Swizletek's Reviews

[Would you nuke a baby?]

Yes, I would nuke a baby

In fact, I just did.
problem?

Locomotivator responds:

If this were real life, you would have wasted a fine nuclear bomb. And thats no good.

[Dave's Guide to Yeast]

y'know,

I had to memorize all the equations of fermentation from glucose into ethanol and CO2 for chemistry class, but i recon your video sums up the process better than my teachers ever did.

the only problem with the film is the yeast are a bit too disturbing. Accurate, but disturbing. Good job.

[A Duck Walks Into a Bar]

If that was really one of your first,

I'm impressed.
The animation and sound quality are both pretty good, and definately better than the majority of peoples when they start out.

Being critical, there was a bit too much repetition in just empty walking frames, which dragged it out a bit. Instead of editing it down though, itd also work to make it a bit less boring by adding background music~ in this case, soft jazz would probably suit the bar scene and add a bit more interest and ambience.

the only other main problem was the lack of a repeat button, but well done if this really was one of your first works with flash

[Scale of the Universe 2]

Love it
It's interesting, informative and fun to navigate through
Being EXTREMELY nit-picky though, violet light should be 4 x 10^-7 not 4 x 10^8
That's my only criticism (but still not enough to rate less than 5/5)

[You're a Tool!]

*facepalm*

I'm cringing at the amount of schmucks complaining about this being in the games catagory, but then again, nobody really bothers paying any attention to the author comments, do they.

Twas great fun seeing this get put together, and I hope to get involved with whatever other stuff you decide to slap together :3

p.s. for anyone sulking about how the penises offended them, take note that the damn thing's allready in the mature section. tools.

[Grave Robber [BCG]]

Exactly like minesweeper, only worse.

If you were going to remake minesweeper, and its a cool idea,
atleast make it AS GOOD as the original minesweeper.

the numbers were too dark to read without squinting or looking very closely, so it was damn hard to even tell the difference between 1s and 0s.

since you're competing with minesweeper as well, itd be a good idea to put in different levels of difficulty / medals or SOMETHING even remotely unique.

also, in the original minesweeper you CANT DIE in your first turn. its a matter of common sense

[Discovery (Slow/Calm)]

It's a good start, but I think you need to experiment with tweaking a few things.

First off, it just sounds a bit too busy. The whole duel melody thing has its place, but for a loop that gets played over and over it just sounds a bit cluttered. Maybe try having a melody on one instrument for a few bars, and then have that being answered by a counter melody on the other.

The other thing is the instrumentation itself. Music boxes are quite a shrill instrument, maybe have one instrument and say a cello as the second backing instrument? This would also help the first problem, which is why I say experiment with a few different things.

Finally, the tempo could probably be halved to give it a more ambient feel. To me, it sounds a bit rushed. Again though, I think just keep experimenting until you find something that really clicks

[Irish Coffee]

Very nice to listen to, but I have a few points of (hopefully constructive) criticism

First things first, in my opinion lose the rain backing completely. It's nice and it has a cool effect, but having it there just completely limits how the piece can be used. Plus, you want people to like the piece for what it is without necessarily having to make it seem more ambient. Besides, most people here know about rainymood to be able to add the sound in themselves if they'd like.

So onto the piece itself. Brilliant chord structure, nice instrumentation, nice atmosphere and layering. I think the two areas where it was let down a bit however was the form and the melody.

I always feel a bit harsh saying this, but when a piece gets submitted as a jazz or pop song I always try to judge the piece relative to a proper song, as opposed to merely as background music, which I think is what you've mainly achieved.

Most songs fit a general format of "Intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus"
This piece has a form more like "Intro, chorus, chorus, chorus, chorus, chorus," with each successive chorus being slightly more thickly layered.

What this means, is for the listener the piece gets a bit repetitive. What you've done at 1:42 is the right sort of idea; it creates interest and makes the listener want to keep listening. I think though that you could probably bring this out a bit more and extend it - change the time signature or key or whatever completely if you have to.

