An internet project finished. Listen

C

CrankyOne

New member
Ok. This is the deal: I'm usually chatting over at the Metallica boards. So, there's a Musicians forum, and we decided to make a song together. After a few months, it's finally ready. It took some time to get all the riffs, ideas, solos & vocals together and mix it all. I guess you can hear the different people's approaches in the song, and also a slightly off-tunings here and there on the solos.

This was a big task to achieve for me, since I was the main engineer and mixer on this, and I'm glad we at least got it finished. I just wanna know what you think about the song. The mixing, arranging, performance, etc.

Just that you know, I sang the vocals (didn't make the lyrics though). I played the rhythm guitar and made the bass & drums in midi. I played one solo, and the rest of the solos are from different people. The riffs ideas are from different people also.

Here's the song, I hope it's not that bad :D :


Remember, when you criticise this, it's not only me it's directed at, but an army of angry Metallica-fans :D (j/k)
 
Nice job Cranky. I've never done an internet collab. before, but I'm sure it has it's share of difficulties. My only comment is the quiet parts seemed a little too quiet and the vocals were maybe too clean for me. The drums sounded good for MIDI. Overall sounds good to me, keep it up! :D
 
COOL...cool.....cool!!
Being a veteran collaborater...I know how hard it is to get all these different parts together and for that matter...to just get the guys to send you their parts. (hint hint hint people who will remain nameless :D ) And I've never even tried to write with someone in cyberspace. You did good.
This is very cool. You did a good job of pulling it all together. The mix is fine and the playing is too. Yes, there were a couple of timing issues but they were minor and it can be difficult to get all that perfect in cyberspace.
A few details on how you transfered files....what kind of gear did you use and so on please.
 
I can only hope not too much of that was aimed at me there mr. bob... :eek:

As a virgin collaborator, I can only imagine the headaches you went through for this. Having said that....

On to the song. I don't know what kind of gear was used here, so take what I say with a grain of salt. And a shot of Jager.

I didn't care much for the flange effects on the opening guitar. It thins what should be thick. It sounds like the levels are decent, but maybe not enough bass. Alright, I'm not gonna comment on the sound too much, because I realize all the variables and things working against you. But the performances were pretty solid.
Quite honestly, I think you did an excellent job in a challenging situation. Congrats on pulling it together too!
 
jeesh!!!

quite an undertaking. it came out good!! sound's just like something that would come from a bunch of metallica fan's!!

vey cool man

peace

rick
 
I liked it a lot..

Your sound is consistently very good.. sweet soundin' chunk @ 3:05.. metal plain and simple.. Your vocals are getting better with every tune.. Did you do the first solo? the guitars get a bit loud at times (some of the guitar solos are way louder than the vocals) The sound is really good, but maybe a bit bright.. (I might just be used to my muddy sounding mixes.)

Nice back up vox.. definitley soundin better with every tune. Good guitar sound.. Nice drum sound.. they get drowned out sometimes by the guitar, but sometimes they sound right on..


I actually thought it was a Metallica tune off one of the newer albums that I ignored..


great job Crankij!





'Raise the fist of the metal child!' :)
 
Thanks to you guys. Sab was asking about the solo. I did the 3:55 solo. I didn't want to do much soloing, because I was already doing mixing, rhythm playing & singing. I just played that 3:55 solo because it was all that was left, and nobody had played it and it went like this for a week, so I just played it so I could mix it finally.

The thing really took a long time, but I think the result is satisfactory enough. There were about 10 people collaborating on this, and at least 30 guys telling me what to do (and what NOT to do) :D

About the setup. I did it like I always do. I tracked the thing with Sonar, and used my trusty Zoom505-II and beefed up the sound with Revalver. I did the drums like on my Blackened-cover. I mixed the whole drum track together, instead of mixing kick, snare, toms & cymbals separately.

I'm surprised you haven't bitched enough about the vocals, though. The Metallica fans were a bit more harsh about them. It's understandable, though, because they've got so used to hearing those ultimate Hetfield-metal roars :D
 
Hey, this is a helluva collab. Amazing that you could pull all the pieces together. I like the mix, everything laying in nicely. The tempo jump around 3:50 is cool, and I like the vocal on this better than Metallica anyway. :D
 
Nice job Cranky. You really did pull this together nicely. And I agree with Mark...I like the vox better than James'. I noticed you used Sonar....good tool eh?
Do you have the individual drum pieces available? I mean is that still an option? Because after you take a break from it, you could work wonders on them drums in Sonar if you have isolated drum tracks. Sounds pretty good as it is to me, but with a little more flexibility...

