March of the Clowns Here's a LOT of advice for you...hope it helps.
Hmm. So this is your first song ever? Then expect a long, painful, technical review...mehehehehe. >=D
Well, for one, it starts out a bit too quietly, with only a few drums. Your drum patterns are fairly simple - you do change things up a bit, but you're missing a few crucial things. Firstly, it sounds very off-key. In most Techno songs, you need a kick drum of some kind taking the first beat of each measure. The two hihats you open the song with are waaaay too plain and sound offbeat whenever you use them. I'll elaborate on that when I go into song structure. The snare drums are weak, and any other drums I haven't mentioned either were unnecessary or too quiet for me to hear them. Overall, they're simple, and unprofessional-sounding... you need, (A) better samples, and (B) better rhythms and organization.
Okay, so I'll move on to your melody. It's decent in the beginning, though it gets worse as it goes on and takes waaaaaay too long to loop. Neverending or long melodies often, in my opinion, make a song worse. You need something consistent and catchy to come back to. A melody is what the listener hums, right? ;)
You have no harmonies in this song, which is a huge dissapointment. You need a bass to hold things up in the back with lower notes... actually, your melody would make a good bass if you just lowered it an octave or two. Then you'd just have to think of a melody, which I described above as consistent, catchy, and something the listener would hum to. Mind you, there's more to harmonies than that - you could have used a pad, maybe, and a few other synths playing harmonies would work nicely - remember the melody's always louder, but never overpowering!
There's no attitude in this song, no atmosphere - but I can't expect that from a first song. You do come fairly close to having one at times, though, which is good for a first try.
Your sound choice could definitely use some work. I explained most of it above, but I'll summarize myself about it here as well: Your drums aren't well chosen, you're missing a kick drum, you need to replace a few drums, i.e. the snare drum, your synth that plays the melody isn't very well-chosen and gets annoying, and then you didn't even have any harmonies to begin with.
One tidbit of advice is that I don't think you listen to enough techno - try listening to some of the better artists on the portal and famous professional techno artists often and you'll figure out the structure of the songs after a while.
There - if you read all of this, I certainly hope this truckload of advice helps you out. Unfortunately, this song's going to recieve a low score even by first-song standards, but I'm going to be kind enough not to do anything about the current score it has. Still, that doesn't mean you should stop - it's not like the best techno artists woke up one day and started cranking out their hits, right? Practice and you'll get there someday. =) I hope all of this advice helped.
