MadTracker - MT2 Compo

Color scheme

House Apology Part 2

By nXpected

Download

Rate and comment this entry

Yannick

Originality:	5	Technical:	6
Theme:	6	Quality:	6
Arrangement:	5	Global:	6

Sunbuster

Originality:	2	Technical:	4
Theme:	2	Quality:	5
Arrangement:	3	Global:	3

wow, made in two hours you say, you must have been on a roll then :) The structure is what you can expect as a result though, pretty basic and usual.

Perhaps a bit too much reverb has been used in this track overall. The track get's a bit muddy now. It works well with the vocals, but the clap for instance could have done better with less I think.

It sounds a bit empty however. I think this kind of a track especially could use lots of fx running around the place. Now it's basically drums and a bassline most of the time, then a somewhat muddy lead comes in (instr.8). I like the vocal sample though, think it works great with this track. It has that suitable tonality and a simple enough message.

The drums again could first of be a bit more imaginative (variating), second, use some panning. Other than the clap, not much seems to be panned in the drums. The fact that the clap is the only one clearly panned makes the drums sound a bit right shifted.

Overall, a good start, but perhaps a bit more than two hours should have gone into the making of this one.

mindplay

Originality:	5	Technical:	4
Theme:	5	Quality:	4
Arrangement:	4	Global:	4

The low-end of the kick drum and the bass periodically cancel each other out, which is somewhat annoying.

Novus

Originality:	1	Technical:	7
Theme:	3	Quality:	7
Arrangement:	1	Global:	2

With "House Apology: Part 2," Nxpected clearly shows he has the ability to craft a basic, danceable percussion line with accompanying bass. It's the rest of the song that needs serious work.

The song starts out decently, if stereotypically. The bassline gets introduced first with some backing sound effects, and then one element at a time the percussion is introduced until it's completely in place. This all takes about 90 seconds, but it's a bit tedious and hardly original.

Nx then introduces us to a short little vocal speech that sounds like some drunken old guy trying to explain a musical instrument or a sound system or something. It's hard to make out what he's saying, but it lends a certain surreal quality to the track and kinda works. At least it kinda works the first time. Unfortunately, as the song progresses it quickly becomes clear that Nxpected is following the time-honored trance tradition of using an ad-naseum vocal clip to completely replace any semblance of a melody, and the clip quickly moves from "surreal" to "annoying."

To make matters worse, at about the 2-minute mark a set of subdued house-style synth chords are tossed into the mix. This could've worked, except that absolutely no effort whatsoever is made to ensure that the chords match the key of the bassline. The results are highly discordant, and this discordance lasts for much of the remainder of the song. Some trackers seem to scorn the very thought of applying a little music theory to their songs, but there are simply some notes that should not be played together because to 99% of the human ears out there they clash horribly. It's not a matter of taste or opinion; it's actually a matter of math and science. Playing C and C# together is not original or groundbreaking; it's painful. Literally. Don't do it.

Fortunately, the playing time is only 4:25, so at least he skips the 7-minute trance cliche. But at this point, you can probably tell that now I'm reaching for good things to say about the song, and about all I can still point out is that the sample selection, production values, and mixing are all rather clean, nearly professional. So, Nxpected at least has that going for him.

But what it all comes down to is cookie-cutter beats, scads of trance cliches, discordance, repetition, and very little musical depth of any kind. In the end, "House Apology: Part 2" sounds more like a song that needs to be apologized for.