me and my shadow

heres another song for some welcome feedback

cheers

Overall good song again. The recording sounds fine to me, but it could definitely be improved upon with both mixing and mastering things. Although, I have no idea how to do either for this style :smiley: Some of the others can give better insights on those things than me.

The rhythm guitars sound good for this style and are played well, as does the style of vocal. I think the lead guitar could do with some work though, there are a some scuffed notes in there where they could be played a lot cleaner with more accurate picking and smoother note transitions as well as picking hand string dampening and fretting hand finger dampening. I liked how it retained some rhythmic similarity to the vocal though, but some fast runs transitioning to a higher octave and back down would give it a bit more variety I think!

I never ever take in lyrics for any song I’ve ever heard in my life I so can’t comment on those haha :smiley:

Your own sound is developing nicely, so good going and keep it up chap :slight_smile:

yer mad !! and i luv it…really good live sound there ( hope you meant it ) sounds like you’ve got Bonham on the drums,your stuff always makes me smile so thanks for that…should be even heavier I reckon, cheers, Kevin

thanks for listening guys,

jonathan,

your right when you say that some of my guitar notes could be clearer but this doesn’t make me any different from any other guitarist for this genre from what is effectively a live recording, i dont tend to do multiple takes and pick the best parts, if i make a boo boo i delete the track and start again, i do find this performance acceptable though. regarding the string dampening, i do a lot of palm mutes and muted strings where i feel appropriate

i also agree when you say things could be improved at the mixing and mastering stage because when i hear these songs on some sound systems the levels can seem a bit strange, possibly compressors kicking in but if i dont know what it is then i cant know how to fix it.

kevin,

glad you like it, i also like the live sound, i dont have the know how to make it a studio polished song but even if i did i dont think i would mess with it to much, the drums is the best example of this, ive watched youtube vids and stuff to see about mixing drums and they talk about how to get a great sounding kick drum that punches through the mix and i just think no…no no no,
what some describe as a powerful kick i see as very weak, like hitting a paper bag with a wooden spoon, obviously these guys are pros and i dont claim to know better but to me a bass drum goes “BOOM BOOM” and not “pitter patter” so i do build everything around the drums.
a little google search is in order here for bonham, i’d like to hear.

i like to think though that its possible to maintain the live feel while adding a little more polish

appreciate the feedback from both of you

thought everybody knew who John Bonham was…drummer for Led Zep…

:blush: :blush:

of course he is, that was a blond moment

Yeah, makes me smile too. Something about the overall attitude I really like. I think it sounds good. Maybe some more drum fills, like that guy, what’s his name, Bonham? Each one sounds better than the last.

i like coming on this forum for a few reasons, to hear music that you dont hear anywhere else and to try and improve on your own skill set where sometimes your in to much of a hurry to fully appreciate that people like what your doing.

these are nice comments, thanks

early,

i much prefer sarcasm when i do it :mrgreen:

This is a fun song. I enjoyed listening and still like your style. Nicely done!

Scott

Great song! I like your sound and especially the drums !

Just one question : Was it your intention to give it a dry sound? Sounds like the band is playing in a room. For those big drums I’d like to hear more reverb, like playing in a hall.And can you give the guitar a little more volume for the solo at 2:28, sounds like it is playing at one level throughout the song, it should play really loud for the solo.

I’m not a guitarist, but your guitarist really knows what he is doing, around 3:22 he plays like a master of rock ! I really like the sound of it ! Please give him a louder solo. :smiley:

KILLER I love the HamBone drum sound fits perfect big sticks should go boom boom you intelligently voiced your philosophy regarding recording techniques and I am going to steal your words lol. Thank goodness you didn’t correct a note. Real music here,

nice comments again, thank you kindly

i’ll be sure to tell him, his ego gets grumpy if it dont get regular feeding, oh wait…thats me… :laughing: :laughing:

there is no band playing here, its just me, my guitar and bass and superior drummer,
i dont set out with the intention to create a particular sound, just try to solve the problems that the sound i want brings :confused:

as mentioned i went on youtube to figure out how to mix drums but decided i didn’t want to go that road, that in turn caused some minor probs like the velocity on some of the snare hits caused the master peak meter to go through the roof while the rest of the song was bobbing away quite happily, i tried reducing the velocity in the midi editor but the track lost oomph!, through experimenting with reverb and other things on the drum track i noticed that the reverence plug in as a send fx tamed the velocity without actually reducing it leaving the original feel of the drums in tact, if i remember correctly the settings on the plugin are minimum (maybe even changed the room size) while the send level was pretty high, i did try a little more reverb to start with but felt it competed to much with the bass, to be honest i cant remember what i did, each song is a new adventure that bring its own problems where i will proberly use some unprofessional techniques to achieve unprofessional results, but i cant help myself, i like the sound i get :smiley:

