[*]I know how to "make it louder" and blow the grills off your speakers, but I deliberately avoided that. I thought the style of music called for a softer beat.
[*]There is a sine bass in there, playing both bass and sub-bass, which may be a problem since the overall bass has no texture. Perhaps it should be stronger. Perhaps I need to find a way to tighten the door panels in my car because they rattle when this song plays as it is, which may have tricked me into thinking there was more bass than there really was.
[*]I noticed that at the volume I normally use to listen to "professional" tracks, the vocals in this have a little too much in the higher frequencies, even though I cut them quite a bit. It can be a bit piercing on the ears at higher volumes.
So here's the thing. I naturally assume people make music that they like themselves. Why go through all the trouble to make music you don't like yourself? This remix competition had 25-30 entries. I listened to all of them and I only liked two of the entries. The rest were painful to listen to. The ones I liked also didn't get into the top ten. Some of the top-ten entries seemed to use three repetitive notes, the same four chords, and... I don't know... some just sounded jumbled, even though they were rhythmic in a strange way.
I know musical taste is highly subjective. Another competition held by Oryx Music gave first-place to a remix I absolutely hated. All I could do was stare at my computer monitor with my mouth hanging open at how awful it was. Subjectivity rears its head again. And I'm 47 years old. Maybe I'm getting too old to understand some of this stuff. lol I love remixed music, though I'm kind of picky about it. For example, I *hate* ducking; it makes my head hurt. But I do like to listen to BPM and Electro on SiriusXM (channels 51 and 52, as well as 53).
At least one person out of 19 plays on YouTube "liked" my remix. I'm grateful for that.
One other note: There have been times when I've spent days working on other projects when I think, "Wow, this sounds great. I'm pleased with myself." Then I wake up the next day and play it all again with a fresh mind and I think, "Hmmm. This actually kind of sucks." But then I keep playing it and I start liking it again. I wonder if your brain just gets into the spirit and/or mood of the music and it somehow deceives itself into thinking the music is really good, like it's the only song in the universe, it's all there is to listen to, and it becomes deceptively beautiful.
Oryx Music doesn't seem to offer feedback on what they didn't like about an entry. I do know that this probably just doesn't fit with their EDM brand. I tried to make the song sound majestic in the chorus. I don't know what else to say. I actually still love it, even if it lost. Even though I don't use any fancy sound design "tricks" such as filter sweeps, I still worked very hard on making the actual music, that being notes and the sweeping broken chords in the last chorus.
So I guess the question is: Is this bad music? Does it suck? Is it even possible to be objective when judging music? Or does it just boil down to whether a person personally likes or dislikes your music? I'm asking this to get better at making music and remixes without emulating others.
Sorry for being so long-winded.
Here goes:
Sometime soon, I'll be changing my link to this since I changed "...stream" to "...zchtryx":