First Live Recording - Prog Metal inside

Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2008 11:02 pm

http://www.filefreak.com/pfiles/38319/Music/Acid%20Rain.mp3

A cover of LTE's Acid Rain, recorded live at a local venue.

Everything was run into a laptop through a MOTU 896HD, and recorded into Sonar 7.

I know it's not great, the drums are too quiet, and theres a tad of phasing issues in the guitar, but it's a little late to change that now =(

Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2008 4:07 am

Forgive me dear Mr. Jesus for I have sinned. I couldn't listen to your whole song. It sounds to me that you over equalized each instrument individually and then tried to mix them altogether? Much too much equalization. So much ear fatigue. What were you thinking? Less is more. Forget how your favorite CD sounds. This isn't how they did it. I mean you obviously have some engineering skills. You're almost on the right track. You obviously worked and labored hard over this. But it's too much of a good thing. It needs to be organic enough to listen to. It's not. I mean it has to sound good for people to want to listen to this. It's not supposed to be a technically clinical nor clinical technically. It's supposed to be rock-and-roll not a cool wiz bang technical piece of blah blah. You obviously utilized your schooling well. Now you have to make it sound like music. Not an angry bunch of insects crawling all over your stereo equipment. That gives me the willies.

Could I interest you in a photo conductively poisonous snakebite?
Ms. Remy Ann David

Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2008 5:17 am

I don't like to be so negative to anyone for trying something but to keep it short I didn't really like it.

IMHO it sounded like a session between Patrick Moore and KISS.

Everything seemed to sit out of place in the mix and the panning guitars near the beginning just seemed odd to me.

Sorry for the comments;)

Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2008 9:36 pm

No worries about saying it's bad, I never said it was good =P

I always seem to have a problem with my mixes having too much ear fatigue... is there anything you can recommend to avoid this? It seems to be much more problematic in any mix I do involving high-gain guitars....

I went back to check the part EQing, surprisingly there was relatively little, I fixed what I noticed being too much after you stated it, re-exported and refinalized it. Is this any better? Now it just sounds kinda odd to my ears, but then again, my ears might be odd ...

http://www.filefreak.com/pfiles/38319/Music/Acid%20Rain%20Mix%202.mp3

Any tips? Do I just need to practice?

Posted: Thu Feb 28, 2008 5:00 pm

There seams to be ALOT of distortions, especially from the synth.. rethink whatever you have done and begin from scratch. Make a miniature mix with no mastering and put it here. That way we can see if the distortion is in the recording or if it is in any of your plugins or whatever you have used.

When I listened to it now I got a headache, thats not good.

keep on trying and try to keep it moderate, especielly in volume (and in the mastering stage try to be moderate with the L2(Limiter) if thats what your using).

Posted: Thu Feb 28, 2008 11:10 pm

http://www.filefreak.com/pfiles/38319/Music/AcidRainDryMix.mp3

This has no "mastering" done, and I tried to keep the volume moderate, and minimize if not get rid of per-part EQing.

It still seems to just sound bad

Posted: Fri Feb 29, 2008 11:51 am

kk nice, the tracks are not bad. What I think you need to do it take it real slow, cut out the different synth parts and put them on different tracks so you get control of them. Do a main mix (No EQ, No compressors, no effects) make sure none of the instruments take up to much space (like the piano-synth in the latest mix).

Then slowly work with each instrument within the mix and try to give them some space in the spectrum with EQ. Remember, go easy on the EQ. Its often better to try to find the instrument that is in the way and cut frequencies there. If you boost trough EQ, then make sure its used with moderation.

Then when you do the mastering, try to do as little as possible, and make sure nothing distorts. If you use L2 then make sure the bar on the right does not move to much, if it move more then 6 db you probobly need to rethink the mix.

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