Summer Theme

[jonetsu]

Quite the contrary to the current weather, here's a Summer Theme, another upbeat and bright piece this time built on acoustic bass guitar and acoustic guitars. With drums, percussions and synth coloring.

https://soundcloud.com/nominal6/summer-theme

Enjoy !

Cheers.

[folderol]

I did

[GMaq]

Hi jonetsu,

Thanks, I needed a summer theme as well, the weather is brutal here!

This may be my favorite one so far, love the blending of the synths and the acoustic instruments. Great playing, and the recordings of the acoustic instruments have great presence and a perfect amount of edgy grit, especially the bass. Some parts are a little reminiscent of Yes, it certainly doesn't sound derivative it just reminds me of that.

My only minor complaint would be the Kick drum (on my system anyway) is very faint and I'd like it to be much more noticeable to glue the rhythm section together with that great bassline.

[jonetsu]

Thanks for the comments. I'm actually trying to bring up the bass drum int he original mix.

[jonetsu]

Here's a somewhat remixed version. This time virtually each bass drum hit was doubled with a sample. The sample sound was toned done nevertheless so as not to sound too obtrusive. The mastering chain has changed. First a slight coloration is introduced using the Mixbus master bus tone controls. Then a high cut is made using PrimeEQ. Follows a bass handling by the GlissEQ dynamic EQ using a 4x oversampling rate. Then as usual it goes through the Satin tape emulation. Last but not least is the Elephant limiter to bring the level up to K14. All plugins except Satin were incorporated using linVST.

See link above.

Cheers.

[GMaq]

Hmmm,

Not sure if I prefer this new mix, I did refresh the SC page so I'm assuming I'm hearing the new one. I'm not really hearing a lot of difference in the Kick drum relative volume or hearing whatever sample you used very clearly. I'm wanting to hear a nice fat acoustic kick underneath to mesh with that bass tone... (Of course all of this is IMO..)

I think in general the drums are a bit over-compressed now, they are a bit 'clacky' and the drum fills have lost some of their previous dynamics. I understand you're experimenting with some new plugins etc. my guess is this mix has gotten affected by "new toy syndrome' which happens to me all the time so I recognize the symptoms...

Just curious are these drum loops? If so I had a brief but intense addiction to the looploft for a few months, I find the loops are great but often the Kick gets lost once you add the rest of the tracks, I'm sure its a pychoacoustic phenomenon of some kind, it happens in a live context all the time... the drummer plays by himself acoustically and the kick is nice and present, add the bass and guitar and "hey where did the kick go??". I find the biggest limitation/turnoff of loops is to get that kick drum back you have to add bass to the whole kit which sometimes helps sometimes hinders... You can't deny the facility and convenience of loops for sure but sometimes they can be a challenge on a finished track to get them exactly where you want.

Please don't think my intention is to be negative, I love this tune! Just want to be honest for the good of the tune

[jonetsu]

Thanks for the comments. I'll give it another try. Yes, there might be too much compression on the drums. I'll keep an ear for that. More open dynamically, with a fatter bass drum. Yes these are a couple of loops from the loft. The approach I use since last remix is to do what many mix engineers are doing, to replace drums hits with samples, or at least to mix both. This gets rid of the problem of EQing the whole of a drum track for a specific need. Or to use a multi-band compressor/expander to focus on the lows. What I did is that under every kick hit of the loop I put a kick sample on another track. I left the original kicks there and processed (EQ) the new samples. I must say that I didn't do an exhaustive search through the sample libraries to find the best kick to start with since this was the first time I was doing that. I'll spend more time now auditioning kicks. And while at it, some snare samples could also be blended on their own track, if only for coloration. And while at it .... nah, I'll stop there.

If you do have a kick sample that would by OK for this, let me know.

[GMaq]

If you do have a kick sample that would by OK for this, let me know.

FWIW the Kick samples for my AVL kits can be found in the SFZ zip file here: http://bandshed.net/sounds/sfz/AVL_Drumkits_1.1-fix.zip

Not really trying to pimp my wares, but to be honest that is the kind of Kick I'm hearing and I can share these without stepping on any legal toes.

[jonetsu]

I have posted an update but then, after listening to it again, I do not like the mix. As I've new add samples to a drum track, I realized now that doing so can unbalance a whole mix. Especially if the bass was a little touched up to go with the drums. Again it suffered from the Curse of the New Plugin. This time the Voxengo 'LF Max Punch'. With a name like this you'd thought that the guy would apply it sparingly. Nope.

It's certainly not plug and play. I'll rework and rebalance it and post an update.

Cheers.

[jonetsu]

So this will now be the, ahem, 'final' version of the piece. The idea of having a new kick was a very good one. I'm glad I tried it. Might not be as loud as it could but then I did not want to redo the playing of any other instrument to go along with a more pronounced kick.

https://soundcloud.com/nominal6/summer-theme

Cheers.

[GMaq]

So this will now be the, ahem, 'final' version of the piece. The idea of having a new kick was a very good one. I'm glad I tried it. Might not be as loud as it could but then I did not want to redo the playing of any other instrument to go along with a more pronounced kick.

https://soundcloud.com/nominal6/summer-theme

Cheers.

Hi!

Much better!! (*applauds) A real difference not only in the kick but also in relaxing the drum and mastering compression and bringing the synths up, it really breathes now and the kick gives 'backbeat.' Before there was no '1' just the cymbals and snare and it was rhythmically top heavy... now that the bass has something to bounce off of it has much more momentum.

I see Rui also hears some Yes in the center section... Steve Howe is some great company to be named in!

A great piece!

[xaccrocheur]

Enjoy !

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