Greetings all,

I've been writing music for pretty much as long as I can remember in some way or another. I've had a lot of experience playing instruments as well before and throughout school and focused on performance and theory in college. I'm trying to get into creating music (and hopefully sound design as I practice that more) for video games. I think that my compositions have some fairly unique qualities to them which could make games more memorable although so far all I've written for are my own projects and ideas.

I'd really appreciate any thoughts anyone has about this portfolio I've put together! (the reason it's titled Sound Design is because I intend to add another player beside that soon with examples of SFX I've made and I think even composition technically makes sense to fall under the umbrella of sound design)

Thanks,

Alex

Hey,

there is a lot of hiss in the background in some tracks and it's very heavily limited/compressed from what I can tell, louder isn't always better even if Metallica think so! The music sounds good, I think it's worth spending some time on cleaning up your sounds to get a more professional finish imo.

If you're recording through outboard gear I recommend using a plugin like Floorfish, it's a noise gate which cuts out unnecessary noise. You can also use tools like Edison (FL Studio plugin) to remove noise.

The rest is down to mixing. Snoltairav sounds good, it sounds like most of the sounds don't clash with each other as they are playing at separate times and occupying different parts of the frequency spectrum, a good technique to avoid too much post production. Just cut any frequencies which clash with other instruments. Seamlessr does a great tutorial on this although he is pretty brutal with it being an electro producer:

hope that helps, no idea if it's any good for the game devs though, I just produce music! :)

I was recommended to make my portfolio into a video with short clips of my songs. I thought this was a really good idea since most people who look at your portfolio won't be wanting to spend a ton of time listening to all of your music, so you want to make it as easy and convenient as possible for them.

Thanks for the suggestions.

alienconcept, I have been taking your comment into consideration while creating more recent pieces. Mixing seems like something I do definitely need to practice more.

Chaotrope, that seems like a good idea, I think I'll try that and maybe accompany it with visual examples of the atmosphere that each piece is attempting to depict/support.

Your music is spectacular. Very unique, abstract, and atmospheric. My only worry is that this music may only appeal to certain genres of games. If that is your main style then stick to it, but if you have other styles you can do then show them off as well.

Edit: P.S. the regeniversity logo is in the top left corner for me on the "About" page. Your "About" page lists in in the top right corner in the final sentence. :P

Edit2: Another suggestion possibly is to categorize your music. Maybe have some music meant for safe zones/towns. Other music meant for standard battles. And other music meant for boss battles. You could put a label on the titles indicating what area of gameplay you think they best fall into. This is just an idea to ponder as I don't know how it works as far as music portfolio layout goes.

Thanks Patliteon, I'm really glad you like it! I agree that a lot of the stuff I write seems to be within a certain genre. I have tried to write some music with a different vibe to it but I think that I need more practice when it comes to trying to make a something sound like a particular genre. I guess usually when I write music I just sort of experiment and go with the flow and the sort of abstract atmospheric stuff is usually the result.
I fixed my about page to say the left corner now haha thanks.
And.. That's a good idea. I sort of have been trying to give some indication of the kind of scene or environment that I think each piece would fit with through the names but I could see it being useful to give a less vague description as well.

I actually have been working on making my own game for a while and when I originally posted this I wasn't sure if I was going to continue on it because I needed to put more time into making money (lol centralized economics fail) so I thought I could try to get into writing music for that purpose. But I am continuing with my game and pursuing other ways to make money now so the music on my portfolio page is mostly/all stuff that will be used in my game. I think that for that purpose the style will be quite fitting.. Now I just need to find someone else who wants to help me with programming because that is not really my forte :P (much better with art and sound, I think)