play with the tongue control, notice how much it changes the tone of the synthesized voice. I wish Pink Trombone also had soft palate and larynx controls, those are also very important to vocal tone. Your mouth and throat posture has a lot to do with how your voice sounds and you actually have a fair amount of control over that if you learn and practice, so don’t give up on the sound of your voice just yet!
Kick is maybe a little too loud or too punchy.
Bitcrushed (or retro game white noise synth) snare is too loud but has some real tasty flavor.
happeNING in “with all this happening” is weird stress, so is REflection in “I gotta see my reflection”.
Track is feeling a little overcompressed, or maybe you just need a compressor with a low pass filter control so you can make the kick duck the track less. I suspect maybe this is an intentional choice for that EDM pumping compressor feel, though it can feel very disorienting if you’re trying to listen to the lyrics and it keeps dropping out because of the kick. In some songs (like Eric Prydz’ Call on Me) the lyrics are not a focal point of the song so the pumping applied to the vocals doesn’t matter because they are just there for vibe. I think this pumping effect could work well in this track if you had limited it to the synths or just kept the lead vocals intact.
I’m not sure if this was intentional, but if so, I think this is a really excellent example of how to do things that sound “bad” on purpose: In the second verse, the line “something wrong with me” has some off-color harmony happening on “something wrong”. But when it’s in that context of the phrase “something wrong” it could be that you’re trying to clue the listener in to the fact that it’s intentional and it makes the emotional punch of that phrase a lot more potent.
I’m not wild about the line “I feel like rocks and I’m so done”. Maybe you did feel like rocks, but it’s hard to relate to.
iveg - Kara Lost the Keys
The lyrics could use some show don’t tell. For instance, with the first stanza, we’re told straight out that Kara leaves her stuff in strange places, then we get a bunch of examples. Instead, why not just give us the examples? We get some nice imagery from it and can understand the point without being told directly.
Pitchy vocals. Also, maybe a guitar tuned a bit sharp? Something is a little out of tune.
Synth bass is overwhelmingly loud.
Vocals seem muffled and overly loud. It also sounds like you might be performing too close to the mic, which causes a buildup of low frequencies in what’s known as the “proximity effect”.
Concept is a lead singer who leaves her belongings all over the place.
None of the lines rhyme except in the chorus, which is a nice choice as it suits the disorganization of the singer but still gives us a catchy chorus to hang onto.
Glennny - No Fool At All
Concept seems like it may be about a person who has (or pretends to have? Kesey plot?) MPD, or possibly this is a metaphor for being shaped by a variety of social pressures, that also seems to be suggested.
The panned acoustic guitar has a lot of low end and it feels uncomfortable. Especially in rock and pop, anything that has a presence below 100Hz or so should probably be in mono or highpassed.
In general, there is a lot of mud that doesn’t need to be there, the bass guitar and kick get kind of lost in everything else booming.
It sounds like you’ve tried to shy away from the muddy vocal tone you had in your last track and this track’s vocals have some nice brightness and fizz. Unfortunately, there’s a little bit of harsh sibilance. It’s particularly noticeable on the line “as I’m losing all sophistication”. A little tamping down with a de-esser or multiband compressor might help. If you don’t have a de-esser you particularly like, or your preferred de-esser wasn’t doing the job on this one, you might try the free AirWindows DeBess.
I really like your choice to make the different sections sonically consistent and even rhyme with each other, but keep a refrain in the chorus so the listener has something to hold onto. The fact that you have several different variations lends strength to your concept through songwriting. Excellent.
Love this bit of lyric: “If I lose my mind / and wallow in a stupor / it might be sublime / to let go of my hubris”
Cavedwellers - Don't Take It Lightly
The sibilance is kind of harsh on this song. A de-esser or multiband compressor could help tame that a bit.
A song about death, and possibly hinting at murder? Not sure what the “planned” part is.
Fun guitar solo!
Low end feels like it’s missing a bit, I can’t hear the kick at all.
Phlub - In Memory
Everything sounds a little distant and boxy.
Snare feels a bit anemic.
The vocal tone you have on this feels reminiscent of Alice in Chains and I mean that in a good way.
