Bennie and the Jets Inst. Tracks

uncle sixer

uncle sixer

Member
This project is going to be a duet with my wife (my music, her voice) when she is ready to sing.

The Instrument mix has gone through a couple of generations and I think I have it where I want it now, but I am ready to hear opinions, get constructive feedback, or have my ego crushed.

Arrangement? Instrument levels/panning? Reverb settings? Low/mid/high frequency balance? Dynamics? BTW, it is up 1 semitone from Elton John's studio version.

To me it sounds pretty good on my headphones with fresh ears. On cell phone and computer speakers I feel like the guitars and cymbals jump out a little more. In the car the guitars disappear a little.

She can really sing, so she will tear up that chorus when she is warmed-up and ready! Thanks for listening!

 
The acoustic guitar seems to be the primary instrument - making it a very guitar based song - so the famous piano riff gets lost a bit, but with all the guitars, the bass gets lost because it's often playing high in the same place as the guitars. When it goes low and plays the bum-bum-bum single notes it's much more effective, and the high twiddly bits seem a bit pointless. Everything is nicely recorded - but that's the beef I think - the song is about a live band, and Elton's version sounds live, not studio, and this is very studio. Nothing wrong with that and it all fits as this arrangement - but is it live enough once you get the grippingly good vocals on it?
 
Sounds good, It sounds a little slower than the original ? I agree that the main instrument being guitar makes it different, so I have to hear it with the vocals. I never build a track without a scratch vocal, this way I know how the instrumentation will sound against the vocal. Everyone produces their own way though.
 
rob aylestone said:
The acoustic guitar seems to be the primary instrument - making it a very guitar based song - so the famous piano riff gets lost a bit, but with all the guitars, the bass gets lost because it's often playing high in the same place as the guitars. When it goes low and plays the bum-bum-bum single notes it's much more effective, and the high twiddly bits seem a bit pointless. Everything is nicely recorded - but that's the beef I think - the song is about a live band, and Elton's version sounds live, not studio, and this is very studio. Nothing wrong with that and it all fits as this arrangement - but is it live enough once you get the grippingly good vocals on it?
Click to expand...

I remember watching a doc about Yellow Brick Road some years back, and the complaint was that the track was kind of blah. Gus Dudgeon added a slapback echo, the hand clapping and crowd sounds from some concert recordings and PRESTO... a live concert recording that sounded exciting.
 
Sounds pretty good so far. I'd bring the piano out a bit more as that kinda drove the original along. Let's hear it with the vocals
 
Back in the 70s on 4 track we recorded a trad jazz album - you know the banjo, clarinet, drums, trumpet type thing and it didn't do much at all. The band were playing in a cellar at a pub about 40 miles away and I had at that time a Nagra reel to reel we used for film audio. The camera (16mm) had a sync unit and the Nagra crash synced to a crystal generated signal from the camera. I took the Nagra, and a Shure 545 and recorded the crowd in the breaks. Then joined them end to end and then with about 20 mins done, slipped them against each other and on the 4 track, had them panned left/mid left/mid right/right, then sent that to the stereo machine - we remixed the songs, and put the audience noise over the top, low level - with no clapping between numbers, and we got a really live sounding recording with nobody spotting it was a trick - it got renamed 'live at the Loaves and Fishes' - and did pretty well in sales for years. I think as Rich says - this is one recording where roughening it up a bit might be better? It sounds perfectly fine - if you aren't old and remember the original. That is the thing. A bit like Smoke on the Water - the live recording sort of captured something the studio version couldn't.

I've always thought that if you change arrangements, then you need to go further than normal to let it stand on it's own. You kind of need to force the acceptance that it's not just a copy?
 
Thanks for the comments. Here it is with the context of some scratch vox.... my wife would not want this to go public, though. She didn't even warm-up and didn't really know the words...

It did feel slow to me to play, and obviously boring/monotonous without vocals... the lyrics feel like they are on tempo to me, though (lots of sixteenth notes in the phrases)

 
That's going to work isn't it! I was wondering what kind of voice she'd have and the electric boots, mohair suit section gives a clue what it's going to be like. Keep us updated.
 
It definitely works better with vocals. I might be changing to a different reverb and back it down a bit. It seems to make the vocals move too much towards the background. The tail is too long, like she's in a huge hall, but the band is in a small bar.

Looking forward to version 2.
 
Thanks again, guys. Yeah, the reverb is something I wrestled with a little. Everything else is on a reverb bus and then she has her own. I put like 50-60 ms predelay on her 'verb and also eq'ed it to try to keep her voice "in front" and the reverb "behind" and I also sidechained a compressor to cut a couple of dB of her reverb while she is singing.... I might go back and play with those parameters again.

Then there is a short and a long delay (echoes) on her track and I might play with the levels there as well as feedback to clean it up just a little.

She also has parallel compression, parallel saturation, and slapback on her track, as well... and I doubled her quietly an octave down on the chorus, too (once I finally got a rough track from her I guess I went a little nuts with it)

I have so many guitar layers in there that I like, but I really want her voice to stand out on top like she is the star... almost over-produced, but not tacky... or at least that is kinda what I have in my head.

For a little more context, this was supposed to be a silly little song together to celebrate our 18th anniversary... I think she sings so beautifully, but it is hard to get her to just settle in and record... she chose this song out of a list of like a dozen or so that I brainstormed.

Thanks again for the listens, I appreciate your thoughts!
 
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