I like the song and in regards to the clipping and editing the midi velocity, that’s all down to the mastering! My orchestral mixes end up at minus 25 dB sometimes leaving around -3dB peaking, but I never sacrifice dynamics. To get the right energy and sound from the instrument sometimes it has to be played with maximum velocity/expression. The headphones I have go 3x louder than normal headphones and that’s the reason, because mixes end up so quiet in volume because of getting the right velocity and velocity/expression should never be sacrificed to keep it from clipping :smiley:

Reverb should be used as sends yes, it gives the instrument more clarity and sounds more realistic. In the mastering stage you can add some reverb to ‘gel’ together all the instruments so it sounds like they were all in the same recording room. At least that’s what the pro’s that wrote the manual said :smiley:

But mastering is what brings the track back up to volume without any clipping. There is mastering stuff in Cubase and you can download free Maximizer’s which will bring your mix back up to a commercial standard, or near enough, in regards to the volume. But iZotope’s Ozone 5 has some nice presets for all kinds of different styles and from there you can tweak them and hear how it makes the production sound different and get the sound you want :smiley: As I’ve suggested in other threads, even downloading the free manual has good tips and guides for use with any mastering plugin.

Anyway, I’ve uploaded 2 examples of one of the few pieces I’m writing atm so you can hear the volume difference mastering makes without sacrificing dynamics at all. Although, it’s pretty rough so sorry to hurt your ears ;D Actually having some trouble getting the right string sounds/techniques for this one :-/

No Mastering: SoundCloud - Hear the world’s sounds

Some Mastering: SoundCloud - Hear the world’s sounds

Can’t stress how happy I was when I came across this mastering plugin :smiley: Like the manual said, I always wondered why my mixes were so quiet, yet turning the volume up caused clipping. You get a good sound but learning new things that give improvements and a sense of progression is what keeps me motivated so I think learning is always good. I’m trying to learn electronic stuff more, cos I suck at that :smiley:

Hope it helps, sorry to rant on a bit, kind of a boring Saturday this week :slight_smile:

damn nice work on that track jonathan

I have the project open atm, I just hope the mastering point comes through about the volume because that stuff applies to any music of any style and I scratched my head for ages wondering why oh why is my music so damn quiet but turning up the volume causes clipping :smiley:

The plugin I mentioned above takes a lot of the mystery out of it and gives a good sound with just a few tweaks, but ofc it’ll never come close to learning it in-depth, but mastering presets are good enough for me right now :smiley: There are some good free maximizer’s or alternatives that are probably cheaper too but I like the ease of Ozone. I don’t feel clever enough to handle learning all the mastering stuff.

Someone just linked me this singer/songwriter; Tucker piano Dec 7'2010.wmv - YouTube

yeah…bought ozone 5 pro today…

very funny vid…reckon he’ll go far…needs autotune tho…

Awesome, I think it’s a great product really, I’m very happy I found it or my music would still be so quiet :smiley: Perhaps you can do a comparison with and without it for our horny scotsman too.

Yeah, the dog is so cute ^.^ Autotune haha :smiling_imp:

i actually have a mastering suite, i use t-racks 3, and yes i see a big big difference in the over all output but its still best to try and fix it before i use t racks, i believe anyway, sure it wont clip when t racks is in use but the more you can fix in the mixing stage the better, if you fix the peaks in the mixing stage the more gain you can squeeze out the mastering stage, i find you get an unusual effect when raising the gain to much, the snare for example can sort of sound like its stuttering along in slow motion with some kind of delay, not a good description i know but i cant really describe what i mean and when you watch the master peak meter while this happens you can actually see it being forced to stay below the 0.0 db mark, i’m 99% sure this is the compressor going to work but couldn’t say for certain, so i do think the less you need to use compressors the better.

jonathan, i listened to your work in progress, i like the intro before it kicks in, by your own high standards though the rest needs work, the idea is there but it sounded a little robotic, like you manually placed the notes in time on the midi editor (not saying thats what you have actually done of course), i guess this is what you mean when you say your having trouble with the technique and expression, you’ll get it though,

funny vid by the way, the dog actually looked like it knew it was performing for an audience :slight_smile:

here’s one for you, the voice over in this just fits, class

I think your right about…“getting right in the project before mixing”…gotta be the best way really, then a bit of tweaking with some mastering software, Kevin