After I had a couple of tracks accepted, I thought I could finally pass the 2 track per month limit, but I got another hard rejection, which is very discouraging. I would be grateful for any advice you might have for the possible improvement of this track, which I thought was a rather “typical” one and should be accepted, but obviously not the case…
It sounds pretty similar to the tracks on your portfolio that got accepted, so I’m not 100% sure what the reason why this one got rejected while the others were accepted.
However in terms of improvements there’s 2 main things I would do:
put the track through some kind of mastering chain including a limiter. Of course don’t squash the dynamics completely, but some limiting would help bring the overall volume of the track up to competitive levels. Right now it sounds completely unmastered, which I think hurts the overall commercial appeal of the track.
The whole thing is mixed pretty well, with the exception of that white noise sweep around 30 secs which is way too loud. It should be similar in volume to the cymbal swell (which is correctly balanced) but instead it’s like twice as loud as anything else in the song.
I hope this helps! Again, not sure the others got accepted and this one didn’t. If I had to guess, they were all “borderline” tracks and those sometimes end up being a 50/50 decision.
Many thanks for your feedback, much appreciated! The noise sweep was even louder before, I thought I had managed to turn it down, but probably not enough. Do you think if I remaster the track a bit I could resubmit? Or it is not appropriate in the case of a hard rejection?
According to Envato’s help pages, you cannot resubmit a hard rejected item, unfortunately.
Personally if it were me I would just create a new track using the old one as a starting point, change the key, chord progression, melodies, percussion sounds, maybe change the structure and bpm a little, then resubmit. As long as it’s a sufficiently different track that should allow you to save a little time vs. starting again from scratch.