LinuxMusicians

German Metal Pop with female and male vocals

Made with Qtractor, Yoshimi, Linuxsampler, Fluidsynth, CALF plugins and other free stuff.

http://www.myownmusic.de/suedwestlicht/ ... gid=437414

Impressive!
What did you use for the percussion? There's a lot going on there.

folderol wrote:Impressive!
What did you use for the percussion? There's a lot going on there.

Thx.

The sidestick is a sample in samplv1, the clap is from a GM sf2 soundfont in Fluidsynth, rest comes from Linuxsampler.

bluebell wrote:German Metal Pop with female and male vocals

Made with Qtractor, Yoshimi, Linuxsampler, Fluidsynth, CALF plugins and other free stuff.

http://www.myownmusic.de/suedwestlicht/ ... gid=437414

Lovely! Nice to hear more non-english stuff also.
Very well played and nice mix. Not a big fan of five string bass (which I'm guessing it is) but is very well played... and that's just like only my opinion
Good singing though do you think you could convince her to sing a bit more aggressively? ; ) Metal benefits from more power in the vocals. Again, my opinion.

Overall I liked it, very nice!

spamatica wrote:

bluebell wrote:German Metal Pop with female and male vocals

Made with Qtractor, Yoshimi, Linuxsampler, Fluidsynth, CALF plugins and other free stuff.

http://www.myownmusic.de/suedwestlicht/ ... gid=437414

Lovely! Nice to hear more non-english stuff also.
Very well played and nice mix. Not a big fan of five string bass (which I'm guessing it is) but is very well played... and that's just like only my opinion

Thx, but the Bass is a Yoshimi-Sound (Bass 5, modified by me).

spamatica wrote: Good singing though do you think you could convince her to sing a bit more aggressively? ; ) Metal benefits from more power in the vocals. Again, my opinion.
!

That's a long way, but yes, you're right

Sounds like components are not glued together. The drums are there, the female vocals there. When the femal voice enters, it sounds like recorded totally elsewhere than the rest. The feeling of band can be, and must be recreated today since people do not play as much together. It sounds a tad more together when the male voice is heard eg. break at 02:30. The claps during the solo are sounding like not belonging at all - did it morph into a disco hall ?

The very last female voice intervention sounds more blending, as if the experience in mixing the song so far dictated that. Although it's not handled so well at the beginning when there's a drop in the instrumentation.

The song by itself is that medieaval style. For the king or for the god, with all will and just. The hero, the drama. This said, it's a style that people like, what with all those bands doing it, but in this case it could benefit IMHO by sounding more together and also by having an edge since in its current incarnation there no edge, it does not jump at the listener. It does not mean loudness, but more bite.

The above is when taking public musical scene backdrop into account. The way produced pop music sounds. OTOH as a hobby-only effort, it's nice and actually one could one say that, nice song, wondeful. I took the liberty to listen to it carefully from another perspective und dann schreib Ich ein bißchen mehr

Personally I like it when people pinpoint things out of my songs. For the last one there's someone on KVR who came up with a frequency graph showing why he liked the bass so much. I would have sent money to him for this commentary. On another one someone commented that there was something not right around 10KHz, which there was. So on so forth. For me, I grow better with these kinds of comments. This said I also like the 'well done', 'nice', 'I like it'

Cheers.

jonetsu wrote:Sounds like components are not glued together. The drums are there, the female vocals there. When the femal voice enters, it sounds like recorded totally elsewhere than the rest.

Thanks for your comment.

This song is indeed made of sounds that don't "belong" together. A bit of 80's drums, a bit medieval, a bit Pop. That's intended.
And you won't find a soft, female voice with distorted guitars in many songs. That surely sounds strange. I know.

But not all of the strangeness is intended. The female voice doesn't sound always the same although all of the female vocals were recorded in one single session. Maybe due to the fact that it's long ago when she sang in a band and lost some routine.

bluebell wrote: This song is indeed made of sounds that don't "belong" together. A bit of 80's drums, a bit medieval, a bit Pop. That's intended.
And you won't find a soft, female voice with distorted guitars in many songs. That surely sounds strange. I know.

