Comment on the mix of this Punk Song?

I

iceyflame

New member
My band is recording an EP and this is one song we've finished so far. the mix isn't final but i thought i'd put it up here and see what people think. The problem is I can only upload it as .wma because it needs to be less than 10MB so I can't put up lossless .wav.

Tell me what you think.

And, as long as were on the topic - does anyone know any free sites that let me upload files larger than 10MB/.wav?

http://www.box.net/shared/1tnph0hf8c
 
Lol. Sounds pretty good. Nice old-school thing yall got going on there. Maybe bring the vox and backing vox out just a hair more, but overall pretty good. :)
 
Yeah pretty early 90's sounding. Not bad. I like a lil more melody in my punkrock but it ait bad. I like the snare sound.
 
Hehehe I didn't like the sound overall, but then again, garage punk isn't my cup of tea. Many bands like that rough sound, and many more seek desperately for that sound (see Ulver's Nattens Madrigal, it was recorded with a portastudio in the middle of the forest). They say that kind of sound goes with the music atmosphere (raw black metal in their case) but I think it applies here to, but I personally, don't like it :)
I'm curious, how did you record the drums? and in how many tracks do you have it?

Edit: After posting this I went to hear that ulver cd and I couldn't laugh out loud. Here I uploaded a sample so you can all "enjoy" it :)
 
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They went to the forest to record that crap?


Ideas of long haired black metal mongoloids never cease to amaze me.:rolleyes:
 
Thanks guys. I was thinking that the backups might be too loud though.

To answer Vagodeoz, I recorded the drums with SM81s on stereo overheads, SM57 on snare, and Behringer XM8500 on kick. thing is, i miced the kick on the batter head, wheere the beater hits it, and that way it's easy to get that clicky+bass kicksound, BUT the problem was it was picking up alot of the bottomsnare sound and my snare wasn't tuned very nicely and alot of sound was coming out of the bottom, and so, if I add more high end to the kick to make it clickier, the snare gets more nasty, and so I tried to get an alright blend without making the snare too nasty, but I did sacrifice a bit of snare sound for a reasonable kick sound.

But I have learned my lesson and from now on mic from inside the bass drum, pointing towards where the beater hits the head, and I still get that amazing click sound with tons of isolation and no adverse effect on the snare.

Oh and can you make out the lyrics? Because I find lyrics are one of the most important parts of punkmusic.
 
Greg_L said:
Lol. I disagree wholeheartedly. :D
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hahaha me too :P I think it's probably the worse sounding part in the mix. What I would do (I often do) is record a couple of hits of every drum part once I have everything in place. So I can use triggers, so I replace every kick hit for one of the samples.
It has many adventages. You can work a lot on the sound of one single hit and then use it.
I use drumagog for that task, which has dynamic tracking (loud hits are loud, quiet hits are quiet...) It also has the ability to let you mix between the drum track, and the triggered track.
Also, in a way it's like "doubling" your drums, or your base rythm part at least (bass and snare), which should give you more power.
I use this sometimes on the snare, but almost every time in the kick.
The kick I use for the trigger also has way lower frequencies (up to 50 or 60 hz), which my Bd can't produce.
I highly recommend you to try this for both the snare and kick, especially if you recorded the kick with anything less than a AKG 112 or Beta52 and your drum set costs less than 2000$.
 
Of course i'm talking about punk music. Intelligent punk music, not stupid oipunk, or lame ignorant 'punx' bullshit spouting out their bastardized version of 'anarchism'. And im not talking about the mainstream 'music' industry's verson of punk - trendy kids with skateshoes and spikey hair playing watered down medicore drivel. I'm talking bands like Minor Threat, Dead Kennedys, Crass. where the lyrics > the music.

But alas I shall not get into the debate.

Back to recording - I agree on the snare sounding shit and explained the reason for it in my previous post. The drums for this track were recorded quite a while ago, when I first got my SM81s and hadn't spent time tuning or fiddling with mic placement, and as i also stated in my previous post, I have learnt to better that now. yay.
 
Also, one recording technique I read somewhere on the internet and recently prooved to be great (imo at least) was to put the left OH mic 2 drumsticks away from the snare, exactly above the middle of the snare, and the right OH mic also 2 drumsticks away from the middle of the snare but this time above the drummer's right shoulder. This is supposed to give the most natural panning of your drumkit, of course you will have to tune a little the angles of the mics to your wishes.
The stereo image of the drum in the link I posted won't be very natural, since after the mixing, I panned the stereo takes of the drum and acoustic guitar a little to the left and bass and lead guitar a little to the right according to the video, but you can still hear it works pretty good.
If you have a bad drummer (like me) you might wanna warn him that if he hits the mikes he pays them, since they are a little low and might get in the way of an excited drummer's drumstick. Or you could raise them a little, just make sure that the distance between each diaphragm and the center of the snare is the same in both mics (you can measure that easily with a mic cable).
And lastly, experiment and tell us your results :)
 
iceyflame said:
Of course i'm talking about punk music. Intelligent punk music, not stupid oipunk, or lame ignorant 'punx' bullshit spouting out their bastardized version of 'anarchism'. And im not talking about the mainstream 'music' industry's verson of punk - trendy kids with skateshoes and spikey hair playing watered down medicore drivel. I'm talking bands like Minor Threat, Dead Kennedys, Crass. where the lyrics > the music.
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Crass = 100% lyrics about bullshit i don't want to listen about + 0% punkrock music.
 
