Search the Community

@Bacon Danger I love it! I'm using this as my intro and ending for my next video. I'll tell you why when I answer your question in B. A. Stands out from others: This sounds like video game music to me, maybe 8 bit style? How I would say it stands out is that you have a pretty nice beat, rhythm, and I love your theme. The theme reminds me a little of the Shark Tank theme, but that's ok. It still has a unique twist to it. B. What impression it gives off (emotion, what context does it sound like its in, etc) Now this is the core reason why I decided to use this as an intro and ending for my next video. Since I am talking about a "speed update" in Music Jotter (notation application program that I am developing), this is a great way to introduce the video. The music I choose to use in my videos revolve around "mood and feeling". So I have to choose very carefully. A fast paced eletronica piece is a perfect way to introduce and conclude my video for this reason. C. My structure/arrangement The intro is awesome, and I love how you slowly introduce more instruments into the mix. The body of the piece exhibits drama and intensity. The sawtooth towards the later part is too loud so you should lower that a little. The rest of your instruments seem pretty well balanced though. Structure seems like this: Intro -> Body -> Conclusion (ABA) as Vince says. Stay tuned for my next video!

@Carl Koh Wei Hao I love this piece! The recording is well done, glad you took some notes around my piano nuancing techniques. I can still make some slight tweaks for you, and implement Music Jotter's realistic playback to make this sound like an actual pianist, in probably an hour's worth of time since you've done most of the work already 🙂 Also, your ending is perfect. I love how you utilize the left hand to create an awesome secondary voice. Let me know if I record this piece for you to use in one of my YouTube videos. This would be perfect for my Music Jotter "speed update" video. If yes, I would need the midi file which you can PM to me.

I think the actual video is pretty neat. A very nice touch to include the pictures of the various orchestral sections to help aid the listener. This music itself had interesting transitions and styles. From the beginning to ending, I felt like there was a gradual transition in style from Modern to Late Romantic. And at times I felt like I was listening to John Williams. The transitions in this piece are very clever and well done.

Intense! I love the music and it goes well with the Western style. I know the requirement called for 90 seconds, but It's still WAY too short 🙂 Good music can't be this short, can it? My only feedback for you would be to balance your strings and horns a little better. The electric guitars were very overpowering, and the strings felt like distant background music. The brass is even more distant and as a result, they sounded a little lackluster to me. But that could be fixed by bringing them out a little. The other instruments though felt well balanced. Choir ahhs are perfect, wooden blocks, maybe slightly louder, but overall, very well done.

As far as the simplicity of the piece, you clearly demonstrate how even simple harmony and melody can be used to create very fun music with great character. My favorite part was at 0:35. There are hidden gems in simplicity that you can use and expand on in larger works. If there's anything that this piece proves is that there's so much more to music than harmony and melody. We have style, character, color, rhythm, the element of surprise (your ending) and much more going on. Let's see if anyone else here picks up on what you did with your ending lol.

For the strings they should be balanced a little better, slightly louder in my opinion. However this recording sounds really realistic. Did you play the instruments and layer them in or something? What techniques did you use? I love the tune though! Was this tune inspired by Greek folk music by any chance?

I really appreciate some of Sorabji's works, and this is definitely a much more tamed Sorabji. I think these types of piano works can really bring out an expression that typical "tonal works" have trouble with. As discussed in the Discord, I think that the actual 4 stave system may be really difficult to read as a performer, although there is a huge "cool factor" when you see the piano score broken up this way. And your sheet music is beautiful! I see you've pushed the limits of MuseScore, which is cool! You definitely have a theme / motif, that you are incorporating in these sketches, and it's hard for me to point this out on text. But if I decide to record parts of this piece, I will point them out on a video review. I think doing an "atonal" work like this might be kind of interesting for my channel. This way Music Jotter is not just "associated" with classical music. But overall, I think this atonal piece is actually a great introductory piece to listen to for those who want to venture into this style. You have the style down quite well in my opinion, and it is fairly well structured from what my ears are telling me at least. There are parts of the recording that need my "nuancing" touches though, because the louder sections are way too mechanical. But I think with my techniques, we can turn those sections into some pretty convincing recordings. PS: I thought I was the only one who knew of Sorabji. Glad to see he has another fan.

