Dave Kropf: 0:01

What is happening everybody? This is Dave Kropf, and welcome back to another episode of Ready for Sink, where we feature a queue written by a member of the 52 queues community and we ask is my queue ready for Sink placement? And today we are checking out a queue called Weekend Warrior, which is a synth wave queue written by Jacob Forslund. So we are going to take a listen to this and then we will talk about it on the other side Music playing, music playing, music playing, music playing. That was Weekend Warrior from Jacob Forslund. Jacob, thank you so much for sending this along. He sent this during our week 47 weekly feedback thread. We put weekly feedback threads together every single week and I choose one of these to talk about here on the YouTube channel and on the podcast.

Dave Kropf: 2:58

But I enjoyed this. I like this a lot. I love me some synth wave and I think you absolutely nailed the vibe of this. We've got kind of this. Take on me drums and the drums are really, really good, and so all of the pieces are there. I think the bass line or the bass patch, I don't know. I don't know if it needs a little bit more movement, and I don't necessarily mean rhythmic movement, I don't know if it needs to, kind of just needs to kind of pump in and out maybe some light side chaining or something Music playing.

Dave Kropf: 3:43

One of the things to keep in mind anytime and this is for anybody looking to write synth wave music and one of the things that makes it sound super authentic is remembering when these were originally written. They weren't done in a DAW, they weren't done where somebody could just like set up a loop and go. These were often performed in real time on synthesizers, and so the performer was always moving a parameter, always affecting a filter or a modulation, and so it's very unlikely that it would just get kind of set and set and forget, forgotten, set and forgotten. There would have been some kind of tinkering, some kind of synthing going on as the sound progressed, and I feel like the bass part boom, boom, boom it's just kind of sitting there. I think we're doing great as far as our mix so far.

Dave Kropf: 4:41

Of course, here we've got a little bit of a knockout. That's because I pulled it from SoundCloud, which is an MP3. Once we get into here, however, we're starting to get in some pretty spiky highs, and this is from the high pitched little bell kind of thing, and it's really really extreme. I mean we're hitting 20 dB above unity in the 14K and that's really really high, and I imagine if we weren't pulling from an MP3 off SoundCloud we'd probably have even more. And so I think we need to tamp this down quite a bit, and I wouldn't compensate for it by pushing everything else higher. I wouldn't raise this section up.

Dave Kropf: 5:41

What we should be doing is kind of tamping these down because it's really really coming in and, as being a lifelong drummer, I've lost some frequencies much above there. So I imagine folks listening to this who might still have those frequencies were probably almost to a pain point Could have used a riser or something out coming out of this going into our breakdown, which I like and this is another instance where that bass sound just kind of sits there. It needs to have a little bit of modulation or filtering or something. Love that counter melody line and the sound sounds great. Love the. I would bring those out Because we really don't have much like that earlier. I mean, it's there but it's definitely not a feature and I think it would be really cool here in our breakdown to feature that sound. Maybe bring that out a little bit more here. Yeah, that's really really nice. I love that sound. I want more of it. Yeah, good job.

Dave Kropf: 7:32

One of the things we also need to be careful with is making sure that we're not going too close to unity. I imagine you probably set your peaks to about minus 0.1 or minus 0.2. And when they get translated to compressed audio like this, it can clip the output bus. So we're pushing dangerously close to clipping there. So we've got to be careful. I wonder if we back up a little bit, I think, maybe to help set up the fact that we're about to go back to our kind of our double time, maybe have some inner and have everything kind of stop and then do that. I think would have been cool. So I have the little drum fill and have the pickup note, just so that that our peggiator isn't pushing the whole time. That pulse, that's really nice. Again, we have some some spikes in their upper frequencies that we need to attend to and you have the all those little details. I think we can bring out a little bit more, especially here the last phrase, so we get the feeling of one more gear of energy. Yeah, really nice job, other than a few, a few mixing notes.

Dave Kropf: 9:35

Is is a weekend warrior ready for sync. I think we're really close. Weekend warrior, as far as the title doesn't necessarily do anything for me, I generally tend to evoke synthwave 80s imagery in my synthwave cues. How could you do that? I don't know. I always lean on like neon or slap bracelets or something like that. Weekend warrior just feels a little, a little generic. So I'm not sure. I'm not sure it is uh. It's really doing you any favors. But I think we're really close. I think, like I said, just a couple of mix issues really, and maybe a new title, and we will be ready for sync.

Dave Kropf: 10:18

Well, jacob, thank you so much for sending this along. Like I said, this was sent during our week 47 weekly feedback threads. We put weekly feedback threads together every single week and currently we are collecting for week 48 and I will be choosing one of these to feature next week. But if you want uh, if you want feedback on your own cue, you want to know is my cue ready for sync? Then head over to ismyqreadycom. You can order up your own feedback video. And also, if you are looking for uh coaching, mentoring, uh, head over to 52qscom, slash coaching. I would love to help you out. And uh, while you're there, why don't you join us at the 52 cues community? Um, uh, to join is free and we have membership subscription tier starting at just four dollars a month. But that is going to do it for me. Thank you so much for joining me, until next time, peace.