Hey everyone,

I've just finished version 1 of my portfolio site. If you'd like to take a look you can find it up at www.jonnymartyr.com. The site navigation is a little hinky as I'm trying to make it work for both my day job and my music stuff but it's a rough idea.

You can also listen to some samples of my music:
Tribute to Handagote
A Perfect Pause
The Spy!

Any feedback is greatly appreciated!

Cheers all

Tribute to Handagote - a nice tune! I like how you evolve the material slowly like an opening flower or sunrise. While repetitive, it has enough substance and development over time to keep me engaged instead of bored. That's hard to do, so I congratulate you on that. Some very interesting sounds and the mix sounds good on my system. I could definitely see this working in a puzzle or platformer game. The ending did feel a bit weak to me. I get what you're going for but I felt it went on just a bit too long.

Overall nice job!

The Spy! - Perhaps it was intentional, but the song's rhythms feel messy. I found myself concentrating more on that than enjoying the groove and the melodic content. The use of guitar was very appropriate, good job! The middle section with the strings feels misplaced to me. Too happy sounding - so I'd be interested to hear what your motivation and intentions were with that section. The various horn calls and panning is nice but overall the mix is more muddy to my ears than with Tribute. Also the horn samples are really fake sounding. If you're going to use horns in a predominant way then you really should make them as realistic as possible. I also felt the ending could have been prepared better. The final chord works but, like with the strings section, it feels just plopped in instead of intentional. There's not much swell and tension coming up to the ending.

Of the two songs I checked out, Tribute is the stronger, more developed song. At least to my ears. I think The Spy! has a good deal of potential but it hasn't reached it's limit yet.

Cheers Nathan!

Great to get some feedback on my stuff. You're right about "The Spy" - that's the result of trying to master a new piece of software and create a piece from scratch all in one week! I'm currently working on smoothing the edges and getting the rhythms in place - I was umm-ing and ahh-ing about it a little because I sort of liked the janky, slightly-off rhythm as a bit of a reaction against the overly quantized MIDI stuff you tend to hear. I've got some better sample libraries since recording that piece so I'm working on updating the brass and strings at the moment.

As for the middle section, someone else also said that it felt a bit jarring, so you're on the money there I reckon. I was trying to create a contrast between the two halves of the spy's life - sneaky, shadowy guitar line vs. sweeping strings for the glamorous, casino-and-cocktail-lounge lifestyle. I imagine it as sunset aboard a yacht out in the Mediterranean filled with European lingerie models. Although maybe I'm getting a bit too into it...

Thanks again for your ear-time!

Any time man. Always happy to check out other people's work!