I can’t tell if that’s a bass guitar or a distorted electric guitar playing power chords that’s severely low-passed but it doesn’t feel quite right.
Feels like low mids are lacking from this song. Would be really cool to have a distorted guitar that only comes in for choruses, like in Nirvana’s “Lithium”, and bring up the energy a little more in the choruses while filling the low-mid-hole.
Your song, telling the story of changes spanning a lifetime, is constantly modulating and going through phases until it returns to where it began. From dust we come and to dust we shall return. Cool.
Some pitchy vocals, some buzzy notes on what I’m fairly sure is a mandolin. The rough feel of the performance kind of works given the subject material, plus nothing ever gets too out of wack to the point of really distracting from the song.
“A fish without a fin” is a great bit of imagery.
A blip of static at 2:37. Not sure if you’ve got a bad cable or if this was a hiccup in some plugin you’re using while rendering, but worth checking your equipment to see if anything is on its way to the grave.
Siebass - Turn the Key
I like the vocal delivery.
Pitchy vocals in places. The slow pitch slide in the choruses seems not to happen at the same rate with all the background vocals and the result is pretty rough. When going for the same sort of light poppy style as The Postal Service there is a relatively high standard of production and performance to hit the style correctly. Listening to The Postal Service vs Death Cab for Cutie you can hear that they aggressively tune his voice for TPS, and keep a much more natural sound for Death Cab.
Vocals are overly loud, plucks and claps sound cheap.
The key transition is very rough. We just suddenly slam from one key to another. If I was a music theory guy (I sadly am not) I would make a recommendation here on how to do it more smoothly, but I know that it’s more complicated to do it smoothly when you haven’t chosen a closely related key, which from your song notes you chose not to do.
The “lock and key of my heart” metaphor is very cliche.
“This place a shed looks down upon” is a cool line.
The Pannacotta Army - No For An Answer
Reminiscent of “Blackbird” by the Beatles.
Really great clap sound.
Wonderful guitar and vocal tone.
The brushed snare is a nice choice to match the vibe.
The subtle musette in the background and periodic guitar harmonics are nice touches and they help to fill in a lot of the empty space of the minimal arrangement.
Performance is immaculate.
Nice use of the stereo field, there are various elements that enter and leave that are distinctly off to one side or another but they don’t make the mix feel lopsided.
This song definitely does a better job of reflecting on the faults of the protagonist than your R1 entry, even canonically the protagonist reflects on them as faults. However, we still don’t explore a lot. Verse 1 the protagonist tells us: “I keep trying to get back in a relationship with you and you don’t want one” and every subsequent section of the song more or less tells us the same in a different way, except the two lines of brief self-reflection hinting at something more we never learn anything about: “It’s self-delusion, I can’t deny / Like the faults I try to justify”.
Song ends abruptly.
Tunes By LJ - Modulate Me
It’s dripping with groove.
“A new sense of gravity” as you hit the transitional chord to Eb Major is cheeky. I like it. If little references like this and puns like “let the C reclaim me” were where you stopped I think it would have been more charming, but later on you go to spell it out really explicitly: “I'm swimming up a third / To the beautiful and sweet flat key of E” and you kind of lose me. It ends up sounding more like this is meant to be an edutainment type song a la Schoolhouse Rock (which I love, don’t get me wrong). I think you can spell out explicitly what’s happening in the song and do it well (Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah “it goes like this / the fourth, the fifth / the minor fall / the major lift”) but I don’t think it works for a whole song.
The modulation is well done, it feels seamless but we also get a definite shift in the tonal center.
The bass synth could maybe use a little reduction on the resonance but that’s a minor nitpick, the rest of the production and performance is spotless.
Sober - The First Will Be The Last
The transition at 1:17 is killer!
The structure of this song is great, there’s so much that changes over time to keep your interest that it’s entertaining from start to finish.
Great performance and production, I would probably have given the vocals a tiny bit more warmth but it’s such a small nitpick that it hasn’t factored into how I’ve scored you.
I really think this is one of your best songs I’ve heard to date. Phenomenal job.
GFS - Ready
Whether to leave mouth noise in or out of a vocal recording is a tough choice, but in a song like this meant to feel intimate and personal, I think it was the right choice to leave it in.
