Another silly mashup.
Great tight work and tones Franjoe30 ! Sounds fabulous
Congratulations that's awesome!
Thanks BayouTexan ! Don’t undersell yourself, you could easily do this sort of thing. Really aspire higher than this as it’s very messy and imprecise with some terrible structure and flow issues and very questionable tone choices.
This is just me having some improv fun with chorus and heavy tones, throwing a few random riffs together and keeping it short. Carrying on the noodle challenge.
Feeling hair-rock-y
You're still fighting the bass fluff there with the kick and bass. This is stopping you from being able to raise them to their best levels because it's blowing out when you do.
Try this, reduce the kick alone in the drums or use a high pass filter just to remove maybe up to 50-80hz tops just till there's no more fluff in the sound. Then raise the drums further till the snare sounds right. Next reduce the overheads to calm the cymbals.
On the bass create a parallel channel, on the first channel leave things as is but lo-pass till you just have low mids down. Then on the second channel high-pass till you have that up, so you have the complete sound on two channels. Now on the high-passed channel add a tinge of distortion, any distortion plugin should do it. Now raise it till the balance is right. Finally route both channels through a single mix bus and use that to control the overall volume of the part.
Solid riffs and much better balance on the this one! Great progress.
You can afford to bring the drums louder still don't be afraid to pull them all the way till they're too loud then back them off till they just sit nicely rather than mixing them from quieter to louder, you'll be amazed at how loud they can go. It can help to listen to a commercial track while your'e mixing to compare your levels.
Bass is much better but can still have much more mids punch (and less actual bass), I've found a neat trick is to actually high-pass the bass, level it, then reduce the hi-pass till you start to get the warmth back in, but not all the way just so you have some bass and definition, then balance the kick drum against it for level, and then at the end on the master bus use a little eq to raise the overall bass.
Essentially - mix to level, master to enhance frequencies is better than mix to adjust frequency and master to level.
With the guitar I would use an EQ to take out some of the upper mids because the particular sound you've got going on is washing out creating wolf notes, basically a certain frequency is going into clipping/distortion which is creating a range of not as pleasant harmonics as the original distortion. In fact I'd check that it's not clipping on the output of the Kemper. If you see any even small blinks to yellow (not even to red) then you're getting some clipping. Reduce the volume there and then raise it in your DAW. It's amazing how just lowering the volume really enhances the sound with digital gear, absolute opposite of analog.
Thanks BayouTexan and deadman42 !
I’ll consider it for next time. This felt appropriate for the style and era to my ears.
Attempting to go for some classic rock riffage tonight.
Really cool track, nice guitar tones! Cool and interesting vocals, I'll be studying and learning from.
There you go, you said it in the second sentence. Don't do that. Perform at the level you are at now. Music is about making a sound you like with what you have and that includes your current capabilities. No-one listening to your stuff has to know what went into it. You don't get brownie points.
A "good musician" is simply someone who uses what they've got to make something other people enjoy. People put the wrong kind of pressure on themselves the pressure of fear, perfectionism, that actively stops you from progressing or learning, it's the voice that says "I'm not good enough to join a band yet" yet a band is the single best way to rapidly learn. This is why artists keep sketchbooks, not to get good at sketching, but to keep their feet on the ground and stop them getting precious. That's why I'm doing noodles, not to get good at noodling, but to stave off perfectionism.
The journey you take will happen regardless. May as well let go and enjoy the ride.
One thing I’d like to add BayouTexan thinking about your words some more.
If I have any skills at this at all which I really don’t think I do, it’s only because I don’t take it or myself too seriously from the start. I would recommend it as a general approach.
Every evening I go through the same process. I sit down and have absolutely no idea what I’m going to do. I start out with a few lazy riffs, I get frustrated, then I remember the three most important words… it doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter what I start with, it doesn’t matter where it ends up. It only matters that I make some effort, record something. There are no rules beyond that. That’s the point of liberation, and where creativity can be allowed to flow. I don’t have to not record the same thing I did last night. I don’t have to record guitar. “I don’t have to” is a general mantra. It could lead to why don’t I just record pencil sounds and try to turn that into a tune? It also throws out the internal competition thing that says it’s somehow about integrity. The only thing that matters is recording something and putting it online. So why not loop stuff? Why not record faster or slower for a difficult bit? Or if I want why not spend all evening practicing a piece to record it in a single take, suffering the whole way? Because again there’s no rules.
Having to upload and post it is also important because it’s ego stripping. You make something you think sucks, but still you gotta put it out there. It’s a little like gigging. You put your face to it.
The more you do, the less you say “it has to be a long piece” or “I need it to have this structure” or “it needs a solo” and realize those are arbitrary rules you’re placing on yourself mostly in an attempt to avoid doing more, and the less attached you are - then the faster you will progress and learn because you’ll make the mistakes and rather than spending time trying to rectify them you’ll just learn and next time get it a little more right.
So start by not taking it seriously. Don’t work your way towards that point. Don’t be serious right now. Don’t worry about things not working out. It doesn’t matter. The only thing that does is the journey. The results are a byproduct.
Thanks hafi19 !
Thanks for checking it out BayouTexan hafi19 and Monkey_Man !
Haha yeah I guess so Monkey_Man now you put it like that and in light of what you were saying BayouTexan listening back even though it’s completely different I’m somehow reminded hobo humpin slobo babe
Mashing up the worst possible of all worlds, because why not?
Thanks V8guitar and BayouTexan !
The bass was the challenge on this track, the chord changes go all over the shop and break mid pattern to go off in new directions.
There’s a vocoder but the rest of the synths are left as is.
Thanks whippinpost91850 !
Thanks deadman42 !
Thanks Monkey_Man its an interesting experiment to try. Honestly it took me about half an hour to figure out how to get the vocoder to work, then another half hour just to find a good carrier sound. I’m sure there’s easier ways but I always wanted to do something vocoder ish.