Anyway, nice job dude!
 
Sounds good,you guys did a great job of putting all the parts together,no easy task I'm sure!:D

How exactly did you put the work of ten people together?
I mean did you use mp3's?

Guitar playing was great as were the vocals!


Really nice job.

Pete
 
cool tune. sounds like a lot of work went into it. DEFINITELY influenced heavily by Metallica. It could be (early) Metallica. In my opinion, you should mix...and shred...and let somebody else sing.

Hope I don't piss you off, but you probably already know you're not a great singer, right?

MH
 
I'm confused..

Is this a Metallica song? or a song written in the same type of style?


either way it's great!
 
No Sab, it's not a Metallica song. It's just that the guys I worked with are members of the www.metallica.com musician's board. Kinda like this home recording site, but not nearly as professional. It's just a place where musicians hang out and chat about guitars drums and such. And they're mostly Metallica fans. Every once in a while somebody posts a song they've made, or wants to do a collaboration. There have been a few collaborations which have ended prematurely because a lack of interest. I guess an attention span thing. People get excited of all the possibilities of a project, but if it doesn't happen fast enough, people tend to forget it. It's quite natural. I'm surprised that this project got finished. People suggested different song ideas, and the rough idea of a metal song formed, where it would start out mellow, and get heavy and fast in the end. Well, I guess that part at least went right :D

And I know about the singing. There have been a few people there who actually did like the vocals, once they got used to them. Now I know what Mustaine must have been through :D Of course I'm not claiming to be able to sing as good as him. Not a chance, but anyway... I'm just babbling here. I better stop. Now.
 
Ahhh that changes everything. So you guys wrote the song too??? Duly impressed by the collab efforts!
 
Yeah, we wrote it. People kept posting their riff ideas. They made me the "chief" of the project, so I picked the riffs that were most suitable for this project, so I had to ditch some blues-riffs and a few weird ones that didn't sound remotely like riffs at all.

Then we were kinda discussing what riffs would fit where. As in, what would be the "verse riff", and what would be the "chorus riff". I made a few song drafts as midi files, so they'd be fast to download. They were simply for the purpose of knowing what riff goes where, and how the song flows. After we had tweaked the riff placings and stuff, I mixed one draft in mp3, so the sounds were better than in pure midi format.

At this point, we didn't even have lyrics. Somebody came up with some lyrics, and I tried to fit them somewhere. I had to chop a little part out of them to make them fit so that it wasn't too forced. I sung the vocals, and people were a bit like, "Hmm... that's ... nice" :D One guy said he'd sing the vocals, but after he listened to his vocals for the first time on tape, he decided not to do them after all.

I kinda understand him. It's hard to hear what your voice sounds before you record it. I sound more whiney than I thought, and it was really difficult just listening to my voice for the few first times. Now I'm gotten more used to hearing it, but I'm not that content of it anyway.
 
Hey Cranky,
Way cool man, I wanted to echo the question that the LT. asked..... How did you guys do your file transfer?
I love this collaboratin' thing, and am always lookin for better ways to skin a cat. Yours is an example of where collabin could be heading.... as well as just adding tracks to someones finished music...... collaboration from conception. ....Just gotta find a way to make it as fast as possible. Great stuff man, and I can totally respect the effort that went into this. ......and the fun!:D
 
We tried different file transfer things. At first, we thought of transfering the files through AIM, or ICQ. Unfortunately the file transfer in my AIM & ICQ doesn't work. I tried all the different settings, but it just didnt'. So, then someone made a geocities site to put the files into. We used that for everybody uploading their riffs there. It worked pretty good, although occasionally the site was shut down because of the bandwidth.

When the song structure was ready, so there was no more riffs sent, I uploaded the first whole song mix on my own personal web-space, which doesn't have any bandwidth limit. Of course, when people started making solos, they uploaded them into their own webspaces. The results were varying. Some of them used geocities, some used better ones. Some didn't know how to, so they couldn't send the files. One sent a file through e-mail to me.

I guess it's not easy to find a webspace provider which is free and doesn't have bandwidth limitations. Those of them which are don't have much space.

So, in short, we used a mixed bag of web providers to do the thing, and a little bit of e-mail sends too.
 
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