Artcore Workshop.

[Phaliyah Dragneel]

First round of advice for those who posted. Please note that I'm comparing your entries to what musically feels right and not to other people.

Crimson
<I'll get this to you before 2 AM.>


XStep
I will base critique off of [url=]this version[/url] since you already fixed some things that I pointed out to you earlier which makes my job much easier.

The main point of this review is to touch base with distinguishing the rush piano. The rush piano is a finicky balance to play with, you have to make it both dominant and background noise at the same time.

For your entry, the rush piano lies deeply as background noise and that it's hard to pick up if people want to try to "closely listen" to your song. The foundation chords overshadow the rush piano and although foundations should be fairly dominant to guide the song, you still need to let the detail of the rush piano be audible as its own individual thing.

There are two things I can suggest to fix this problem. One of them is changing the rush piano pathways to Electric Piano since EP has a stronger bite than GP to help it get some attention. It also makes it easier for you to edit both layers, since you can just lock/unlock the EP and GP respectively to focus on one layer in case you don't like something.

Two, allow some rush piano notes to go higher than the foundation chords. Higher notes always end up being more dominant, but of course use this sparingly since you need a balance of the two layers.

There are a few measures that appear really messy due to this lack of distinguishment, if you can attempt to sort the rush notes out, it might be easier to elaborate on what can be fixed in those measures. 

I'll comment on the less dense part of the song once I figure out what to say for it.

My initial rating on the song so far is 7/10. The organization of the song is rather decent and when ignoring the rush piano you are able to emphasize the rhythm of the music with the wide chords. The sequence of course needs some cleaning up, but there is nothing so far I can say to add on. Do note that it's your first draft of the song so I can't compare it to anything yet to give you an accurate score.

Phaliyah Dragneel
<I'll get this to you before 2 AM.>

When is "before 2 AM?"