First Demo - Would really appreciate feedback

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This has potential. The performances are worthy of listening, but like you say the recording isn't great. It's OK. Sounds a bit muffled at times, especially the vocals. The snare really needs to be tightened up. There's no pop to it, and it rings out too long. How did you record this. If you state your methods, you would probably get some good feedback on how to improve the sound.
 
I recorded the drums in the rehearsal room. My presonus audiobox has two inputs so I directed one mic in the general direction of the bass drum and one at the snare, I guess you could say closish micing!
The mics were sennheiser dynamic vocal mics (I can't remember the exact model).
The room has two omni wall mics for recording rehearsals so I used these to record the room sound to cd and then synced them together in the house.
All the tracking was done at home, the bass straight in and guitars using a marshall practice amp and aforementioned vocal mic. We recorded the vocals by making an improvised booth using a doorway and duvet.
I made a lot of use of the free blockfish compressor plugin and the kjaerhus classic range of plugs when mixing. I don't have any decent monitoring gear, I used a £20 pair of sony consumer phones that are very bass heavy and mixed down to listen on various household stereos every so often for reference.
I decided beforehand to try and make a feature of the 'lofiness' of the recording due to our relative poverty of gear but obviously still want the listener to be able to enjoy the recordings.

Thanks for your post guitar zero, it is appreciated.

Stu
 
Just listened again. The guitars are fine. Recording them with a dynamic mic is what most people do. They sound fine. The vocals maybe on second listen aren't muffled, they're just too soft. Just bring the level up and I think it would sound better. The drums are where I would focus. Recording drums with two mics is a challenge. I'm not set up to record drums, so I can't give you much in the way of meaningful suggestions. Lots of good drummers on this site. Hopefully one or two will chime in with some helpful ideas. I think ideally you'd want at least four mics. One on kick, one on snare and two stereo room mics. I'll let the experts tackle that one.
 
I couldn't figure out a better way to capture the drums because the audiobox only has two inputs. Also the internal preamp is so hot that I couldn't get the mic any nearer without horrible digital distortion.
I feel that the drummer's(Simon) performance was excellent and that helped to cover some of the cracks in the sound.
It's cool to hear that you think that the guitars sound good. They were probably the part of the recording that I felt most clueless about capturing properly. Especially as it is guitar driven music. Maybe we were just a bit lucky that things went right on the day.
A friend suggested using parallel compression to bring the vocals out a bit, which I think helped a little but I was a little unsure of how to best apply the technique without overdoing it. In retrospect, it would have been better to have a few extra takes to work with when mixing rather then relying upon sorting things out in the mix. That said, I think Tom performed pretty well but I really struggled when trying to mix my own vocals into the track. It's very hard to be objective in that situation.
 
There are two songs on your page. Which one is it?

I'd hate to comment on the wrong song.
 
Both of them, they were both recorded in the same session/with the same gear etc. I reckon incinerate is a better song than gonna kill me though, if that counts for anything.
 
Just had a listen to incinerate. Again, the elements sound decent. It's just the constant crash cymbal has no definition. Sounds like one big smeared cymbal crash throughout. I think if you could fix the drums, you'd be in good shape. Still waiting for the drummers here to help with some good suggestions.
 
Yeah, I agree guitar zero. The process of recording and mixing the drums was one big compromise from the start. When I bring down my room mics, I lose some of that ugly crash sound but the life of the performance loses something as a result, in my opinion. Given the choice, I would certainly have used a few more mics on the kit.
Has anyone on here got good results with a minimilist approach to recording live drums?
 
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