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This is an interesting question, to which I think there is no right answer. Firstly, like what was said, developing your personal style is something that comes naturally. But I am going to argue that your music is already intrinsically laden with your own personal style.

To start off, it is important to define what style means for you. I'm going to assume here that one's musical "style" would be a set of characteristics that is present throughout the majority of one's works. These characteristics could range from melodic phrasing to instrument design or to harmonic use -- but the point here is that these characteristics could be anything and are present often. With such a broad definition of what these characteristics could be (and thus in turn, a broad definition of what musical style could be), I think it is rather hard for one's music to lack style. What I mean by this is that you are probably already injecting your music with little quirks.

Think about how you make your instruments, for example. I'm going to assume that you don't *always* create every instrument in your songs from scratch, but instead have a library of pre-made sounds or 'templates'. From there you would tweak these templates (or maybe you wouldn't) and start using them in your song. Though the sounds would be different, they would still have a sort of distinct "you-ness" to them, because they stem from a common base. Maybe you have a lead that you really like, and use it quite often in your music but with minimal differences. All of this would be an example of your music sharing characteristics, and thus you developing a "Style". I could keep listing other things musicians do, but that would be redundant. I hope you see my point.

It is natural for composers to create shortcuts for themselves. Little go-to things that they put into each of their songs to speed up the composing process. It is these little go-to things that essentially define your style, I believe, and thus since this process is natural, so to is the development of style. Plus, it would seem odd for someone to claim that a musical work lacks style -- I am willing to bet that if anyone were to listen to the entirety of a composer's work in depth, they would start to pick up on the little nuances in their style. So much so that when a new song of theirs were to play, a listener could say: "Hey, that's 'x'!".

Style is all about patterns. Common patterns. You naturally fall into patterns as you compose, and listeners naturally pick up on your unique patterns as they listen to your work. I do not think this is an issue that you should worry about, as I am almost certain that your music already has a definitive Metatronaut style. Unless you're just plagiarizing every single little nuance of some other composer; if you're composing your own music, you have a style. It's there, and it will keep developing.

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Thank you for this review, it's truly wonderful. This place also looks awesome and I hope I can visit it sometime

I know you stated you want it to be done with a microphone, but there is a new piece of musical software called chipseech that just came out. It's purpose is to emulate old voice synthesis programs from the 1980s and its very easy to use. The voices have a robotic, almost "chip" style so you might find it useful. There are some features that allow for what you want, I believe, so I think it's worth checking out. Hopefully this helps!

5-6 years of classical guitar training from my grandfather gave me a boost. However, that only gave me a sort of rudimentary base for composing, as I did not understand why what I was playing sounded good, I just played it. It's really all trial and error like everyone said, but going on google and searching for music theory will give you tons of resources. Literally reading the wikipedia page on chords and harmony helped me understand and get better at composing.

But really, you can learn music without ever having to even glance at a book about music theory. It may take longer but it's totally viable. Just practice.

So I gave your track a listen and I have to say that there's a lot of potential here waiting to be uncovered. I know you aren't a musician, but it's nice to see you delve into something new. The overall song is quite repetitive, which is okay if that's what you were aiming for but in the event that it wasn't here is some of my advice for you:

Try to use one of the channels as a sort of lead melody. Something that just sits on top of the heavy bass and percussion. This will give your song some flavor. It can be quite difficult to do this, especially as a beginner, but to me it looks like you fiddled around with some melody-esque aspects in the bassline. (I might be reading into this too much, you tell me).

LSDJ is all about layering and doing more with less. As a beginner, try to see what more you can add into your music. It doesn't have to be a complex melody or harmony. You have a good solid foundation to move forward -- judging by its sound, I can hear that you've started to utilize the SFX side of LSDJ which is great! See what more you can do with that, and go from there.

As for the buzz and volume of the instruments, that's something I'm going to leave up to you. As a musician, especially as a chiptune artist, you can use otherwise "unnatural" parts of your hardware to your advantage. Some artists may enjoy the buzz, perhaps it adds character; while other artists may not. That's up to you.

I hope my rudimentary constructive criticism will help you move on in your music. Being a beginner in music is tough, but practice makes perfect and I think if you continue moving forward, you will really improve.

the artist formerly known as OmO used 'Double Team'!