[experimental] agnosis (flac)

[IcarusDream]

A song I've made primarily using OpenMPT. Some additional fragments were made in Sunvox, and a vocaloid-like program called SynthV.

Lyrics:
Silence, Please Brace My
Calling, of Candid
Mourning, of All the
Musings, Sunken by the dust of time.
Root-wads, Whisper me
Tales of, Virtue and Glory
But is it of Nature,
Or the Grain of Solitude?

Oh, Yearnings of Our Hearts
Lamented by Silent Benedictions,
Can We Make Amends, to the Ethers of No End(?)
And So We Chant This Gospel.
Oh, Pledges of Our Souls,
Lucified by Dim Ambitions.
What We Sought, by Wonders Cant be Bargained With...

I've also put it on Newgrounds, though I assume that having it in a lossless quality would be preferable: MEGA!

[Saga Musix]

Welcome to the forums!

The composition is sound, but the mixing could definitely use some improvements. A lot of the instruments are panned dead-centre, so they are all fighting for the same space in the mix. Try to apply some more panning and / or use more stereo samples to move things to the sides.

The vocals are also mixed way too low, barely audible. Even after reading the lyrics here, I wouldn't be able to make out the words in the song. This actually goes hand in hand with my previous suggestion: If you move other instruments off the centre, the vocals will have more room.

I hope that helps

[IcarusDream]

Yeah, I'm fairly new to music production in general.
I've got into trackers only in 2024, and didn't have any prior musical education, so it shows .
Mixing is especially difficult for me, for whatever reason.
I've got a number of up-coming tracks, of different genres, more leaning into the orchestral side, and I'm still trying to figure how to mix them properly.

[Saga Musix]

Mixing is a skill completely separate from composing music, and it's definitely not an easy one. Perfecting your mixing techniques can take considerably longer than improving your composition skills, especially when you do both at the same time. Especially in commercial music it is very common that mixing is done by a completely different person than the one(s) composing or performing the music.
Apart from the hints I gave above, here's a few more things I can recommend:

• Listen to other people's music. Try to analyze how their mix works. What's in the foreground, what's in the background, what's in the center, what's left, what's right, what moves around, etc.
• Listen to your music on different speakers and headphones. Different devices stress different parts of the frequency spectrum in different ways, so sometimes you start hearing details that you previously didn't hear, or something that you think is crucial to the song may completely disappear.
• Related to the previous point: I often hear the recommendation to get a really cheap mono speaker and listen to the music on that - if it sounds okay there, it probably sounds okay everywhere else as well. Can't vouch for that tip as I haven't tried it myself though.