You wont be surprised after you hear the recording. I just finished the recording this morning, and the transformation is really good. I'm going to have to have a chat with one of these piano sample vendors when I am ready, and see if I can have it come bundled with Music Jotter. I can work on other sounds little by little, but I want to focus on piano first. What piano samples are you using in this mp3, because they aren't bad sounding? Although your samples are good, the transformation is still rock solid and noticeable. Stay tuned for my next video. Now I have to actually make the video + script. And as far as your comment about not being tech-savvy enough. This is my biggest point here. People will call me out and say "Oh, Kontakt does this already". Oh yeah? How do you get it to work without having any tech knowledge? How can I connect it to my notation software? How about getting the recording? What about the ultra realism that I am demonstrating, which goes far beyond good instrument samples? Well, you can't do any of this unless you know what tech to use and which techniques to implement. My goal is to make it an all inclusive experience. And if you are still confused, you know who to ask for help as I have a YouTube channel, and I make myself available for questions.

@Thatguy v2.0 I love this piece, and it's perfect to use in storytelling. I may even use this again if I decide to make another video that is similar to this style. If you are interested in business, come watch my podcast explaining why I am running Music Jotter with my own personal finances.

Take a listen to Richard Strauss – Divertimento after Couperin. There are parts of your piece that really remind me of this. I suspect this is an earlier work of Strauss, but nevertheless, there are some goodies here. You're quite wrong here. In music, its ok to have sudden mood changes, as long as the transition makes sense. You ease the listener into this transition, making this change quite pleasant. This change of atmosphere is critical in keeping the listener engaged, and you do just that. Ah, I see. I just feel like if you broke up your music into movements within YT, it will help the listeners see the different parts. Either way, chapters are also good for keywords! You can place your chapters below your description, which is what I do with my videos.

Wowee, this piece starts off and ends in modern connotations, but the base of your piece has a more classical, baroque feel to it. And the way you are integrating from modern -> baroque and back is not something I think I've ever heard before. These are the types of atmospheres in your piece that stood out to me: Modern - pentatonic (did you put in some modern Bach at around 1:47?) Somewhat Straussian at various parts (early Richard Strauss) Turning into melancholy -> baroque / fugue (your least favorite part? but this part is awesome, how could this be your least favorite part??) Your baroque section I feel nails it, but I love this type of music. The rhythmic variations that you have are well done, and you turn into an early Straussian at around 6 minutes in. At least to my ears in a subtle way. Pizzicato section is gorgeous, and actually reminds me a little of Tchaikovsky at around 8:30 in. Damn...how did you do that? And the fact that you are able to take these styles and smoothly transition back into the pentatonic scale is so crafty. At about 10 minutes in, it almost sounds like it could be video game music of an overworld, with the repetition you executed. The recording is also well done, great job @Thatguy v2.0! A piece like this deserves a good recording. PS: I might suggest in your YouTube video, to break your music into the chapters as you've broken up in your post here.

Really good stuff here! Your second half really killed it in my opinion. I'm imagining how this would sound in a live performance, and I think it would do very well on stage. The only thing that may worry me are the lack of pauses and continuous fast playing for a 3 minute piece. Chopin had a presto prelude that went on for about a minute nonstop. And his Scherzos are difficult, but they do still have pauses. However, a 3 minute piece with constant playing like this at one pace is quite a different story. I'm conflicted though because this sounds soooo good. You should watch my Beethoven videos actually. I feel like I am spamming you with my YouTube videos lately lol, but I actually talk about Beethoven and his craft around his rhythms which you may find interesting, especially if you are into Beethoven. Feel free to check them out at your own leisure: The Intricacies of Beethoven's Rhythms A Fur Elise Time Lapse Both videos talk about Beethoven and his usage of rhythms, and the reliance upon a metronome in order to play his music correctly.

I like the harmonies a lot, but I had to strain to hear them. The volume of the entire composition must be increased. But more importantly, the balancing of your bass is very off. You want to balance your left hand so that the bass is much more audible compared to your right hand. As far as the composition, having a fast piece that plays without any pauses can actually work, but since you have just one tempo throughout, it creates this very monotonous tone unfortunately. You do break it up at around 1:05 when you change up the style a bit, and I loved that part. But there are ways to record music to keep your original intent and not sound so monotonous. And this has to do with adding in your tempo changes and articulations. This helps create more of a player-like feel to the piece. If you want to learn more about this, check out my video about another Etude that also had a similar problem. And you can see some of the techniques I used (and listen to the before and after results). Nuancing an Etude (tips and tricks)

This is such a clean composition, and well structured. I'm getting impressionistic vibes here (Debussy, Ravel), and this is music I started getting into later in my composition endeavors. Your middle section does sound challenging, but I love it! The repetition is fun to listen to, and your staccato playing is really quite good. I hear 2 themes in this Nocturne, and the way you transition between the 2 different themes is actually very smooth. It's impressive how you were able to include two themes, write variations around these themes, and transition between them....in just 4 minutes! What the heck? Really good job here, you sound like you have racked up some experience around composition.