The little hard panned bass pulses are another good choice that wouldn’t fit in some other kind of song.
I feel like the story doesn’t go much of anywhere, we learn that your protagonist is tired of their situation and wants to rise above it and finds determination, and then for the rest of the song we hear it in different ways. What else could we hear about the protagonist and their life? Who are the vampires? What is the super power? What happens next? What happened before? We do get some progression through verse 1 and the chorus instrumentally as well, but after that it feels like we don’t go much of anywhere for the rest of the song.
The production is pretty strong overall but the voice feels overly present, it’s got plenty of brightness to it and cuts right through the mix, but the mix is so sparse that it feels like overkill.
The Dutch Widows - A Moderate Alligator
Very unique song concept.
Everything has a great tone to it.
Vocal delivery is a bit rushed at times.
The outro line feels odd: “A moderate alligator cannot be found; all the things I’ve said have put me in the ground.” The wording is odd and it’s basically “and then I died” which is a very abrupt and sudden way to put it. I took a look to see if there was any foreshadowing or any lead up to this and couldn’t find any.
Song feels overcompressed, there’s really no quiet and loud parts, just one constant loudness.
Ominous Ride - Drift Asunder
Interesting concept.
Muddy mix. Need to shave some low end noise off of everything, especially on the sides. Consider taking a mid/side EQ to the mix and high passing (or low shelf cutting) the side. If you don’t have an EQ you like that can do this, TDR Nova (they confusingly call mid and side processing “sum” and “diff” respectively) and Melda MEqualizer can both do mid/side processing.
Mix feels lopsided to the right channel, especially in the intro.
Vocals feel too distant. A little too much reverb (natural or artificial, not sure) makes them feel backgrounded when they should be up front. This could be intentional to reflect the Nyquil haze, but there’s ways to do this that don’t make it feel like the vocals are in the back of the room.
Mastering is a bit too quiet.
Something weird happening at 1:51, distorting the mix in an unpleasant way. I don’t know what it is exactly.
Some vocal timing issues such as around 2:15-2:18 where the vocals rush the beat.
Bass guitar off center. Bass and sub-bass should generally be panned to the center, though if you REALLY want the bass to sound panned you can split the bass using a tool like the 3-band splitter from the ReaJS stock effects in ReaPlugs, then pan only the mids and highs of the bass off center.
I get that this track is meant to be hazy and meandering to match the concept but I don’t think it works as written and just kind of feels aimless to me personally.
chewmeupspitmeout - you don't belong to me
Clipping on some parts, like around 1:19.
Some overly loud bits of arpeggiated synth which swells in volume in the intro, but doesn’t seem to have any reason to do so since it doesn’t change or introduce another section, it just gets quiet again before the next section.
Sliding pitch in lead and backup vocals that don’t slide quite together.
Reverb to take up empty space in minimalist arrangement. I think this might be to try to evoke a sense of wide physical space to match the theme but to my ears it just feels smeared.
Timing is odd and inconsistent between vocal tracks on “We gather light / From a dying star / Illuminates our scars”.
Some very cliche rhymes like star / scar, crime / time.
Hot Pink Halo - Shape Shifter
“Sh sh sh sh” in the chorus exposes some overcompression or overly aggressive de-essing.
Drums way too quiet.
Vocal treatment feels different in the choruses than the verses, sounds fine in the verses but in the chorus something feels different like you’re much farther back from the mic or in a different room or simply treated the choruses differently and the transition between the two is kind of jarring.
Vocal delivery and timing is great for the most part. One wrinkle is the “scream?” at 1:36 feels lacking in energy, it feels like you’re asking the listener for confirmation. Another is a bit of a late delivery at 2:25.
I like the guitar treatment. The different effects for different sections help to provide some good contrast.
The cadence of “sh sh sh sh shape shifter” is super catchy, I love it.
The Popped Hearts - Hey Jane
Retro video game SFX feel disconnected from the rest of the song, feels like everything else has a sense of space and they don’t. Consider having a few bus tracks with an effect on them like a reverb or a distortion or saturation effect at an extreme setting (100% wet or some such) and send different tracks to the bus at different volumes. This will provide sonic consistency to your song AND reduce your CPU usage too. Alternatively, or additionally, you can use some effects sparingly on the master track such as a glue compressor (Analog Obsession BusterSE is a good free one) or tape saturator (ChowDSP’s ChowTapeModel is free and best in class imo) to help make everything feel like part of a consistent whole.
