Ambient Math Rock EP

K

Kougai112

New member
I posted this once before a little while back, but in a different Forum label(wrong one maybe?)

So a few weeks ago, as of then, I made, recorded,mixed, and released my first REAL EP/cohesive collective of songs;i.e, Album. Anyways, I was wondering if anyone would give a listen and give me feedback. The songs themself, the recording quality, how everything is mixed, the levels of the songs cohesively, EVERYTHING, essentially. This is actually my first post on any forum, ever, despite how much I read forums in any given week. But there's always room for new things, right?

vvvvv The record can be found here vvvvv

thiscitycalledearth.bandcamp

Also, if you download it there's one extra song included, its pretty gritty hahah

Thanks!
 
I listened to The Plight and Mercy of Vienna.

The feedback stuff in the intro was cool.

I think the guitars are dominating the mix. They're covering everything else, except maybe the cymbals.

On the drums: overall they're tough to hear. The cymbals are very hissy. The snare lacks power - like its low end have been removed. Can't hear enough of the kick to tell what it sounds like.

I can't hear a bass.

Some of the rhythm guitar parts are kind of fizzy. A little too much gain for my personal taste.
 
In any case, I definitely get what you're saying about the drum stuff, and I guess the levelling of things can use some work too, not too much extra work hahah. Honestly though, I do hope you listened to more than just that one though. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on and it'd be a shame to sit out on it all. @___@
 
You're not likely to get many people to listen to more than one or two songs at a time, I'm afraid.

You'd probably get the most mileage out of it by posting each song one at a time and tweaking each individual mix over the course of a week or two. Then, once you'd run all or most the songs through that guantlet, you post the entire project with a note mentioning that these were the songs we'd been critiqueing for the last month or so.

(Either way, my work computer doesn't load bandcamp pages. :( )
 
Full link: This City Called Earth

Dear Science Part I: Overall it's acceptible by any home recording standard (maybe too compressed when mastered -- some of the kick drumming saturates the mix). The reverb used on guitars and drums (especially the snare) is aggressive, drums being too slap-backish and guitars being too roomy. These might be personal choices but you have to mix for the likely listeners, not yourself.

BTW, I wouldn't call a nearly 50 minute collection of music an "EP". ;)
 
Kougai112 said:
So you only listened to one song?
Click to expand...

Good luck getting anyone to listen to more than that. It might be the most important thing in the world to you, but it's not that important to anyone else. That's just the way it is.

By the way, I didn't listen to any of them, so be thankful to the people that took the time to listen to one.

P.S. You have a total of 4 posts here, and not one of them has been a comment on anyone else's tunes. So, I hope you're not complaining about people listening to only one of yours :)
 
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"Granny Smith, In Another Dimension (Again?!)" is very cool. The mix is very unbalanced and noisy, but i kind of like that. Drums could be louder and less smashed though
 
I listened to a few of these. I kinda dig what you're doing here. Overall it's perfectly acceptable. There seems to be a general lack of substance in the lowest octave or two. That's mostly arrangement, of course, there's just not much going on down there.

Most of my problems are with the drums. Overall I think the actual drums sound pretty okay. The snare has a strange kind of click at the front edge which I would have to get rid of it if was my mix. I think it's just some heavy handed compression with a not quite fast enough (or maybe too fast?) attack. Then the "meat" of the snare is kind of smashed and then gated off or something? Is there some sample layered on there? It sounds just a tad generic when we hear it so damn often. That's small stuff, though.

The big problem for me is the cymbals. It starts with a performance that is extremely cymbal happy. Then the cymbals in general are kinda thin, which wouldn't be a huge deal except that they are mixed way too loud compared to the rest of the kit. What really makes them suck is the way that they get smashed up into the brick wall and do that seething, breathing, sucking thing. I can see where you might use that kind of thing as an effect for a short period somewhere in some mix. It's not doing you any favors here as a default thing. Seriously, the drums are pretty decent in the quieter sections, but in the climax parts when you take your foot off the hat pedal and start using the crashes like rides it just becomes a randomly seething wash of yuck. Sometimes I like randomly seething washes of yuck, but... I think this "sound" is becoming almost industry standard in certain styles of music. I hate it.

In that second song I heard some glitchy clicks and stuff. I didn't listen twice to make sure it wasn't just my system. If it really is in there, I wonder if you did it on purpose. If so, I can sort of dig it, but I think you need to try a little harder to make it sound like it's not just some fuck up you failed to edit out.

Like I said, I do like this stuff, and I'm glad you got it down and out. I think it deserves a bit more care in the production. Or you could just go make some more and make the next one better!
 
After sitting off of it, I definitely get what you mean, those cymbals are really harsh! To be fair I haven't really sat on any of it too much, so much tweaking and not letting my ears have a break. And as far as glitchy clicks, I'm not sure what that's about, it's ONLY on bandcamp, so I'm not sure what's up with that. That you for your input though, I can definitely reflect on that stuff for sure.
 
As far as the people complaining about my one one song comment, calm down, it's not that serious guys. If you didn't listen to it, that's fine, I hold little regards to my own low sense of pride. In any case, I asked that question because the other songs are done a it differently, so I was simply asking if that was the only song that was checked out.
 
The drum room sound kind of bothers me because of how much of a wash it creates in the mix at times. (On a few tracks) But thats not to say its not stylistically acceptable, I'm just saying it makes a lot of definition go away. :)
 
I listened to 4 songs as I found your music quite interesting, but noticed some similarities throughout the mixes. As was already mentioned, there's some frantic drumming going on with lots of cymbal wash and I had listener fatigue after after probably the second song as a result. For me, as a bass player, I like bottom end and that seemed to be lacking in all the songs ( maybe there is no bass, I can't tell), but I think the bottom end in general could be brought up to give the music more punch and to round it out. The guitars are way too dominant in most of the songs, as was also mentioned and I know they are obviously guitar songs but they basically drown everything else out. I quite like the music though, very interesting, keep up the good work!
 
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