Sometime Soon - new tune

Armistice

Armistice

Son of Yoda
Hi peeps

Been a while.

A tune I've been working on, it seems, forever, since I got a cool delay pedal for Christmas and starting making interesting backwards guitar sounds and thought... hmm, might do a song with that.

Different from my recent stuff I guess. Shorter, less complicated, poppier - only 3:33 long - can't remember the last time I did a song so short.



Sometime Soon

Your thoughts appreciated, as always...

Sometime Soon

Well I think that you should know, I think I have to go
There's a better place out there, sometime, somehow, somewhere
Hey, I'm leaving, hey, I'm leaving
Hey, I'm leaving, hey, I'm leaving
Sometime soon

Well this whole place is just full of sad endings and I haven’t even found where my life starts
It’s time to chase the sun, it’s time to pay the piper, it’s time to break each other’s hearts

And I know you have to stay
I wish it wasn’t that way
I wish you wanted more
I thought you did before

Hey I’m leaving, hey I’m leaving
Hey I’m leaving, hey I’m leaving
Sometime soon, sometime soon

And I really hope that I’m not running from this darkness to a greater darkness still
I have to find a way from here to the rest of the world, there’s no time left to kill
Have to see the big lights and the poets and the dreamers, have to see what this guitar and I can do
But you know I’ll miss you, I’ll miss you, I’ll miss you, I’ll miss you, I’ll miss you
 
Good to see another song from you Armistice. Distinctive sound as always. The lower end of your mix needs some love. I'm hearing boomy and muddy. Between the bass and guitars there is a lot happening in the low midrange. I'd start by high passing promiscuously and turning down the guitars, then reassess. I think the low-midrange buildup and generally the loudness of guitars might have pushed you to boost the vocal too much. Effectively, you've got a volume war happening between the guitars and the vocal. The drums are collateral damage. They sound tiny and upside down--the overheads and toms are more audible, snare and kick less so. None of them are really driving the song.

I get that the guitar sound and the backward delay effect or whatever was your cornerstone when you wrote the song. You want that sound to be front and dominant. However, I think you would get better results if you rebuilt the mix from the bottom up--kick, bass, lead vocal first, then snare, then guitars and the rest of the kit.
 
Robus said:
Good to see another song from you Armistice.
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OK, quote function not working properly at the moment.

Thanks Robus. I'd done some tweaking along the lines you'd pointed out after you'd listened but before I've read your comments, and have updated the file but I have further to do - need to reset the main vocal as I've run out of wind room in the loud bits and it's sort of getting a bit lost - and I do need to work on the guitars in that section a bit more. Will get onto it tonight. Cheers
 
I am hearing a bit of muddy schtuff that could be removed from the guitars, and maybe even the delay itself. Great sounding vocals, though they are being a little drowned out by the delay guitars during that first verse. Nice drum sound. Oh, yeah, those guitars in the "it's time to chase" section are stomping all over the vocal. I'd knock down that guitar bus 1.5-2.5 db, at least, and see how that sounds. Background vox very nice and smooth, and in appropriate places, spatially.

That's it, really. Just turn the guitars down! Nice work dude. Nice tune too.
 
Thanks andrush. I've taken on board various bits of feedback from here and elsewhere re. the low/mids, guitar levels and vocal levels.

New mix up.
 
Much better. I'm still hearing conflict here and there between guitars and lead vocals, but nothing like before. The low end is cleaner, and the drums seem more present.
 
I like the guitar sounds. It washes over real nice.

There are some times when the vocals may not be getting enough space from the guitar. I wonder if this could be a candidate for side chain compression. That way when the guitar is in full bloom it's good, and when the vocals are going the guitar backs off just a touch but not noticeably. Anyway, just a thought. Sounds great already.
 
Robus said:
Much better. I'm still hearing conflict here and there between guitars and lead vocals, but nothing like before. The low end is cleaner, and the drums seem more present.
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Thanks. I'm still working on it. I normally HPF the reverb bus but had forgotten on this occasion - that cleaned up a bit of the boom down there - plus ratcheting up the HPFs on all the guitars a bit. Always a struggle when you have so many on a track. Still nudging the vocal into line as well. Syllable by syllable. :eek::thumbs up:
 
ibleedburgundy said:
I like the guitar sounds. It washes over real nice.

There are some times when the vocals may not be getting enough space from the guitar. I wonder if this could be a candidate for side chain compression. That way when the guitar is in full bloom it's good, and when the vocals are going the guitar backs off just a touch but not noticeably. Anyway, just a thought. Sounds great already.
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Thanks IBB - I've never tried side chain compression. Understand the theory, just never quite sure how to go about it. In the end I do a lot of automating to cover it. I'm still working on the track. Spent another hour or so of nudging this and that just now, but haven't updated the file at this stage. Will further attack on the weekend! :thumbs up:
 
Armistice said:
Thanks IBB - I've never tried side chain compression. Understand the theory, just never quite sure how to go about it. In the end I do a lot of automating to cover it. I'm still working on the track. Spent another hour or so of nudging this and that just now, but haven't updated the file at this stage. Will further attack on the weekend! :thumbs up:
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I've tried it a few times but was only truly successful with it once. I've read about it a bunch. I watched a youtube video to figure out the best way to do it in logic. It's a good tool to have in your arsenal.
 