The line “You were going pew pew pew / I was thinking 'bout you you you” leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I feel like this song is intentionally campy but it doesn’t work for me.
Pitchy vocals.
Hi hats at 0:52 are pretty buried, they could be bringing some big energy to the hey jane section but aren’t.
nightingale's fiddle - Chicago
Minimalism, harp and vocal.
Cell phone mic is what it is. Zero low end, little high end, transients get squashed, everything compressed. You can do some work to clean up cell phone mics but it takes time and you need to be comfortable with a DAW first.
Wide dynamic range which is nice, but sometimes it gets overly loud too fast, like the “didn’t take” in “didn’t take a second date”.
The song takes a big shift lyrically as you move to the “fucking asshole” section, but there’s something about the combination of the harp and the continued clean vocal delivery that doesn’t really match that energy and it doesn’t work for me.
The performance is stellar, no complaints there, you’ve got a good command of your voice and instrument.
We have a bit of a problem with “show don’t tell” being absent here, we’re told very directly and repeatedly that this person is an asshole but we’re not really given any context and it comes off feeling like being on an elevator with someone engaged in a shouting match over the phone. We have no context and it just feels awkward.
This song doesn’t give us a lot of information past the point where we learn that the subject of the song is an asshole, which happens before the halfway point in the song.
Jealous Brother - Time Has Its Orders
Not going to dock you points for this, but your song has a few seconds of silence at the start. Messy messy!
Mastered SOOOOOPER LOUD, you’re sitting at about -8 or -9 LUFS. This is 6dB over, or four times as loud as what Spotify normalizes songs to. I don’t know if you put your music up on any music stores (you should, it’s good enough!) but it’s hard to reach this kind of loudness without slamming into a limiter or maximizer and killing your dynamics, and this song is kind of the same super loud loudness from start to finish.
Overly bright mixing, possibly saturation from whatever maximizer or saturator or limiter you’ve pushed everything into.
Nice bass tone!
Love the vocal harmonies and the instrumental section is nice.
Drum pattern feels very repetitious.
Performance is good, no major problems that I noticed.
Brain Weasels - Intervention
Bass in the right ear makes the mix feel lopsided.
We get no information about the failed relationship, the whole song seems like it could be summed up in the sentence “we are broken up and I am sad about it”.
Drums could stand to be punchier, this is a very strongly rhythmic song but the rhythmic elements feel kind of overcompressed.
Jim Tyrrell - The Fall
Intro is shades of Piano Man.
The high end is very sharp, feels like you may have had the balance right and then boosted the high end during the mastering phase and made all the cymbals, tambo, sibilance and all that go from fizzy to painful. I had to listen to your track with a high shelf cut because it hurts my ears otherwise.
The lyrics come across as one long relationship complaint.
Bass has some overwhelming sub to it that needs to be attenuated.
The instrumental is bouncy and fun.
Pigfarmer Jr - Say Goodbye To The River
A powerful, personal choice of subject for your song.
Muffled drums esp snare, kick is buried.
Performance is good, no detectable pitch or timing issues, guitar isn’t buzzy, drums are on time, vocal tone is good.
Governing Dynamics - Where's The Fire
A bit washed out with reverb. Gotta be careful putting reverb on drums, it’s easy to lose or muddy the groove.
The lines “Never did quite figure you out, though / And I'm left wondering” are kinda mumbled and late. I understand that this is kind of part of your vocal style and is intentional but in this particular spot it’s taken to an extreme that feels sloppy.
Guitar tone feels lacking, a little too weak for the style.
Story doesn’t really come across to me.
Song overall feels overcompressed, it’s just as loud from one moment to the next for the whole song. Some individual tracks like the vocals could use some more aggressive compression or clip gain adjustment or volume automation, there’s some spots where the lyrics are hard to make out because the vocals get too quiet.
Low mids in the fuzzy panned guitars really wear on my ears. It could work as-is if they only entered at key moments like the chorus to add some energy, but the harsh buzzing in both ears quickly outstayed its welcome.
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