Everything can possibly be made to be glued together. I'm certainly not a dictionary on the subject although there are many examples of soft female vocals in metal, at least for passages in songs. There are compilations out there. My comments were certainly not about the 'sound strange' aspect. I listen to various material. For instance, this is my all-time favorite band:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlJKKtgreqw

Your song do not sound strange. VERY, very far from it.

jonetsu wrote:Sounds like components are not glued together. The drums are there, the female vocals there. When the femal voice enters, it sounds like recorded totally elsewhere than the rest.

I neglected to mention this but I agree that the female voice feels somewhat outside the mix, is the reverb different from the other tracks?
If you want to explore, here are some things I imagine could help:
- lower the voice, could be that it's just too high
- if the reverb is different, try using the same as the other voice
- possibly reduce the bass on the voice

I think I glued everything a bit more together:

- HiHat/Cymbals lower
- Less reverb for snare
- Guitars louder
- Even more compression, song has now -10.8 LUFS (that should be a sane maximum for non-hiphop, non-dubstep)

For many musicians it seems to be important to create a stage acoustically. Non-musicians don't seem to care. However, more compression pleases both kinds of listeners.

Yes. Better

That version has more presence. it is more inviting. But still, the female vocals should be adjusted. They still sound like they belong elsewhere than in this song and that does not mean necessarily the tone of the voice. Try some suggestions made by spamatica. I would also try with blending the vocals in more reverb on a separate buss, keeping the highs low, and to compress that bussed reverb a little bit, Perhaps even have the vocal track and the reverb track blended in another buss and that buss compressed, altering the audio 3D field, the z axis of the vocals, by adding compression so that the vocals are dynamically pushed back and not only turned down in volume. We have volume/EQ for high/low, panning for right/left, and compression for front/back to build the 3D field.

A good adjustment of the female vocals would give the song another great boost.

I'll let a few days pass and think over it again.

But the intention was always that the female voice is the narrator, not part of the rest. The male voice is "in" the story.

They have the same reverb, though. In the later parts her voice can't be lowered else it's buried under the rest. But maybe there's room for some automation to lower her voice in the beginning of the song.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Hi,

Late to this party...

bluebell you always have such sophisticated arrangements and this one is no different, your mastery of the production and software used is always an eye-opener to me. I can't imagine doing a project this layered, I'm sure a screenshot of the Qtractor session itself would be amazing...

Obviously you have taken some good advice from others and I'm hearing a revised mix... One thing I would say to you and many others who program drums (even with my kits)... Enough with the splash cymbal already!!!

To me a dead giveaway of whether drums are real (or an emulation of a real drummer) is the use of the splash cymbal more than once during a song (perhaps more than once during an album). Most real drummers may use a splash to punctuate a drum solo performance or perhaps once or twice in a certain song within a whole night...

The volume, high pitch and almost instant decay of the splash cymbal sample in this song is really distracting to me (and possibly just me...lol). It dampens my enjoyment of the rest of the phenomenal playing, programming and performing going on in this song.

This song has gotten a lot of very specific feedback, you should take that as a big compliment actually, if people didn't like it they would say nothing, I think we'd agree this is a very very good song that is SO close to being great and we want to see it get there...

bluebell wrote:song has now -10.8 LUFS (that should be a sane maximum for non-hiphop, non-dubstep)

Sorry, I may be old-fashioned, but for my taste that is way over the top already. I don't agree with others about louder=better, in fact I think that is just a fad which hopefully passes sooner than later.

But that's just me. If you wish to sound that loud, ok, your choice of course. My opinion is that you don't do yourselves a favour with this - at least not in the long run.

Did I say this is good work? Bravo!Been a fan of yours since I first heard you on LibreMusicProduction.

And cheers,
Wolfgang