Please critique my progressive house/trance music : )

https://soundcloud.com/kthxpie/sets/running-on-redbull

When I say progressive house I am mostly referring to the late 2000s era, not the newer style

(Track #2 is my attempt at progressive trance, the rest are lower bpm)

All comments appreciated! Thank you!

@kthxpie29

Hey there !

Nice tracks but not sure if they both belong to the genre you’re referring to, I would define both tracks ( “Storm Calling” & “Dreaming The Life” ) as Electronic Chill-out because of the numerous melodic elements you’ve got in both tracks.

Now, on a listener experience point of view, I found a bit too much reverb on “Storm Calling” and your kick & drums could be more in the front as opposed to the “Storm” fx sounds & the synths being much more in your face.

For “Dreaming The Life”, I found the low end very much present comparing to other track’s elements.

Arrangement wise, they’re both nice tracks, but once again, I will put them in more easy listening genre than prog.house or trance, I didn’t get that “feel” you can get with those genres when listening to the tracks and once more, this is probably due to the melodic elements you put in the tracks.

Just my listening experience here, hope that could help.

Cheers !

Hey,

Thanks for taking the time to listen!

When it comes to the matter of subgenre I am a bit confused. I haven’t listened to much Electronic Chill-out, but when it comes to bpm usually that type of music doesn’t go higher than 120 (?). “Storm Calling” is 129 bpm and “Dreaming the Life” is 138 bpm which would theoretically be more in line with those tracks fitting the progressive house and trance subgenres. I know labels like Silk Music and Pineapple Digital produce more melodic progressive house as well, though I really am no expert when it comes to categorizing music.

Anyways, I really appreciate the feedback on both of my tracks. I will look into changing what you mentioned. Thank you!

Hey,

You’re right about BPM, I was not even thinking to that when making my first remark, and like you wrote, it’s so confusing now with all sub-genres that it’s hard to get in the exact box and I’m no expert either. :wink:

I found the melodic parts of your track most prominent and since there’s some electronic chill-out music outside the usual slow, more relax & easy listening down-tempo, it made me thought of this type of music. Anjunabeats is also producing lot’s of melodic house & trance tracks.

And again, just my humble listener feedback when it comes to talk about the mix themselves.
It’s hard to do, unless you find tracks with obvious mixing mistakes, because it always has to do between cold-surgical analysis that a mix-engineer would be able to do and emotional listening of a simple listener.

Next to that you always face problems like room acoustics and so on… that might make a track that sounds good to you sounding different for someone else. So track feedback is something to take easy I believe, even if it can be helpful. Final goal is to be happy with YOUR music and having the feeling that others could enjoy it too ! :sunny:

Cheers !