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Old 06-16-2022, 01:46 PM   #1
BobbyD
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Default A couple songs pertaining to the apocalypse that is ongoing

To be clear: I don't want people to be alarmed. I don't think the apocalypse will go quite through. But it looks like we are driving right up to the edge. The inspiration for these, in any case, comes from the feel of that.

All the instruments on these except the guitars are virtual. The guitars are all DI with amp sims. It is all a one-man writing, performing, producing, etc., situation.

On this first one, there are lots of guitars going at once on the main riff, and I am going for a churning vibe.

https://soundcloud.com/user-79901992...social_sharing

I tried to make the harmony vocals on the main part as much into a homogenized slab of sound as possible, and smashed it pretty heavily with compression, and aligned it all as meticulously as practicable.

The "flower" referred to is related to Dante's flower in heaven, to the book "The Rose of the World", and to the flower that emerges from the apple in "I, Pet Goat II". At the same time, it refers to that most charming of spring flowers, the little bluet. The idea of "innocence being a form of power" is related to a vision I persistently have, that at some point, the ultimate evil in the world will somehow be defeated through the agency of a playful kitten.

The second track is about the creeping sense that something is amiss.

https://soundcloud.com/user-79901992...social_sharing


I refer to the philosophic system of William Butler Yeats in the title. The concept of the "The Mask" is complex, and well beyond the scope of this post. But it resonates interestingly with today's world, etc.

Thanks for listening, and I would be very grateful to receive any feedback.
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Old 06-17-2022, 06:18 AM   #2
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Quite basic...
Really bad vocals and arrangements.
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Old 06-17-2022, 06:45 AM   #3
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If the aim was a 60s style psych(and it probably was), arrangement and vocals(and far out guitar work!) are IMO period correct. It's like if early Floyds had a DAW, nice job OP.
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Old 06-17-2022, 09:52 AM   #4
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If the aim was a 60s style psych(and it probably was), arrangement and vocals(and far out guitar work!) are IMO period correct. It's like if early Floyds had a DAW, nice job OP.
Thank you, I appreciate the feedback.
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Old 06-17-2022, 10:18 AM   #5
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Quite basic...
Really bad vocals and arrangements.
Please don't use the REAPER forum this way. If you can't contribute usefully, it is fine not to contribute at all.
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Old 06-17-2022, 12:42 PM   #6
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This was messy mix wise.
Nothing wrong with the vocals or arrangement, but..
The vocals was muddy (maybe too much low mid freq?)
Some high synth tones sounds disturbing (high?)
The mix wasn't 'together', it was all over the place.
The song was cool.
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Old 06-17-2022, 01:02 PM   #7
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I enjoyed it. People here get caught up with making a mix like a pop song, and I don't think this song would necessarily benefit from that. Not that it was a bad mix, but I'd rather listen to an interesting song with less than perfect EQ/Compression/etc. any day over a perfectly mixed generic ass song. Anyway, I liked it. Thanks for sharing.
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Old 06-17-2022, 01:23 PM   #8
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Quote:
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Thanks for listening, and I would be very grateful to receive any feedback.
There are a lot of cool ideas there. Many people couldn't come up with that many cool motifs if their lives depended on it.

It sounds to me like an "everything but the kitchen sink" challenge but that can be a good thing. It's a step towards getting there. You want to get all those cool ideas you have working together, make each part earn it's right to be there.

I practiced this for years when I was starting out. How many tracks can I A) creatively come up with, then B) how many of them can I make work and fit together. Don't be afraid to remove/mute tracks and reevaluate. I don't see what you are doing here as a bad thing at all, in fact a great thing. It may just not quite be ready for prime time but this effort is the very thing you need to do to get to that point.

PS: if cacophony is the intention here, then that's what it is and ignore everything I just said to an extent. I also won't go into mix aesthetics as I don't think that is the more important thing right now.

Keep at it, I enjoyed listening even if it did sound a bit messy. Also, the melody/harmony has a lot of potential, good ear on those.
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Old 06-18-2022, 06:39 AM   #9
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People seem to be referring to "it" singular, though I posted two songs. Based on the listens stats, I am assuming people are referring to the first one.

msundh:


Thanks for the feedback

Messy mix: There are a lot of guitar tracks going at once. In the left channel, auto panning and filter sweeping slightly but all in the same spot in the left-right field, are three layered tracks with the same rhythm but different harmonic material. The first of those three is then doubled in the right channel, and the other two are doubled faintly at hard pan positions. Basically experimenting with that. It makes kind of a large sound, but also, perhaps, a messy one. Is it what I want it to sound like? Maybe, maybe not. Hard to be sure. At some point, I may try to remix it from the ground up, on a totally different basis and see what happens.

