Hey everyone!

It pains me to have to close the challenge with only one submission (excluding mine). It has been quite a tease, since people were keen, but you can't always predict your schedule.

Please, if you've finished, or plan on finishing your songs, post download links below and I'll add them to the Drive as soon as I receive them.

Without further delay here is the Drive link with the songs:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Inmts ... 9pd8KBB7vT

Review them as they come!

Until the next one (hopefully there'll be more) /,,/

REVIEWS

Cederik - A Dark Song
Getting great Swedish vibes from it. The chorus vocals really do well for me, don't know what it is, must be that I haven't listened to Hypocrisy in a while and am becoming nostalgic. My only complaint is that it's only 2 and a half minutes long - I want to hear more! Either way - love it, fucking great job mate.

Vesheljinn - The Conjuring
This turned out much worse than I'd hoped, it's been a while since I recorded a full song. Wanted to get a dark, eerie feel from the mix with the sound loosely following the film, it ended up sounding like shit. Gonna fiddle around with the mix some more soon and post the updated version in the future.

I guess your song was more black metal leaning, and that type of black metal really isn't my cup of tea.
But I hear it's very well played!
The mix is however... Well... BASSY. You gotta be careful with all those lows, I thought my monitors was broken or something, haha!
Check out some bass mixing tutorials on Youtube. That has helped me a bunch!

The split track technique is pretty good once you get hang of it, I do that all the time now.

I'll give them a listen sometime later this week. yea this is pretty much why I stopped trying to host any of these. cause it's to the point where everyone has too tight a scheduel now. even after I last spoke way too much came up. Sorry that's how it sorta goes.

I filmed the rhythm guitar track for my song today in lack of other things to do!

Great job Rocka! You need to write and record more songs to go with this one.

Damn, just now coming up for air. In the time of this contest I released a Udemy course, doing tons of mixes for bands, built a website, all the while holding a full-time job.
I will listen to these and give some feedback as soon as I can.

<a href="https://drive.google.com/open?id=1GBhuRlMyv9JJdCCYerm_XBHf2tNafk7J">This song</a> was created as part of a prompt: it's based around the movie <em>The Guest</em>, directed by Adam Wingard and starring Dan Stevens.

The first half of the movie (before it descends into Jason Bourne cliches about supersoldiers and government agencies) is genuinely frightening. A man shows up on the doorstep of a family that has lost a son in the Afghanistan war. He claims to be a soldier, and a friend of their son.

He's affable enough, but there's something not right about the stranger. He's intrusive, and oddly persistent. Nothing about his backstory adds up. Brutal violence lurks in his smile - he's a human guillotine, with the guard-rail filed down to a hair. What, exactly, does he want?

The movie draws from westerns, particularly the darker, subversive breed pioneered by Clint Eastwood. In it, the Man with No Name rides into town...and he's somehow even more terrifying than the bandits. He's ostensibly a good person, but where did he come from? Why did he have to leave? What are his motives? And God help us...what if he's not actually good?

I tried to reflect this in the horizontal motion of the piece. We begin in jarring 7/4 time, and the G mixolydian melodies attempt cloying sweetness and instability. The family at the start has lost a son, and although they've found a rhythm it's not a good or satisfying one. Nothing like the life they had before.

Then the broken half-rhythm is invaded by knife-attacks of backmasked guitars and neotonal piano flurries. Then the ambiguity about the song (and the soldier) vanishes, ripped away like a mask, and you wonder why you ever thought there was ambiguity to begin with.

I'm not super happy with this, but it's the best thing I've managed yet from a production and mastering perspective. Working around technical limitations sucks. (I ended up with hats chained to the snare bus somehow, limiting percussion possibilities.) My brain still thinks in 4/4 even when I'm writing 7/4 and 6/4, and some of the piece suffers for that.

At one minute and fifty-one seconds, this is a short-staying Guest.