itch.io

Totally the same same sort of up-down-up figure used for the motif in the main theme in Frostpunk 1 😲

Funnily enough have never played the Frostpunk games before, since I never really been into city builder games and more of a CIV and Total War enjoyer, but might be the time to give it a shot 😄

The more chamber sound of the Frostpunk music was really nice, maybe should've used that for the string sound myself as well, could've maybe help make the big bangs for the colossus feel more fitting with the distant sound of the "not chamber" feeling brass representing the big colossus boy in the distance.

Glad you liked it!

Just been starting to customize Reaper during this jam too, since I'm coming from Cubase a lot of things feel a bit janky out of the box 😄

I made a thread in the jam discord under the #production-resources text channel, I posted these there and will be posting other workflow stuff I'm coming across and finding useful if you're interested. If you come across any other good  scripts/tweaks etc. that are not mentioned in there, please share there 🙏 hopefully will build up to a good resource for people to read through.

Last rating of the jam for me, and what a good one to end on.

Really cool soundscape, every sound has its place and nothing feels overdone for the lack of a better word, elements change/go away before just before they might get repetitive, and get replaced with a contrasting one, which i found was really tastefully done.

I don't know what you used for the mechanical sound that sounded almost like a floppy drive in the background at 0:50 and 1:25 onward, but really liked how it felt with everything else.

Good work!

The track kinda just stops without an actual ending to it, but lack of time is lack of time.

The vibe itself is nice, fits scene 1 with the feel of moving through a mysterious factory it gave me.

Good work!

Production is crisp with a lot of ear candy as usual, makes me jealous every time 😄

The panning and falling bass stuff 1:37 was really cool, haven't really played the mick gordon doom game's that much but from what I remember of the soundtrack you got the atmosphere down nicely.

I'm not a guitarist, but for me the guitar work sounded great so no need to be too hard on yourself, if you want to hear bad guitar playing I can pick up a guitar and then you can hear what actually bad playing sounds like 😉

Can't really comment on the mixing since that's beyond my pay grade and everything sounded good to me. Do have to say I loved the punchiness of the drums, I always have trouble getting them to sound fat and punchy without over compressing them and losing all the dynamics

Good work!

Like FoxHyode mentioned, feels just a bit too bassy, I only had the feel at the starting parts of the song, but might be my ears just got used to the loudness later in the song.

The vibe is nice and having listened to quite a bit of the RoR soundtrack lately (for probably obvious reasons 😉), this fits that vibe well. Also had the feel that if this had singing on it, something like the falsetto ish style that Darren Korb uses would fit this like a glove.

The 8dio sax sounded  surpisingly good! have to say that before hearing it and just reading that its from 8dio I was half expecting it to sound a bit worse  since I've had a some mixed experiences with some of their stuff.

Good stuff!

Whatever effects those little L R panned things at 1:144 had was really cool, wonky sound but in a good way.

The spacious feel of this fit the theme's cavernous description nicely, and all the different effects on the sounds worked great.

I think I've mentioned it before on another one of your submissions, but your style really gives me a lot of the same vibes as Kirill Pokrovsky's  work on the Divinity series, which I haven't really got from a lot of other peoples music, since he had a really unique aesthetic to his production and writing style, I tried doing a pastiche of his work for the OST Composing Jam: RMX jam but couldn't really nail the feel, but you manage to have that same sort of special sauce in these.

In short, I*m jealous, so only giving 1 stars across the board /s

Good work!
 

Bit of a trance ish vibe at times, really nice!

Personally I would've maybe like some more sustained stuff padding in the background at parts to fill out the sound more, but that might just be personal taste 😄

Good stuff!

Giving me a lot of ff13 feels, apart from the little person behind the mask figures

Really good stuff, maybe the sfx overpowered the music a bit at times, but other than that can't really say more

Good work!

You say "something kind of orchestral (if you can call it that)" but that was some stellar stuff, the whole ambience had that really nice introspective melancholy to it like the music in Hollow Knight and Ori games have, totally different take to the storm colossus part than I did, but works well.

Only gripe I had while listening was that at softer parts the mechanical sfx overpowered the music a bit, but the sfx do work in the whole context, just was a bit sad since the musical material was great.

Good work Boss!
 

Thanks, glad you liked it! 

🙏

🙏 Glad you liked it! 

Yeah, porting the project to Reaper took a while, since Reaper does not support the DAWProject format and the converter to turn the dawproject file from Cubase to a reaperproject did not really work that well, so just imported the midi and set up all the tracks/insruments manually 😂. The sound is probably not 1 to 1 to my initial Cubase version since I had to swap out the Cubase stock plugins for reaper ones.  

