Thread: New Song, bit of 70's rock

Hi gang,

Here is yet another song for critique.

I wrote this about a month ago for some friends who gave some ideas, one being a Tenacious D type song, so I doubt I wrote anything like that but tried to have the Verses be kind of meloncholy and chorus hard rocking like most TD songs, like I said not sure if I achieved that... But this song is kind of first for me to record my acoustic guitar as being a big part of the song. There still needs to be some guitar solos, one slow and one fast when you listen to the song you can imagine where they are.

http://soundclick.com/share?songid=7016468

be brutal if you like!

Originally Posted by RemyRAD

I listen to your entire cut very carefully. It sounds like a great intro to the vocals but when the vocals were supposed to start, it was the end of the song?

My other observations were, great balance. Good mixing. Great sounding electric & acoustic guitars.

My gripes. Bass guitar has too much midrange happening & not enough velvety low-end. To further complicate the problem here, while the drums sounded great, the bass drum which had some reasonable processing on it, having an interesting pump sucking sound. It lacked balls & no low-end. It didn't place well with the bass guitar. So essentially, this was too precise sounding.

My recommendation for the fix. Remove most processing from the bass guitar except for a little limiting. Knock off some of the high frequency & midrange stuff.

On the bass drum, only utilize the one inside the drum & invert the phase. Take off most of the processing. Tweak your equalizer's.

Now you should have some velvety smooth bass that underlines everything else. With a nice bit of low-frequency CPR that beats upon your chest. Instead of coming up behind you & giving you a wedgey. The two will now fit much better together and won't crowd the other instruments. You've got its spectral content too close to the guitars currently.

It's the way I do it. You might like it? It will sound more organic.
Ms. Remy Ann David

Thanks Remy for giving it good listen and as always I took your suggestions to task. I tackled the bass first. I was sort of digging it but your'e right it needed to be a bit smoothier, before it was kind of "Plucky" in some places. The only things I had going on there was the Ampeg Plugin and the Massey Compressor. So in the Ampeg plugin I did have the 800hz and 2khz up about 6db, so I took those down to about -4db. The low freq that was boosted was the 150hz by about 8db, and it was ok but the one part I did add in the Ampeg was the "Filter Envelope Pedal" which accented the lower to lowed-mid freqs to give it a smoother sound, then adjust level to taste. That "Pedal" really made a good difference.

As for the Kick drum, well I'm still using software for a drummer so I only have one mic for that "Drum" so to speak. The one thing that was being added to the Kick was a 4 band EQ. I usually just boost up between 60-80 hz for the thump and 2-3khz for the smack of the kick. After you suggesting to give it more balls, I added 300hz also. Along with the EQ there is one other way I bring out a Kick with my current mixing and that is I use a Bomb Factory 76 limiter (1176 emulator), I set it up at usually 12:1-GNR and set the input to watch the needle go to -2 or less but then I increase the output to get a more bassy or something that sounds like more air is being pushed out of the kick (even though its not). Not sure if you had this in mind....

I'll be posting the new mix up tomorrow for all to listen too.

Thanks again Remy, its good to learn how other people achieve sounds on what they like.