Play soundtrack
Lost City - submission for Impressions Ambience 2 Jam hosted by KaleOverlord January 2025's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall Uniqueness/Creativity | #7 | 3.952 | 3.952 |
| Composing Quality | #56 | 2.905 | 2.905 |
| Execution | #56 | 2.905 | 2.905 |
| Overall | #57 | 2.937 | 2.937 |
| Listenability | #59 | 2.857 | 2.857 |
| Correlation to Theme | #61 | 2.429 | 2.429 |
| Sense of Atmosphere | #61 | 2.571 | 2.571 |
Ranked from 21 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/lost-city-submission-for-impressions-ambient-2-hosted-by-kaleoverlord-for-itchio
Description
Ambient piece using the FA-08 and doing proper track alignment (as I'd been requested to start doing...)
Description of Setup (Optional but recommended)
Quantized performance on FA08, brought onto the DAW on the laptop, track alignment via multi-track export from the synth, then reassemblage into a single WAV again and globally stretched/compressed sections to get the final piece.
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Comments
Dude, you clearly have some creative demons within you, but I can't really classify this as an Ambient song, but look keep doing your thing, im a big fan of improve myself, but check some stuff on the essentials of ambient music I think you'll find something great to learn :)
Take care!
I would keep doing improv - I would play with a metronome more and play with more of a sense of rhythm.
Your compositions I think are constantly in a transitory state. And the thing is, you're actually composing music that is appropriate for a transition - but it's like that transition is all the time.
This is funny because most people have the opposite problem, their music is overly static going anywhere.. I would start experimenting with ostinatos, and repeated melodies, and bring down the complexity a bit.
Some clean hooks with consistent rhythms would give you a really solid contrast to bring some meat to your current style.
I'd recommend playing an arpeggio or ostinato and then just playing a melody over it, and get used to "staying in place" for a while musically, and then changing directions when it is appropriate. Think like you're telling a story.
Great work overall though! :)
This is accurate, concise, and candid, and I do thank you :)
This is exactly my issue, some of my better things that get more soundcloud plays are precisely the ones where i take a breather and idle a little.
see :"Reflections" (Release CI (101)): where someone in south africa asked to play it in a bunch of locations and it got mini viral like 300 plays for a moment so that now it totals 6-something
Notwithstanding that compression or density is kind of my brand and we wouldn't want to entirely dismantle that...
But this describes the correct path.
Heh, we're all born with different personalities and different things that we gravitate towards.
Likewise, for you, I think I would overcompensate for a while in the other direction. One thing I noticed is that after I built my lyre, I got better at improvising all kinds of music, because I was composing in a narrower range.
I think music is like a sort of fractal - what happens at the higher levels is also reflected in the lower levels. I.e. the relationship between pitch is a very fast version of the relationship between rhythm. Melody contains a structure, and reflects its superstructure in a way too.
So, what I'm saying is I think that if you zoom in, when you zoom out again, the view will be clearer, and then your natural tendency to wander and explore with the music will take you more deeper places than you've ever imagined. :)
sort of a no-no to reference another jam when the voting period is not yet ended but moments-before-disaster seems to have been an appropriate concurrent stab at structure (the acoustic draft i did especially where only the piano is present)
This is so good! I love the "lost" feel you set, really unique!
You definitely have a style!! I'm super curious about the way you write and perform your music, and how much improvisation there is. This is softer than your other works for sure, and still a bit busier than the ambient music I'm used to.
I feel like I'm in the Castle of the Ice Princess listening to her lament about how her younger brother was kidnapped by the Gore Hack the Mad, the Wicked Necromancer from the Northern wastelands. It has a regal cold feel to it.
Ton of harmonic variety, unexpected shifts, yet it's fun and pleasant to listen to. Very nice work!!
its a lot of manual noodling on the Roland FA-08 which has the inbuilt sequencer so i can set my ideas down
I'm kind of notation-illiterate beyond what I know from choir in my youth (semi-true, i could write these note by note but it would take months...)
so I noodle by ear from memory better than i can sight read by quite a margin
and i go....several seconds at a time with my one year of piano lessons, usually trying to do a daring phrase, then hit save
sometimes i slow the tempo dial down to 60 then bring it back
the FA-08 has all the cut and paste functions a DAW has in its own sequencer area, out to something like a 600-measure song
a person could get lost in the menus in it for ten years and not exhaust it, you can save studio sets of the 16 tracks' instrument tones for each song
and mix and match, and edit the tones....
and then after that if i chose i can take things in mixcraft and modify with my 25-key AKAI that i got long after the fact after i had already been on soundcloud 15 months. Most things have been lock-step faithful to the MIDI file the FA-08 generates. I haven't really done much after-effect things
but with that MIDI file i can layer software-synth instrument tones in Mixcraft from anything Humble Bundle throws me on the cheap
(that hasn't scratched the surface really except one composition : Theory Versus Application (One Week Later Remix)
https://soundcloud.com/doug-stoothoff/theory-versus-application-one-week-later-r...
I always love the experimentation you do! I think the panning voice tracks are a nice touch.