I've found some helpful tools and guides that have helped get the Reaper midi editing feel a bit better, but Cubase is still the king with how smooth the workflow is natively in it. 

The first tool that I found and has helped me, is the multi tool script from Julian Sader. This script adds most of the same midi value manipulation that Cubase has out of the box + it also works in the arrangement view, so you can use it there for automation

https://forums.cockos.com/showthread.php?p=2211574

The other good resource has been Seventh Sam's blog guides on setting up the MIDI Editor, I found from there how to make a button for toggling multi track editing on/off in the MIDI Editor, which has also saved me a lot of head ache, also found out about the Multi Tool script for those. Seems like he has some new guides on a script to set up CC lane preset buttons to the bottom of the MIDI editor which I think I'll have to try to set up.

https://seventhsam.com/blogs/tutorials/posts/6791049/how-to-set-up-reaper-s-midi...

Binding the action to change the grid sizes is also handy, I did that in cubase too (1/4, 1/6), but there is a user made script tool to dynamically change the grid size based on zoom level thats great too.

https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=260388

Probably the one thing that helped me the most on this one, specifically in regards to working with orchestral/sample sounds, was the new Articulation System by Jesper Ankarfeldt, since before the jam I had set up expression maps with negative track delays per articulation for all my sounds in Cubase, as that was finally  a function in the newer updates, and this reaper script also makes it possible to have per articulation delay values as well,

I still had to remake all my Cubase expression maps again in this Reaper script, but luckily this one has a easy to use GUI editor compared to the older Reaticulate script where you had to edit a config file and assign the keyswitch note values with their actual midi numbers 😩 (so not C#3, but 86 or whatever the corresponding number for it is...). 

https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=306590

One script that's not really just for MIDI but I like a lot is nvk_SEARCH, which adds a handy search window that you can use to pretty much quickly search anything in your project, be it actions, track, trackpresets etc. They  make some other sound design focused scripts too that are iirc heavily used and recommended by game audio people, but I haven't done much sound design so cant say much about those.

https://store.nvk.tools/l/nvk_SEARCH

This is not MIDI related too, but a handy script to get the track disabling/enabling functionality that Cubase has that I use on my orchestral template to turn off tracks not in use

https://forums.cockos.com/showthread.php?p=2203958

And pairing that with custom scripts that hide and show those disabled tracks, helps keep the project not looking too cluttered. I have bound the hide and show scripts to shift + Q and shift + W respectively myself.

https://forum.cockos.com/showpost.php?p=2651508&postcount=4

The theme I'm using is the Reapertips theme

https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?p=2701211

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Those have helped me a bit to make the editing feel smoother, but I've only used Cubase for years before Reaper so it's probably going to just take time to get as comfortable with Reaper as I had gotten in Cubase over the years. The only real annoyance I still have with Reaper is that the whole program gets really laggy graphically in bigger size projects, like in my project file for this jam the GUI feels really low frame rate when scrolling around in the MIDI Editor and Arrangement view.

If I could somehow get the lag fixed I'd be pretty happy with my Reaper setup, but from what I've read on the forums there is no solution to fixing the laggyness unfortunately...

But anyway, that's all the scripts/tweaks I've found to help, still not as fluid feeling workflow as I had in Cubase, but probably just need to keep using Reaper more to get comfortable with it (hopefully🤞).

I also used one of Giovanni Battista Piranesi's etchings for the last OST Crunchtime jam, so regognized the style as soon as I saw it 😄.

Really liked the line moving between the different instruments in the first part, added a lot to the sort of sinister vibe I was getting from it.

Good stuff!

The atmosphere on the first track was great, really liked it.

On the second one, the accordion ish sound was a bit harsh to my ears and maybe could've been switched for another sound at points or maybe some EQ to cut out harshness out a bit, similarly the sine wavey sound that comes at 03:26 could use some EQ to cut a bit of the more resonant frequencies that overpower the mix a bit (can't really say what frequencies from just listening though, don't have that good ears 😂 )

Good work!

Cool stereo usage! The repeated note at the and was maybe as bit jarring to me as the the track just ends after it, instead of the repeated note being a lead up to a new part.

But still, good stuff, really great vibe!

Cool stuff like always! the whole intro buildup with the hits was great, probably my favourite thing was the distorted synth plucks, really cool sound.

