Sea Song

jm67 · 07-27-2019, 11:45 AM

Here's an original called Sea Song... I originally recorded this with distorted guitars a couple of years ago, and it came out sounding like a reject from Mountain circa 1971. This version is more lush & a bit orchestral...

Any advice on the mix would be appreciated. My monitor set up is problematic - I have to keep running upstairs to the stereo to listen & tweak the mix.

https://soundcloud.com/jm67dc/sea-song/s-AJ1sy

Sambo Rouge · 07-27-2019, 03:28 PM

I like it. Some very unusual ideas mid way through.

One tiny crit: I think that the instrumentation should go back a tad(or the voice come forward a bit)and a touch less verb on the vox.

Listened to your other track(Never Let Me Go)which I enjoyed greatly but again I feel the voice should come forward not be on the same level as the accompaniment.

Just my humble opinion.

Well done ---- really nice.

SR

barrymk · 07-28-2019, 07:32 AM

Like the instrumental mix a lot but agree with SR that the vox needs to come up and maybe lose some reverb.

jm67 · 07-28-2019, 07:55 AM

Thanks for the feedback. I haven't the strongest singing voice so I tend to submerge the vox a bit.

barrymk · 07-28-2019, 08:45 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jm67

Thanks for the feedback. I haven't the strongest singing voice so I tend to submerge the vox a bit.

Make sure you take full breaths in the right places when singing and go all out for the notes, you'll find you're a stronger singer than you think.

smueske · 07-28-2019, 04:29 PM

A love the dreamy, ambient guitar sound.

Drums are thin and don't really sound played. Is there a delay on the snare? Would definitely swap it out for a more diffuse sound. If the drums are MIDI, I'd either redo them and try to get them tighter and with more of a groove or hand edit and quanitize a bit. If they are real drums and played, I'd still redo them because they don't really lock down the beat. They kind of lurch and fall behind and catch up, etc, which makes me thing they were recorded last instead of being the bed.

Vocals are very cool and remind me of Pink Floyd.

Cool whirling epiano type pad behind the piano.

Very cool song overall. It just doesn't gel overall from a performance standpoint. Maybe practice each of the parts a bit more and redo them? I think the orchestration is right. I think the form is there. A very interesting piece.

Timothy Lawler · 07-28-2019, 06:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by smueske

...love the dreamy, ambient guitar sound...

Me too. And the writing. All in all, dreamy in a 1960s way for me.

I like the tone and expression of the vocal. It could come up in the mix.

The drums are the weak link. They sound artificial but it's mostly a rhythmic thing. Maybe it's the ebb and flow of the other parts that isn't gelling with the drums, rhythmically, assuming the drums are on a grid. There are frequent spots where that snare backbeat seems way out of sync with the other parts.

I'm imagining this with Hugo Rivera doing the drums. That would be nice to hear.

jm67 · 07-28-2019, 07:45 PM

Interesting... the drums are MIDI and they are on a grid (although the tempo purposely picks up during the refrain). It's probably the imprecision of the other parts more than the drums themselves that you're hearing. I'll have to give it another listen & maybe retrack.

The drum sound is EZDrummer2 DreamHop kit - I elected to use an electronic sounding kit for this song. During the chorus there's also a manually-played African percussion soundfont that comes in.

The dreamy guitar is via the Electro-Harmonix Canyon delay pedal - it has a shimmer setting that gives a synth wash on top of the guitar. Great little pedal!

prom · 07-30-2019, 02:53 PM

As an extra dimension I hear how a sweet pretty female voice would work being right with you here.
You do appear to know exactly what you are doing on these recordings.
Very high quality recording is difficult (as you know) and some of the very best we have heard have extensive production credits - top session players, multiple engineers,experienced producer,multiple session locations, best studio gear known to man etc,etc.

So yeah,just ignore my words but the bit about female voice just behind yours worx,I know this to be true,perhaps not possible to achieve but would be very good.

synkrotron · 07-30-2019, 11:30 PM

I like this a lot, jm67

Mix wise, difficult one for me. I am listening on my cans, for starters, plus I think that streaming from SoundCloud isn't the best way to critique something like this. There appears to be some "artefacts" present probably due to SoundCloud's conversion to a 128 kbps sound file for streaming.

I would question, how did you upload to SoundCloud?

You should be uploading as a 24 bit WAV, or other lossless format if possible. If you upload a lossy file, SoundCloud tends to make it even worse.

Also, what are you peaking at? Personally, I find that keeping the intersample (true) peak to around -1 dB helps a lot when it comes to converting to 128 kbps format.

Sounds like there may be a little bit too much low end? Not sure, really. I have similar monitoring issues although more likely down to not having great ears than anything else. I always use SPAN to keep an eye on frequency levels and use dynamic EQ (Pro-Q3) to keep on top of any runaway resonance.

cheers

andy