Vagodeoz said:
Also, one recording technique I read somewhere on the internet and recently prooved to be great (imo at least) was to put the left OH mic 2 drumsticks away from the snare, exactly above the middle of the snare, and the right OH mic also 2 drumsticks away from the middle of the snare but this time above the drummer's right shoulder. This is supposed to give the most natural panning of your drumkit, of course you will have to tune a little the angles of the mics to your wishes.
The stereo image of the drum in the link I posted won't be very natural, since after the mixing, I panned the stereo takes of the drum and acoustic guitar a little to the left and bass and lead guitar a little to the right according to the video, but you can still hear it works pretty good.
If you have a bad drummer (like me) you might wanna warn him that if he hits the mikes he pays them, since they are a little low and might get in the way of an excited drummer's drumstick. Or you could raise them a little, just make sure that the distance between each diaphragm and the center of the snare is the same in both mics (you can measure that easily with a mic cable).
And lastly, experiment and tell us your results :)
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Thats called the "recorderman method". Very good O/H technique.

Polska_77 said:
Crass = 100% lyrics about bullshit i don't want to listen about + 0% punkrock music.
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Lol. I wholeheartedly agree.
:D
 
Polska_77 said:
Crass = 100% lyrics about bullshit i don't want to listen about + 0% punkrock music.
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Hmm, ignorance is easy. Not to worry. Your statement that Crass' music isnt 'punkrock' already loses your credability so don't you worry, but I do believe you are taking the ideologies of 'punk' in the wrong direction ;).

About the OH technique, yes I have seen that Recorderman technique before and I did experiment a long time ago, but i'll give it another shot.

Did you think the drums' stereo imaging in this wasn't very good? I think it was alright, but then again, I don't do any tom rolls in it, so you can only judge from the cymbals but you don't know where my cymbals are :o.
 
iceyflame said:
Hmm, ignorance is easy. Not to worry. Your statement that Crass' music isnt 'punkrock' already loses your credability so don't you worry, but I do believe you are taking the ideologies of 'punk' in the wrong direction ;).

About the OH technique, yes I have seen that Recorderman technique before and I did experiment a long time ago, but i'll give it another shot.

Did you think the drums' stereo imaging in this wasn't very good? I think it was alright, but then again, I don't do any tom rolls in it, so you can only judge from the cymbals but you don't know where my cymbals are :o.
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I think Crass is shit too. Is my credibility shot now too? I've only been listening to punk for 25 years now. Please enlighten us.
 
Hmm, ignorance is easy. Not to worry. Your statement that Crass' music isnt 'punkrock' already loses your credability so don't you worry, but I do believe you are taking the ideologies of 'punk' in the wrong direction .
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Yes I am ignorant. I treat music as entertainment. I listen to a lot of stuff, the only condition being the band plays good music, most of the time thats R'n'r for me.
When I checked out crass, I got some radio clips intertwined with a bunch of dialogues and practically no music. That was enough for me. As far as these ideologically involved punk bands, Conflict was a lot better cause their albums actually involved music.

I heard the Feeding of the 5000 album from crass was pretty good, but honestly i never got around to listening to it, due to my previous experience with the band.

And all that being said, I find it quite typical of these "involved punk" people to tell you stuff, like your credibility is low cause you don't like Crass, or how can you call yourself a punkrocker if you don't like this, do this, eat meat, or don;t fight for social equality. bla bla bla
 
Polska_77 said:
And all that being said, I find it quite typical of these "involved punk" people to tell you stuff, like your credibility is low cause you don't like Crass, or how can you call yourself a punkrocker if you don't like this, do this, eat meat, or don;t fight for social equality. bla bla bla
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That is what I'm against, people saying 'oh your not punk if you dont listen to this bla blah blah' or 'this isn't punkrockmusic' which is why I was aggrivated at you deciding what was 'punkrock' music and what wasn't.

But from one punk fan to another, I highly recommend Feeding of 5000.

And greg you are certainly not contributing as much to the discussion as Polska_77 is, and I'm not sure at point you think age or the amount of years one has been listening comes into it - it's what you take from it.
 
I just disagree that lyrics are the most important in punkrock. To me they aren't and crass is a perfect example. Lots of content with crappy form. Plus, I'm not gonna argue about crass' politics because we'll never agree on that.


But from one punk fan to another, I highly recommend Feeding of 5000.
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I might check it out some time. I'll stick to Brutal Attack for todays beautiful day-off Monday morning.
 
iceyflame said:
And greg you are certainly not contributing as much to the discussion as Polska_77 is, and I'm not sure at point you think age or the amount of years one has been listening comes into it - it's what you take from it.
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What is there to contribute? You made a general assumption based on ignorance. I'm just gonna leave you to wallow in your ignorance. :)
 
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