Enjoyed my listen, can't really say more 😄, good work from both of you!

Downloading worked for me!

There is about 50 seconds of silence at the end of the audio file, which I guess is not on purpose.

The first part felt to me that the piano was bit alone and could've maybe used something more to fill the soundscape (or a fat reverb to make the piano fill more space), but the second part after that was really great, and I mean really great, absolutely loved the vibe it had and wish it had been longer. The slight vibrato on the voice/whistleish sound combined with the piano just gave a really nice "mysterious" feeling to me which I felt fit the traversal through the mysterious factory well.

The parts themselves feel a bit disconnected from each other, but I guess you intended them to be 2 different short tracks.

Good work!

The volume shift is a bit too much 😅

Glad you liked it 🙏

Yea, going to try to do more electronic and soun-designy stuff in this years jam's to hopefully get better with making and using textures in stuff, since I'm pretty bad at that and haven't done much of sound design stuff 😄

Glad you liked it!

Yep, when the motivation to continue working on a track hits the nice round 0 mark, a lot gets left unfinished 😅

Didn't remember to post in the jam discord, but I installed and tried your game. Worked well on my phone, although I quickly remembered how bad I was at flappy bird when I tried to play it in the past 😂 the addition of the gliding feature which iirc flappy bird didn't have was a good addition imo

Glad you liked it!

When I first heard the metallic snare sound, I really disliked it, but in the end it ended up being my favourite sound in the track 😄

The vibes and all the different sounds were great and this had a nice feel of a progression/story throughout it,

Good work!

Glad you managed to your submission done!

Feeling some Halo inspiration in this, the vibe is great, especially the more ambient parts are really nice.

On the Storm Colossus part, the very chaotic tension feeling is nice, but to me it felt that it lacked a good low end, maybe it could've maybe been a good place to add some low percussion to amp up the tension and help add gravitas to the colossus.

I agree with muttzilla on the reverb, although I guess its mostly the string sections that feel a bit disconnected from the rest since they're a lot more focused and bright sounding compared to the solo violin and pads, which are more ambient and distant sounding (at least felt like that to me)

Playing around with removing some high end with an EQ maybe could've helped with getting them to blend better spatially, since even if you add more reverb, the brightness of the sound still makes them feel a lot closer compared to everything else (not a production pro though, so take this with a grain of salt 😉)

Good job! 
 

The ambience and vibe is nice, but personally I would've loved to have some more melodic/moving lines since apart from the arpeggios in the first bit, this is mostly just held tones that get a bit boring after a while.

Still, good work!

Didnt notice those when I was doing the final tweaks... I freezed the woodwind tracks to save on RAM, but reaper propably messed something up during the rendering the freezed stems.

Completely agree with you on the blandness of the first half, lost the plot a bit after the first few days of the jam and only managed to add the tutti hits to it later on 😅

Glad you liked it, hope to see you in the next ones!

I last minute tweaked the volumes of the parallel compression busses I have for all the instruments and since those are using the dry/no added reverb signals, it kinda made the dry sound a bit too prominent. It's a fun/usefull trick to add presence and punch to orchestral samples in the DAW though, tried it after seeing it in a few mockup/template videos on YouTube and has felt a great technique (in moderation/tastefully used though 😉.

Working with orchestral sounds in the DAW, especially getting the sounds i use to feel lush and not in your face took me the whole of last year to finally get a bit comfortable with, since the hollywood orchestra package has a really dry-ish in your face tone. I'm probably going to start keeping a spreadsheet with the different send values to my reverb's, so I can have some reference for what values felt good for a distant, medium, close, etc sound 😄

I've done sidechained reverb only for vocals before, but usually I  try to just use reverbs with built in ducking instead, like the one in Cubase's vocal chain plugin or in Reaper, the free Tukan Studios Lexicon clone reverb jsfx plugin that also has a ducking option   😅

Glad you liked it!
 

If I correctly understood your issue about recording in real time/no latency with all the effects, you could try enabling the automatic disabling of effects that add latency when a track is record enabled, of course the singing performance is not going to be the same as recording with all the effects on (the setting is under Preferences/Audio in Reaper).

The combination of the synths? and voices really is a nice full texture, it's powerful sounding, but compositionally, it gave me a nice sort of an ethereal and otherworldly feeling, the same kind of feelings i get from the music of Lothlorien from the Lord of The Rings movies, so I think you nailed the feeling of grandeur 😄. 

