Song: Eva

M

maestrotee

New member
My friend and I just finished this (for the most part, unmastered as of yet) last night. If you had to pin down a genre, you probably would say something like dream pop, shoegaze, heavy shimmer guitars, lexicon reverbs on a lot of it. The vox are pretty heavily processed. That's the way we wanted it. We both are recording with Cubase. I play drums, bass, guitar and sing. My friend plays the distorted guitar on the chorus parts and added some keys. He is the production mastermind. I wrote the guitar song 10 years ago, just finished lyrics about a month ago. I also used a Boss RC-2 Loop Station for chorus on vox to give it some more swell. We're pretty proud of the way it turned out. There's no flashy guitar solos. We still like it. I'd appreciate the input ...

Eva Master 11-19 by Ammoniad on SoundCloud - Create, record and share your sounds for free
 
i love the low bass fuzz in the beginning. I would do some more interesting parts with the vocals, production-wise. It reminds me of muse a lot, but slower tempo'd.

for S&G's i'd try some cool panning tricks with the vocals along with some vocal distortion in select parts. but thats just my taste :)

edit - really cool song tho and i love your style.
 
Thank you so much!! It's been a while since I've finished something that I feel this level of satisfaction with. Yeah, we had a lot of ideas with vocals, just wanted to walk the fine line of layers of production and yet still discernible, tried more subtle effects until the end AM radio style one at the end. I like that one. :)
 
Cool feel to the song. Nice mood you've set.

Couple of things on the drums. There's a "tick tick tick" on the ride cymbal that tends to dominate the drum submix. The snare is a little on the wimpy side. I'd like a lot more crack to it. Not sure about this one, but the kick sounds a little anemic - as in not enough low end.

The vocal effects were cool and appropriate. I just think they're a wee bit too wet. Back off the reverb a few dbs.

Lots of low-midrange buildup. Like maybe around 400hz - 800hz or so.
 
I couldn't agree more with the drums! Through a series of mishaps, we had to load in a previous mix of the track on a complete rerecording of the the song just to get the song back from a complete loss on the hard drive. I was not sold on the drums when we did it initially, I just kind of used that to establish the flow of the song, and, in a way, now I feel stuck with it. However, since the original drum tracks were put down, we have gotten the Neil Peart drums plug-ins from NI. Also, I am not a drummer. I can play drums, but I am more comfortable with a guitar or bass in my hand. I have a Roland V kit that I am using to play basic beats and end up looping alot of it sadly. I would LOVE to find a really good drummer to put a good beat to this in a MIDI file! :) The production master, Paul Seegers, and I are putting together a 8 or 9 song release hopefully by spring or summer and we're calling it Thy Fearful Symmetry. We've got some good things in the works I think. Thanks for the feedback!
 
Very dreamy, almost haunting. A little too compressed for me. I like the reverb. love the intro. It sounds like the 'click' from the kick is panned way over to the left, but the oomph is in the centre, is that intentional (or my ageing ears)?
 
Thank you, thank you. Yeah, I don't remember us intentionally panning the kick anywhere but I think it was a stock kit in Garageband that I was triggering with my V-drums before I bought Cubase (instead of recording to MIDI in Cubase like I would do now and using the new Neil Peart kits) and that's how the stock sound was panned. Someone else had mentioned that to me last night, too. Like I said, I might get anal and take a completely new crack at the drums, or find someone who would be willing to put one down in a MIDI file and get contributory credit for the rest of my natural life. :)
 
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I like the use of the effects, and the "dreaminess" .... low frequencies tend to rumble through too much for me. I'd bring them down a smidgen.

I have a song in this type of genre that I don't know how to produce yet. ... not quite ready to navigate my effects.... but I will probably return to this song periodically to remember the feel - and read about "how to" do it.
 
Thanks, and I have noticed the EQ work that still needs to be done too as I've listened to it several times since last night. A couple of vocal tone issues that I can hear in a couple parts and probably no one else can that still makes me shudder a little bit when I hear them, but they're minor so it's really no big issue anyway. I could get pretty obsessive and Type A about this. Trying not to wear down friend, Paul. He's a gear junkie so me doing take after take means he's gotta operate a good set of bells and whistles. Usually, about that time, he rolls his eyes and tells me something about how the imperfections contribute to the dynamics of the song, yada, yada. lol Considering reapproaching this song entirely fresh from a sound rhythm section, tho. And letting a good drummer build the dynamics to what is there. Seriously, drummers, PM me.
 
maestrotee said:
Usually, about that time, he rolls his eyes and tells me something about how the imperfections contribute to the dynamics of the song, yada, yada.
Click to expand...

That's how I came about my name - the guy with the equipment telling me how a "few clams" can add to the mix - and "if you make enough, you can have clam soup." :listeningmusic:

They really don't know what we're after - but as long as they don't take their ball and go home, all is forward.

There is a guy on here that was offering free drum tracks --- where'd he go?
 
There's some nice ideas on here - I like the swirling feel of the distortion and the chorus effect. Instrumentally it made me think of Evol era Sonic Youth, probably down to that chorus guitar. I think clearing up some of that low mid end mud would really help. Is there some pumping of the compression from around 2:18 too?

I like though that there's a lot of different elements to the mix without sounding discordant or it really being obvious that new parts keep being introduced.
 
And huge Sonic Youth fan here. Grateful for the comparison! I've always liked that 'wall of sound' with guitars. I spend alot of time listening to stuff like Depeche Mode, Cocteau Twins, The Cure, A Perfect Circle. I don't want to borrow from anybody's style, but as we were putting it all together, I started recognizing different elements that reminded me of some of my favorite artists. Fun when that happens.
 
Just got home from banging on some drums and remixing. Re-approaching this song from percussions. We have bass and snare on separate tracks and are trying to redial in a god mix. I can't wait to repost and hear some more feedback. I'm so grateful to be working with someone with such a great ear for music and production and also patient. ;)
 
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