December 16, 201015 yr A piece off of my newest project called Soundtrack for a Nervous Breakdown. Its an album full of mini one to two minute long songs with a dark and eerie theme. This one is pretty minimal and straight forward. I'm particularly happy with the corny little piano melody towards the end. Closed Eyes
December 17, 201015 yr This is interesting -- the starting riff in the electronic-sounding instrument sounded kind of anxious to me in a way, and then the sharp sound of the cymbal hits at about :50 seemed to add to that effect. Was that the feeling you were going for here? :hmmm: The honky-tonk piano sounds very nostalgic to me, but the soft voices sound haunting and longing -- I suppose you named it "Closed Eyes" because you wanted to make something atmospheric that conveys the thought of someone closing their eyes and thinking of when times were better? Was someone lost? .... Maybe you find that thought "corny"? I'm probably over-thinking all of this :lol: But I like this -- it's simple, and it works for me. Thanks for sharing :D
December 17, 201015 yr Are you putting this version on a real album? It sounds very MIDI-ish, all the way through the song. I don't believe people would actually want to buy those kind of recordings. The song itself was OK I suppose, although I didn't get this anxious feeling Sergeofarnivillage was talking about. I think if you were to change all the samples for a real recording (or for high quality samples), this might actually be pretty nice indeed. The music itself doesn't really change or develop over the course of the song, so you should try to get more out of the sound. Adding the instruments one by one as you did helps, but it does not help that they don't form one solid 'soundscape' (they don't add up to something more than just their individual parts) and that is only due to the samples I believe. You want this kind of droning motive going on and on, so the instruments (esp. piano) can cut through something. For that, you need better samples. I hope you get what I meant . Take care.
December 17, 201015 yr This didn't bring out an eerie mood to me as much as it did a pensive and contemplative one. The harmonies used were pretty straightforward and never seemed to try to break out of the conventional, which is what I think can make something dark and eerie, though maybe that's just my own flawed opinion haha. The entire thing seemed pretty repetitive as well, though I get the effect you were going for by that kind of instrumentation, it just seemed to fade into background ambient music after a while with no real climax or anything to me. Then again, an album of eerie music is a pretty cool idea, just thought the eerieness could have been put across a little more disconcertingly :P
December 19, 201015 yr Author Thank you all for your reviews! Yeah, dark and eerie isn't the best descriptor for this one... I suppose I shouldn't have put that in the description then! I'll explain my thinking on that a little better. The overall theme of the album is dark but not every piece on the album really presents that atmosphere in the same way that not every song on a horror film or game soundtrack presents a feeling of terror. I feel that anxious and contemplative were probably the two best words I've seen here to describe the feel of this one. I feel SergeofArniVillage hit it pretty close. It makes me think of someone that is in a dark and unhappy place closing their eyes and trying to imagine something better, perhaps dreaming up an impossible escape from their dilemma, or just trying to hide from their unhappiness. This isn't a commercial album. Its just a project I did for fun and to gain experience. All of the pieces are short and simple like this. It was sort of an experiment. It allowed me to focus more on creating new ideas and deal less with things like expanding on existing song ideas. Its sort of like an artist's notebook full of rough sketches. It was kind of an exercise to help build up my song writing skills I guess. In the end I had a lot of fun writing like this. I would love to be able to record a real piano for this, but I write music from my home as a hobby. I can't afford a lot of professional recording equipment. I don't even own a piano that's suitable for recording. I could have done more with the samples though. Those samples are just part of the default pack that came with Reason. Thanks again everyone for taking the time to leave reviews!