The other thing is the melody. The melody is what you can essentially sing along to (regardless of whether it's a vocal part or not). Really, if you tried singing along to this, you couldn't, because well, there isn't a melody. It's completely up to you whether you want to go and actually include a singable melody line, but for this to become a proper song and more than just background music, it's somewhat crucial.

It's not really easy going back and completely changing up so much of the song, but if you can write this in an hour, surely you're capable of extending this into a proper, catchy song. I would like to see this worked on some more though, theres a lot of potential but it's just not QUITE there yet from a musical standpoint.

LimeDisciple responds:

This is why I love newgrounds. You criticizing bastards are usually dead on.
Your right about the rain from an anonymous viewer perspective, but I don't write my songs for them, I write them for me. I want to hear rain, so I put rain. I will make a second version without it though.
I put it in jazz because the genre selection on here sucks, and the misc section for audio is filled with bullshit and 99% of pieces there get overlooked. I obviously didn't want this to get overlooked, yet it's not electronic so I didn't put it in ambient. If there was an acoustic genre, that's where this would go. So please don't judge this as a jazz piece.
Of course it is repetitive, it is background music after all. And for the chords I was using there was not much room to progress. Not an excuse by far, just didn't want to kill the song by overdoing anything. Simple is good.
The good majority of songs have vocal melodies. Again I write for me and this song shouldn't have vocals, or any lead for that matter. Eno's rule is it should be as listenable as it is ignorable.
But I'm glad you like the song, I'll take the other pieces of your review into count and make a second, livelier version whilst still retaining the mellow atmosphere.
Thanks a lot for your time and a good, honest fair review. This site needs more cats like you.

[The One]

Ok so there were some good moments in there, but I think for the most you need to sit down and think about what you really want to accomplish before you start writing. To me though, it sounded like you really just went about the piece by trying random notes and hoping something nice would come up, and unfortunately this approach doesn't usually work too well.

So where to go from here...

For starters, the strings sound off. I'm not sure what sound file you're using, but for this type of music try keeping things pure and undistorted; especially if you're writing for a girl. In my experiences, remixing sounds and finding a good balance and all that should probably come near the end of actually writing the piece.

Ok so onto the actual content. At the moment theres only really one line, which kind of staggers from note to note. I recon start off by having one instrument play one note at a time, ending the next where the next starts. At the moment there are some absolutely awful clashes where the notes just don't go together, so avoid this by just one note being played at a time. Once you have a pretty basic idea, it's on to the next step.

What I'd recommend doing next, is taking the idea you've made, and then enriching it by turning it into a harmony line by having more than one instrument playing it at once. It helps to know some musical theory here to know how to structure the chords and the harmony.

Once you've done all this, then finally add a melody over the top, which is usually done in a higher octave.

I hate to dismantle what you've done, but in my opinion this piece still needs quite a bit of work. I'll be more than happy to help out where I can if you'd like, but good luck with your future composing.

Pissomatik responds:

The overlapping was on purpose. As for everything else, maybe you're right. Sakura plugin for FL Studio. Violin 4 preset. I've done essentially what you said there in the past with many of my shitty pieces of shit and they tend to sound too programmed and robotic. I'm attempting to add a bit more of a human quality to it.

[Self Portrait]

Awesome

I love the tiny details in the collar, which are even more intricate when zoomed in.
You had better grow a moustache like that in the near future

[Wind Swirl]

Be wary of filters

What it largely seems like you've done, not just with this piece but with several of your pieces, is whipped something together fairly quickly, then decided you didnt quite like it, so you ran a photoshop filter over it.

You want to be showing off your skills as an artist, not what photoshop can manipulate. My advice would be to just keep working using only the pen tool, and to practice making art without ANY photoshop effects or filters.

once you get comfortable with that, try applying different textures SPARINGLY, usually to only small parts of a picture at a time. Tutorials are your friend~ they'll help show you how to correctly and effectively use a lot of the different filters

Choco-block responds:

Thank you for the review anyway

[Strawberry God]

Love it, but

my OCD is acting up 'cause the right (devil) wing is slightly higher up than the left angel wing. (hence the 9)

I really love the colour in the clouds though. Amazing work