lend me your ears

[carlv]

Howdy,

I recently posted a track in hopes of getting some feeback on the mix. I'm now starting to feel comfortable navigating my way in and around Ardour, have settled on a handful of goto plugins and have established a minor work flow with an eye toward building better templates.

At this point in my process other ears (tips-n-crits) would be greatly appreciated to help further me down the road.

Note: This is for educational purposes only, so the track will only be available for as long as 'active' life of this thread.

Thanks all and have a good one.

Carl

[singforme]

Great music, love it! Good mix too! One thing I noticed: the midi drums sound awesome but when you're hitting a single drum repeatedly (especially the snare drum) you can hear it's the same sample. Try and vary the velocity because for example avl drum kits have about 5 velocity layers so if hit 1 is at say velocity 50 and hit 2 at velocity 70 then it will play 2 different samples and it will sound like an actual drummer and not the same sample twice. Hydrogen is great here because it shows different colours for different samples so you can really optimise that.

[barbouze]

As 42low wrote, this is a good start!
A multi layered drum kit, with random or round robin, would indeed greatly add some organic feeling to the drums.
Imho, you should try to cut as much bass as possible on all tracks except drums and bass because for the now I feel like everything is in a bass swamp and it is hard to tell which is which. The bass is overmatched by the rythm guitar (nice stereo effet by the way)and even the center solo guitar, when it goes down loses its presence. You could also gently nudge left or right each track that is dead center to better spread the instruments so they wouldn't be sharing their bass component too much.

[carlv]

singforme and others

Thanks and good call. I'll write more about that in a while. I just got hit with the tooth ache from hell, so can't really think or formulate my thoughts properly at present, but that's just what i was looking for. I got seduced by the sounds and started losing objectivity. And for the record that's The Black Pearl avl kit holding stuff down, but in truth i did not do anything to humanize/vary the snare hits...

Again thanks... more when i can think.. now off to roll around on the floor and scream a bit.

Cheers gang!

[jonetsu]

The guitar is very good, the bass notes also. The drum, mostly. For me it's not the snare so much than the cymbal (not plural) that's hear much more often. I do not know avl drums but if the velocity change means affecting the sample itself, perhaps like pianoteq modeling or the u-he project on modeling drums, then that would be it. If not, different samples. Different cymbals in any case. Rare are the drummers with only one cymbal, specially in that style of music.

Again, the guitar, the beat and the bass are very good. For a test, this is very good. Of course, many things can be adjusted, but the idea is there.

Cheers.

[carlv]

hi jonetsu

Your input and suggestions are noted, added to the growing check list and greatly appreciated, thanks much.

The avl drums are pretty flexible and well worth a try. As i said above, i'd done nothing to vary velocities of pieces within the kit on this particular pass, but it's something (among other neat tricks) that can certainly be done with relative ease.

Here's a couple links with info on the kits and the possibilities available therein.

http://www.bandshed.net/avldrumkits/

ardour avl drum midi record
https://vimeo.com/209790453

Have a great weekend!