Play soundtrack
The Death Knight - Impressions Comp Jam 1 hosted by KaleOverlord's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall Uniqeuness | #18 | 3.484 | 3.615 |
| Execution | #31 | 2.817 | 2.923 |
| Composing Quality | #32 | 2.891 | 3.000 |
| Correlation to Theme | #32 | 2.668 | 2.769 |
| Listenability | #34 | 2.372 | 2.462 |
| Overall | #34 | 2.846 | 2.954 |
Ranked from 13 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Link to Streaming Service
https://soundcloud.com/doug-stoothoff/sets/the-death-knight-submission
Description
Performed Manually on a Roland FA-08 then exported to the laptop and finished off with Mixcraft 10.5 Pro Studio
Screenshot of DAW
The screenshot is present in the listing of the files in the project page. I made sure of that, never fear
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Comments
Felt some Rick Wakeman influence on these 😄
Adding to your discussion with Kale i feel a lot of the "too improvised" feeling comes from the fact that a lot of the sections on the tracks just go into a new section without any elements of the new section being teased beforehand, making it feel a bit abrupt and lending to that improvisatory/noodley feeling to a listener.
I feel if you focused a bit on smoothly transitioning between parts, your tracks would be even better, since the sections are fantastic on their own.
As a whole i love these, absolutely got some big prog rock vibes like i was listening to stuff from Rick Wakeman/Keith Emerson.
I like the old school nostalgic vibe here. I also like that you played your instrument, delivering natural dynamics. I strongly encourage people to do that because its so much better than trying to key in all the dynamics in a midi scoring system, which is slow and tedious.
Constructive feedback:
While I encourage people to improvise a lot - to my ear, this sounds like pure improvisation, and maybe like it isn't tied together in a way that is maybe as cohesive as it could be overall. I say this because I do a lot of this sort of wandering improvising as a form of practice and discovering ideas, so I'm sensitive to that pattern. Not sure if that's what you did here, but it's kind of what it sounds like to me.
That said, as it goes, it is good improvisation/playing, with good articulation, dynamics, and keeping a sense of place and story.
Great work, thank you for joining!
When I get enough time I can pass through and make sure motifs are emplaced.
We saw that with Life of Rixlor in July as my itch Debut :)
Our ragged band of competitors had a lot of deadlines in parallel this week and the last, at one point we had six(?) jams at once.
So I am sure this fell victim to that :)
In the round the itch community's OST folk are more the ones to be using the little Akai 25-key setups and similar dummy MIDI keyboards in tandem with -software- synths. I'm a bit of an outlier to be strutting around with an 88-key Roland with the sequencer built-in.
And so we have a gradual dance going on here as I (now that I have an Akai) learn to join the caravan and conform a little re: quantization of rhythm, etc. When i am squeezed for time, this will exhibit less, but as i can get a space in edgewise I aim to try to get more with the program :)
I nearly pulled it off with the Axl Low theme for Guilty Gear. my percussives were off but if you listen to that piece on my page there are good long sections where I achieve lock-step quantization.
In the coming months, i should be more on the rails :)
Anyway most gratified that you were able to put in your 2 cents.
> Our ragged band of competitors had a lot of deadlines in parallel this week and the last, at one point we had six(?) jams at once.
Heh, no worries. I'm keeping the cadence monthly so that people can see their improvement month to month, as well as having each jam focus on specific skills.
I'll try to give more notice for the bigger jams, and also check on which of the other jams are running and schedule around them a bit more.
I appreciate your feedback for this - my goal as a host is to provide an excellent jam experience that brings out everyone's best and drives improvement in their respective work.
(2nd reply) as an eclectic late bloomer who has play by ear ability and can just noodle and ego aside, probably can build at least a B-list sounding tune in just an hour, i have to tread carefully and not poke a stick at the music theorists who have to build upward the hard way, folks with a music degree etc. I'm just winging in between working a 9-5 job as an old fart :)
Against students who spent all day building their thing note by note, I tend to score in the bottom quartile in the jams so far, yet individually score high on the creativity metric by itself. And that's fine as long as over on Re-Ex/soundcloud the woolly band over there gives me 8.5+ out of 10
Really enjoyed listening to the Intro composition and felt like it was taking me on a journey the whole way through. Maybe it's just me but I had a tough time listening to the second track just due to how heavy the attack on that plucky harpsichord synth was. Definitely on theme in a kind of medieval vampire-y way.
A fellow mixcraft user!!! I love how complex these tracks are musically, and I think you could use these for an JRPG-styled game easily. You have great creativity when it comes to introducing different ideas in a song!
Gratified you liked. Peeps in my age range got a lot of SNES JRPG into our system during the 1997-2005 early emulation days.
my soundcloud where I had been putting stuff out prior to Itch these days is:
https://soundcloud.com/doug-stoothoff/tracks
Cheers,
--D
It captures that nostalgic feel of classic Sierra games. Sounds good!