Armistice said:
Thanks. I'm still working on it. I normally HPF the reverb bus but had forgotten on this occasion - that cleaned up a bit of the boom down there - plus ratcheting up the HPFs on all the guitars a bit. Always a struggle when you have so many on a track. Still nudging the vocal into line as well. Syllable by syllable. :eek::thumbs up:
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Armistice, are you familiar with the Abbey Road reverb trick? Somebody on this forum pointed me to this video a while back. I use it each and every time I apply reverb. It really cleans up a track.



Is there a new mix coming?
 
Robus said:
Armistice, are you familiar with the Abbey Road reverb trick? Somebody on this forum pointed me to this video a while back. I use it each and every time I apply reverb. It really cleans up a track.



Is there a new mix coming?
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No, I wasn't aware of it. Seems logical - never thought of going both ways - and I think I was HPFing at about 400, so clearly going higher is OK. I'll have a play with it on the weekend. Cheers

Yes, there will be a new mix but it won't be until Saturday afternoon Australia time - that's the next opportunity I have to muck around with it all.
 
Armistice said:
Yes, there will be a new mix but it won't be until Saturday afternoon Australia time - that's the next opportunity I have to muck around with it all.
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And Saturday afternoon is here and a new mix is up. Did some minor drum tweaks as well to make it a little less "draggy" in the quiet bits.
 
It's moving in the right direction. The guitars are more disciplined and in scale with the vocal. I think they could come down more. The mix still feels upside-down. The energy is in the guitar and vocals, while the bass, seem distant. Those could come up, or the guitars and vocals down, to get a better balanced mix. The high passing is also a big improvement. This sounds cleaner. However, since you are lacking some beef in the drum kit, you might check the cutoff frequency and make sure you aren't high passing too high.

Just curious, where in the songwriting process do the drums come in? Are you building them in early on?
 
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Robus said:
The mix still feels upside down
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Thanks, but I can't really do anything with that as I have no idea what you mean... :laughings: I'll check the EQ on the kit, however. I've got to listen to it on a few different systems now to reference it, so I'll see how the overall balance is.

The drums come into the songwriting process when they come in. I'm a guitarist, so the song is usually envisaged on a guitar - typically I put a basic beat down and record main guitars to that, then bass. Then I'll work out ancillary guitars in, or I may do the drums in more depth as I have a good idea by then where the main emphasis points will be. And then I may do the ancillary guitars. Or the other way around. Depends. Then I work out words, melodies etc. Then I sing it. Then I do harmonies. Then I revisit the drums again. Something like that.

And then I go back and forwards for ages working out the final form. I've made the drums a little more interesting in the mix I have now - not sure if it's posted or not, but as I listen to it this morning, I'm thinking, "too much" in a couple of spots, so I'll go back and tweak again tonight, probably. I'm at the point with this song now where if I change something, I walk away for a bit, and then listen later - see how I feel about it.

The next song I'm doing started out as a drum rhythm, however, so we'll see where that ends up.
 
This is really good.
Very good performances all the way around on a complicated arrangement. Great mix too. I'm impressed man!
Great job Armistice!
 
I thought the mix was good. The vocal can use a bit more space carved out for it -- sounds like it is fighting the guitars.
 
RedStone said:
Midrange focus maybe needed some tweaking, and I wanted to hear some more of the snare's nice depth. Here's an effort to demonstrate.

View attachment 99811

View attachment 99812

Anyway, it's good. Love the sound of the guitars during the interludes!
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Thanks Red. I think by the time I'd read your comment I'd already done a little more mid-scooping and drum twiddling along the lines of what you mentioned. Cheers:thumbs up:

jimistone said:
This is really good.
Very good performances all the way around on a complicated arrangement. Great mix too. I'm impressed man!
Great job Armistice!
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Thanks Jimi :)

Nola said:
I thought the mix was good. The vocal can use a bit more space carved out for it -- sounds like it is fighting the guitars.
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Thanks Nola. I've been up and down on that vocal a bit - it sounds clear enough, almost too much, on my monitors, but when I started listening on other normal playback systems I could hear that it needs a bit more work. Cheers.
 
Cool tune, Armistice. I only heard the latest version, so it's hard to comment on improvements already made. I think the left guitar might be a tad hotter than the one on the right? Sounds like the left guitar has more of those mid-range frequencies going on too... Maybe just for shnits and giggles lower the mid on the left guitar a db or two and see what happens, try anywhere from 1K up to like 5k. Might smooth it out a little and make the vocal sound even better. In my cans (Beyer Dynamic DT-770s) that's what I'm hearing that I would play with.

These are nits of course, it definitely sounds pretty good as is, that Delay pedal sounds sweet. Nice job writing too. :)
 
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