First real try at home-made album: Tell me what you think?

J

jguitar_tm

New member
I'm in this band call Traveling Mercies. None of us are recording engineers and we just wanna have a good time making music and try to gain experience to maybe move on in music one day or make it as a band in the years to come. Anyway, we just finished up this project, an album called "American Hymns." It was recorded entirely at my house with Presonus Firestudio and Studio One software. It's not professional, and it's our first try at real, live recorded drums. The album is available to listen on bandcamp is available for free download if you care:

Traveling Mercies

Would appreciate it if some of the veterans around here would listen and give your opinion. Thanks!
 
Good music; you guys have some talent. The drums are a bit muffled but otherwise this whole thing sounds excellent considering this is your first album.
Btw, the last track is my favorite. Such a nice, mellow sound to it.
 
Xaaron1377 said:
Good music; you guys have some talent. The drums are a bit muffled but otherwise this whole thing sounds excellent considering this is your first album.
Btw, the last track is my favorite. Such a nice, mellow sound to it.
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Thank you so much! I agree with you on the drums, mainly with the snare. I don't know what it was. Maybe the drum micing kit we bought didn't have a very good snare mic, or we just didn't figure how to EQ it well enough or something (my brother was in charge of the main mixing).
 
Next time you record the drums, maybe try a different mic, another mic placement, etc. I don't know how many microphones you have but if you experiment with that you might be able to find one that sounds better on the snare. But either way this whole album is great. Keep playing!
 
Can't really add anything to what others have said. Great songs, great recordings. The snare is the only thing that lets them down for me. If the volume could be lowered on it and a touch of reverb added it wouldn't sound so harsh or dry. Great first attempt though.

I really enjoyed the songs.
 
So I'm listening to the first track that came up, "Come Out Fighting" (I thought it might have been a cover of the Pennywise song before the music started). I'm not going to comment on the drums because it's already been said above; however, I will add that I think the same applies to the other instruments as well. They all sound a little muffled and pushed back in the mix. It may be because of this that the vocals sound like they are a completely separate recording - like you had bounced down the music to a two-track and then tracked the vocals on top of that.

You guys sound young - would I be wrong in guessing that this is probably the first "real" band that you guys have been in? I say this because I remember having recordings much worse than this when I first started out and it's par for the course. Your songs are good and that's what matters. The recordings will get better as you learn more over time. If you guys aren't young and have been doing this for a while, then may God have mercy on your souls. haha. :p
 
DogmaticVox said:
So I'm listening to the first track that came up, "Come Out Fighting" (I thought it might have been a cover of the Pennywise song before the music started). I'm not going to comment on the drums because it's already been said above; however, I will add that I think the same applies to the other instruments as well. They all sound a little muffled and pushed back in the mix. It may be because of this that the vocals sound like they are a completely separate recording - like you had bounced down the music to a two-track and then tracked the vocals on top of that.

You guys sound young - would I be wrong in guessing that this is probably the first "real" band that you guys have been in? I say this because I remember having recordings much worse than this when I first started out and it's par for the course. Your songs are good and that's what matters. The recordings will get better as you learn more over time. If you guys aren't young and have been doing this for a while, then may God have mercy on your souls. haha. :p
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Nah, we're young. We've been a band for two years. Youngest guy in the band is 18, and the oldest is 20. We also didn't have much of a budget to really build up our studio for these recordings. We'll either learn how to fully utilize the potential of the stuff we have now or upgrade in the future. We're proud of this album though and I'm glad you all seem to agree that the songwriting itself is pretty stellar. That's good to hear.
 
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