You should change your attitude because your playing is beautiful. Here's a little secret about me. Although I can play around on the piano and compose / notate my music, I am unable to improvise. You have yourself a gift. And some gifts just come in different forms. 😂 I made it this far. I'm really sorry that you had been attacked while you were younger. Whatever was going on back then, it only made you stronger though. And your talent is definitely something I envy (in a good way, not the dark jealous way!). I want to encourage you try your hand at notating a composition. MIDI is definitely tough because of the lack of authenticity, but I want to remind you again that tomorrow (May 27th) I will be talking about how MIDI can actually be tweaked to sound more authentic. BTW, I am featuring your music and playing as the conclusion of my next video, so I hope you are able to make the debut! If not, it will be posted for you to watch later on. Thanks for sharing your story, it was a pleasure to read.

What a completely different stylistic change compared to your Symphony 9! I have to say, ragtime music was how I got started with the piano, so this type of music has a special place in my heart. The beginning of your piece is really cryptic and dissonant. I love it! About 3 minutes in, this is when I started to get Scott Joplin vibes, more specifically with the Magnetic Rag. And the clear winner of this piece is your ending which I'm not even sure how to express my feelings around it. Perhaps I can describe your ending as an anticipatory ending. It's really a great way to come to a conclusion. For example, at 5:17, that could have been a conclusion right there. And then again at 5:22, that could have been the conclusion. But you string the listener along, and actually conclude it at 5:28, which is a really sneaky way of drawing the listener in, in my opinion at least. BTW, I'm going to see how my next video does around "transforming a midi file into a performance". Basically the idea is to take a midi file without performance data, and make it sound more like a performance. If this video resonates with my audience, I would actually love to use this piece as my next example. Especially because you have performance data. It would be a challenge for me, but I think I can make your piece sound more like a performance, despite Finale's human playback + NotePerformer. If you are up for it, let me know as I would need your midi file. Love the piece! And you'd potentially be the star in one of my future playback series videos!

Your very welcome! The video was fun to make, and it's already received around 50 views since I posted it! I'll try to figure out a better way to advertise my Young Composers videos. But most likely, I will add the tag #youngcomposers to every video when I use music from someone else on this site. The tag has to get indexed by Youtube though I think.

@epii, I featured your music in this short here. I think it works pretty well, and it gives the video a lot more character. I referenced your music in my short's description.

Thank you so much! Definitely follow me on Youtube if you enjoy the platform then. I could use the support since I am pretty new to the platform. And trust me I understand about not being a part of social media. I was like you until just 2 years ago. Since I am creating a new product, I am forced to embrace it lol. So it is no problem at all that you are not on any social media. I don't either honestly. I just enjoy it to the point where I am creating a product for other composers. But at least you've identified what works for you. As far as this piece is concerned, do not worry about changes, I will never ask for changes with "opt in" works. I have to think about how I'm going to manage this but since I am a developer, I can probably come up with some type of technical solution. Then when I use your music, I can just tag you to let you know that I used your music in my next short or video. You can most certainly put your email here, however I am going to modify your email so that you aren't targeted by spam. Thank you again Rick!

This is very good, and the beginning is fantastic with the guitar. I think you need more of this piece to show off the guitar, as the beginning really shines. I commend you on the instrumentation and your ability to portray a solid mood throughout. As I am starting to delve into the Youtube creator world (which is extremely scary!), I'm always looking for new tunes for my shorts. I could definitely see this as something I could potentially use in my shorts. I like to bring awareness to different styles by using "clips" of different types of music in different settings I talk about. And this piece portrays such a great mood. As long as I am able to loop the music (and this is a perfect piece that can be looped anywhere), it would make a great candidate. I might open up some type of program on Young Composers, where people who opt in, will allow me to utilize their music (and I will give appropriate shoutouts in my descriptions, always). Let me know if you'd like to be "opt in". I may manage the opt in, in our Discord.

You are right in that music is subjective, but I will remind you that meeting the requirements of a competition are critical if you want to do well. Receiving low scores doesn't mean your music is bad, and doesn't reflect who you are as a composer. It simply means that more people saw that this specific piece of music just did not fit the criteria. For example, something as incredible as Beethoven's 5th Symphony would have gotten low scores if you think about it, maybe except for melody and harmony, because it would have most certainly not fit the criteria for this competition! With that said, I personally enjoyed your work, but enjoying something doesn't mean a judge has to give high scores for this particular event. The whole idea of the competition was to convert 8 bit tunes into something bigger. Right off the bat, your piece was one track making it difficult to judge. So in terms of orchestration, the form of your piece ended up being too small (and of course this is my very subjective opinion as one of the judges). But then this is why we have 6 judges. I also had to look at what the other contestants did as well, and all of them had multi track works. I realize this wasn't a specific condition of the contest, however you were up against 8 other people. In a competition like this, the other works will either set the bar a lot higher, or a lot lower. But in this case, the bar was set quite high, because the quality of submissions were immaculate. I know it is disheartening sometimes to receive feedback that is on the negative side, but you can quietly use this feedback to your advantage. There are many of the great composers who had to endure such criticism in the past, and this was their profession and livelihood. So they were forced to listen to the feedback from their audience in order to improve. If you don't adapt to feedback, you end up losing. And this doesn't apply to just music. It applies to anything in life.