The track kinda cuts out before the reverb tails have time fully decay, but you were probably in a hurry to get this submitted, just wanted to find something to nitpick about so this comment is not too positive 😉 

Good work!

Sounds really nice, very crisp production too!

Bit shame its just a minute long, the way it builds up and then stops kinda left me wanting to hear "the rest of it"

Good stuff! 

When I listened the your earlier version in the discord's devlog channel, the low end felt a bit muddy, but I was listening on my crappy earbuds then so I was going to re-listen again on proper speakers before mentioning it, but totally forgot.. 😅

The way you have the bass sounds playing  2 different lines that low, ends up muddying the low end, so the 2 lines kinda just blend into this mushy texture.

If you took the 2 lines and left the bass one where it is, but raised the other one up an octave, that would help make it feel a lot less muddy.

I'm guessing the old doom games used the same Roland SoundCanvas patch that Nobuo Uematsu used for the ps1 FF games, since that Doom Square Wave soundfont sounds exactly like Uematsu's FF square wave lead sound 😄

If you're ever going to work more on this, adding a new more contrasting section, maybe without the piano for a bit? where the parts/lines change a bit more could be a cool addition.

Good work!

Good vibe, for me it fit the post apocalyptic setting you were aiming for well!

Felt to me that you could've had a softer bit somewhere in the middle, where you maybe dropped out the sequence for a while, since for me the bright bell sound of it got a bit grating  after a while, even if the sequence itself changed.

This one is probably just my personal taste,  but I felt that the pluck/guitarish melody sounds could've maybe used a bit more reverb or just be a bit more distant sounding to not feel so close compared to the accompaniment and just help amplify the feel of the cavernous factory (still, just personal taste though 😉)

Nitpicking aside, good stuff!

🙏 Glad you liked it!

Can't even imagine how less proficient/productive I'd be with composing and writing music if I hadn't found about itch composing jams 😂 (started with OST Composing Jam #2 iirc) 

Always been fun to hear the progress of people who keep turning up jam after jam, some people get dramatically better every jam, and others just make great stuff from the get go and somehow manage to get even better 😄

As usual, just sat back, relaxed and enjoyed the ride.

Great material and stellar production, what more is there to say? 😉 

Good work from both of you!

It be a jam, really nice vibes!

This could've probably fit well in the Lazarus show (the new one from the Cowboy Bebob director)

Can't really say more than that I enjoyed my listen 😁, good job!

Already said it before in the discord, but really like the vocals 😄

Really great performances, a solid mix and just overall sound world, I think the only thing that stuck out to me a bit, was the distorted guitar at 02:05 onwards was a bit heavy and when the vocals came back in, it ended up fighting for attention with the vocals a bit for me.

Vocal production is also a a lot better than what I usually manage to do, so I'd say you did a really good job!

You probably know of it, but in case you didn't, the Audio Alignment Panel in Cubase (under the audio menu) is great for getting vocal doubles tight (if you don't mind loosing a bit of the human element, that is 😉) and has worked great for me.

Stellar work!

First off, have to say that really liked the tracks!

This might be just me, but the tracks didn't really give a feeling of a space setting, but felt more like what one might hear in a fantasy/adventure story set down here on planet earth, maybe like a movie similar to Mulan or the Monster Hunter: Rise video game in tone 😁

But nevertheless, the melodies, arrangement and orchestration was great throughout!At parts the tone of the brass and choir and kinda felt a bit too harsh, but from what I remember from using MuseSounds before the sample set is not so flexible to get everything feeling butter smooth 😄

From what I've used with notation software, only Noteperformer seems to  really be able to have a smooth dynamic range without suddenly getting harsh when going between the mezzo and forte dynamic, since its modeled, but sadly MuseScore still doesn't have support for it.. 

Stellar stuff!

This truly is the one submission that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism 😉

Personally would've liked a bit more synth stuff to go alongside the orchestra in the background, maybe some synth bellish tones or some higher stuff to add some sci-fi sparkle to give more space feeling to it, but the track is great as it is musically speaking though 😁

Could feel this type of stuff fitting a Warhammer 40k game, or something of the sort, good work!

Cosmic Greenery fit the space theme nicely, but  Spacewalk with a side of existential dread felt more like the usual Fantasy Forest music with the instrumentation, with probably the hammered dulcimer hammering in the fantasy feeling a bit too much for me to feel it as space music (subjective thing I'm sure 😄)  

Just as pieces of music, these were both wonderful, with a great feel and production on both.

Good work! 

Really cool soundscape with all the textures, good stuff!