Muddy vocals: I tend to sing too close to the mic, for one thing. In general, I am not all that delighted with my voice/vocals, so in some ways, I am trying to mud them up. But that may or may not be really working, so I need to consider that more.

High synths: This was intentional, trying to make use of available real estate in the soundstage. If it sounds "disturbing", that may be a bug, or it may be a feature... again, hard to be sure.

On the whole, I am making it up as I go along production-wise, so my decisions are very much subject to revision.

GoldenDeath: Thanks a lot. Some of the music I have enjoyed most is the early Guided by Voices stuff, which is entirely crap sound quality. So as I go about this, knowing my limitations with gear, I have as a baseline the fact that I am more concerned about the songs than the production. At the same time, I want to do the best I can with with what I have available, and I have no doubt that technique is far more important than gear, so I am very interested in any feedback about things like EQ and compression.

Karbo: You are spot on about "the kitchen sink". It would perhaps not surprise you that I have muted tracks... but then more want to creep into the mix! Certainly, an element of chaos is part of the vibe, but that sort of thing can very much misfire. Thanks for the supportive words.
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Old 06-18-2022, 07:24 PM   #10
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There are large parts of creation and art where self expression removes the point of or negates all 'critical opinions', and it just becomes about the listener vs the artist and the listeners perception of evaluating a product. This can be circumnavigated via critical feedback but that means one has to take into account the artists intention. Without all that stuff in mind, it just becomes a value judgement.

No one is here to have their value judged as a product, Pash may as well have been posting star ratings for everything Obviously, judgements are only to be expected on the internet but still... It was getting silly.

Anyway, keep it up! I look forward to you posting more stuff!
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Old 06-18-2022, 11:09 PM   #11
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To be honest, it's nice to hear something that isn't all mixing standard quantized pitch corrected anal-retentive copy paste just like a store bought one that many home producers pump out.
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Old 06-19-2022, 11:32 PM   #12
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Well, that was something else! So many things going on at the same time that I couldn't really figure out what the songs were "about". But since both were consistent in their "fullness", I'm assuming it's a chosen style.

Your vocals were alright so no need to hide them in the mix!

Just my 2 cents! Keep it up!
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Old 06-20-2022, 12:00 AM   #13
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I'd commit more fully to the psych vibe by distorting the vocals and adding some fx to them. Like automated phasers and dub delays. Also make them louder. The mix is also imo a bit too non comital. In the sense that everything tries to stand out.
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Old 06-21-2022, 07:26 AM   #14
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Of the two, I preferred the second one (The Mask), but I enjoyed both of them. Interesting work. I wasn't offended by the mixes, but I may have low standards. I'm a long time fan of Hawkwind, and their mixes were abominable
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Old 06-21-2022, 09:34 AM   #15
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Wyyyrd enough for me!

I'd leave out most of the noodles tho, they are quite distracting. I do like the odd rhythms and the vocals are definitely not bad.
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Old 06-25-2022, 09:44 AM   #16
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I'd commit more fully to the psych vibe by distorting the vocals and adding some fx to them. Like automated phasers and dub delays. Also make them louder. The mix is also imo a bit too non comital. In the sense that everything tries to stand out.
I think you are absolutely correct about the mix. I defaulted to "being able to hear everything", and was, I think, unwilling in too many cases to bring things to the front.
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Old 06-25-2022, 09:47 AM   #17
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Well, that was something else! So many things going on at the same time that I couldn't really figure out what the songs were "about". But since both were consistent in their "fullness", I'm assuming it's a chosen style.

Your vocals were alright so no need to hide them in the mix!

Just my 2 cents! Keep it up!
The first mix of The Hunchback actually had the vocals a couple of clicks further back in the mix, and I realized I was burying them and brought them up... but still not enough. It is indeed the case that I don't particularly like the sound of my own voice (a common enough psychological phenomenon), and certainly don't feel quite comfortable having it nakedly forward. But perhaps I need to overcome that to a greater extent.
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Old 06-25-2022, 09:48 AM   #18
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Wyyyrd enough for me!

I'd leave out most of the noodles tho, they are quite distracting. I do like the odd rhythms and the vocals are definitely not bad.
Thank you.