I absolutely love rag time music. It's how I started off my piano playing hobby, and even my early compositions. Scott Joplin was my musical hero at the time! So I had to chime in here and commend you for such fun music. When I start moving my foot to the beat, you know things are getting serious. Love love love the transition of your theme from major to minor, very beautiful touch there. If there was just one criticism I had to offer, it may have to do with the tempo of your piece. Generally ragtime music is played at a slower pace, and I do think this "funny rag" will have a chance to shine some more if the tempo was slowed down, even if just a bit. Give it a shot, see how it sounds.

My favorite out of the bunch is your second etude, but let me go through each one. Etude 1: Just wondering if this was very loosely inspired by Franz Liszt's sonata in b minor? Maybe not, but the piece will definitely help someone learn how to play Liszt given how that composer loved his parallel octaves! I think that the very loud dynamics of your piano samples does your piece more of an injustice. Even if you mean to play forte, I would tone it down a bit so that the piano samples don't sound jarring. Etude 2: This one was my favorite, and I will tell you why. Your dynamics here are excellent, and you don't overdo it with the forte. It sounds more like a piano composition here, and I love it. You did a really great job making it sound as realistic as can be with these samples, and the musical expressions you create are fantastic! Great job on this one. Etude 3: Again, the forte does a huge injustice with your composition. The arpeggios at the beginning of this piece are jarring and sound almost unreal to the ear. But you can fix that very easily by adding articulations, tempo changes etc to simulate something that will sound more realistic. The thing that kills me is that your non forte sections are so good, and I know it has to do with the samples. Overall, your middle etude here is the winner, because of the excellent expression and dynamics of the piece. I think if you were to rework some of your sections to use mf to p, and only use forte sparingly, it will greatly improve the output and presentation of your music.

When I listen to a symphony or a big orchestra, I expect to hear all of the different instruments clearly when they play their part. And if the composition commands all the instruments to be playing, it must do it in such a way that makes sense for the composition. Also, it must be done sparingly, otherwise you exhaust your players, your conductor and your audience. Your introduction and ending actually were the best parts, because I could hear the instruments very clearly. The harp had its moment, the piano had a solo part, and the cello chiming in was amazing. Then you got into the body of your piece, and I almost forgot the piano was a part of your movement. A concert piano is what, around $125K to $150K? And to have it not take command at any point seems to be a waste of a pianist, and an instrument. Most of the time the piano did not really have any breaks, but I couldn't tell that it had any part. If you took out the piano, it wouldn't be missed. This is in stark contrast to something like Rachmaninoff's piano concerto 1. If you took out the piano section, it would be very noticeable. Think about when you are painting a picture, and you use all the colors in that painting. If you use too many colors, they start to get muddled and you get black or brown. Your picture starts to lose its shape. The same can happen with music if you use too many instruments without a purpose. The ear becomes desensitized and doesn't know what it's listening to. This is why I say your intro and ending is where you nail it. You are controlling which instruments come in at specific points, the piano has a purpose, the harp has its purpose, and the beautiful cello line helps to accentuate your harmony. But I couldn't even tell you had violins and violas. And the cello got lost as the piece moved on. As for your instrumentation, this is really important because you are using solo instruments where you should be using ensemble instruments. If you were to update your instrumentation to ensembles, you will have a much softer sound which your audience will thank you for. You should only use solo strings / woodwinds for chamber works.

Musically speaking, this piece is very beautiful. You were able to portray some various emotions here, and the one emotion that stands out to me is solemn. I enjoyed this piece very much. One thing I would like to talk about is the score itself. While the work itself is beautiful, I feel that some slight adjustments to the score would make it far more readable. I had a hard time following the score, and I think it may have to do with your constant time signature changes. I feel like all of these changes were unnecessary in this piece, and you likely could have written most of the score in common time. You really want to avoid changing time signatures too often unless the music calls for rhythmic updates. Instead, you could just make some slight adjustments to fit the music into 4/4 (in this case) and the listener wouldn't even notice. Bottom line is, if you find yourself constantly having to update the time signature, it means that you are being way too literal with all of your beats. And I just feel being too literal like this overcomplicates the score unnecessarily. But this is just my opinion.