As to "the noodles"-- can you indicate precisely what you are referring to? Any of the guitar soloing type stuff?
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Old 06-30-2022, 01:14 PM   #19
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First off, well done for having the courage to share your work, especially as a lot of people on here are professionals. I'm certainly not. I've been using REAPER for about 10 years now, hopefully improving, but still consider myself a total amateur. At some point I may do what you have done and ask for feedback from the forum.

As an aside, the chess grandmaster Savielly Tartakower divided chess players into four categories:

1) Weak players who don't know they are weak. They are ignoramuses. Avoid them.
2) Weak players who know they are weak. They are intelligent. Help them.
3) Strong players who don't know they are strong. They are modest. Respect them.
4) Strong players who know they are strong. They are sages. Follow them.

Hopefully I'm in category 2 when it comes to recording and mixing, but hopefully one day I might make it to category 3!

So with all that in mind, here are my few thoughts, having skimmed through the other comments.

First is that for wayyy too much of the time I can't hear the words. This is a pity since they are obviously not boring "Baby I need you so, moon and June" kind of stuff. They're easiest to hear at the start of the second song, and some poke through in other places, but in general I think this is absolutely the first thing to fix.

Then, as some of the other posters have said, expressed in various different ways, I think there's too much going on all at once. Sometimes I find that if I listen to stuff I really like - that hits me in the guts or just sounds great - and then pay attention to what's actually going on, I realise that there's not that much going on after all, but the overall effect is powerful.

One example of that for me, admittedly a totally different genre, is The Boy in the Bubble by Paul Simon. Apart from the instrumental break there's just accordion with doubled synth to flesh the sound out a bit, a synthy sort of bass, and drums. Backing vocals are just him doing "dooby doo waa"s with reverb. (See if you can find the Graceland episode of the Classic Albums series on YouTube.) But the whole adds up to more than the sum of its parts, and it can still build up through the song, back off a bit, and build to a final climax. I'm sure you can come up with your own examples like this.

Then I thought there might be some boomy/resonant frequencies somewhere, but as your instruments are mostly virtual I'm probably wrong about this. (Before I had ever heard of room treatment or anything like that I was recording any-old-where, and the boominess is almost painful at times.) So maybe try to find where there is too much of some frequencies? I'm not sure of this by any means.

Then I though that as a whole they needed a bit of glue. If you happen to have a copy of ReaMix by Geoffrey Francis, aka Nicholas on the forum, the bit about using ReaXcomp on p.185 might be useful. Also HIGHLY recommended is ashcat_lt's ReaComp technique in post 4 of this thread: https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=156201

And finally ("at last" some may say) these videos by Dan Worrall are extremely useful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrU_GWJrM6Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sxn3DmWfmbE
along with pretty much all his other stuff of course.

Hope you find at least some of this useful, and good luck.
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Old 07-08-2022, 11:16 AM   #20
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Wow, that was some goooooooood shtuff.

I quite liked both a LOT. They both MOVE. You got that x factor in your writing and arranging that is pretty freaking cool. That first rhythm riff is shit hot. Not sure if im supposed to say that or not. but sometimes the only way i know how to convey some EXTRA quality is to swear.

Yeah, if i had a suggestion, which is coming from a listener that is totally loving it, is i think the vocals need some tightening up in the bominess dept. unless that is how u want it. i think if they were a bit tighter in that regard people could hear them better. Which would be a good thing.

Wonderful work. Anyone dissing your stuff can pack sand. Those were hot. Looking forward to more by you. I was smiling, dancing and laughing for joy at your sounds. That solo in the first one after the come down part. BOSS!!!! They both had some great playing. i love the juxtaposition of your synthy sounding bass next to the more retro sounding guitar work. thats very cool.

Id say genius man.
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Old 07-11-2022, 05:26 AM   #21
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Your melodies and lyrics are good. Few accomplish this, and is the thing that limits most recordings to unrecoverable mediocrity. Arrangement and recording flaws can be fixed. There is some good advice on this in the comments above. A general suggestion I would make is the following: The arrangment, EQ, dynamiv and panning should always be done with a specific focal point (usually the vocal) in mind. Logically this means that the rhythm guitar cannot always be at the same volume. Pan other parts away from the vocal to give it a better chance at being heard. EQ disorted guitars to reduce overlap with the vocal. Remember that less can be more in arrangment as this allows what you really want the listener to focus on to be heard. Build on the good bones that you have.

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