Chili
Site Moderator
Really nioce song. Love the vocals and how you treated it. All the suggestions have been made already, so I'll just say thanks for sharing!!!
Enjoyed the song.
Enjoyed the song.
S
Steve-0
New member
Bushmaster, Mattdee, Chili and Jeffmaher, thanks so much for your critiques and comments. I'm glad you dig the tune!
If anybody does the myspace thing we have one at
www.myspace.com/theroyalalexandra
and you can add us there.
Matt, it's probably more safe sounding than anything I listen to either, I'm a progressive rocker/metal head, but I love writing this music and performing it (for some reason I can't quite understand, haha).
You're a nice guy, so I think I'll forgive the radio-ready comments, but don't let me catch you suggesting we have mainstream appeal ever again!
(Thanks.)
If anybody does the myspace thing we have one at
www.myspace.com/theroyalalexandra
and you can add us there.
Matt, it's probably more safe sounding than anything I listen to either, I'm a progressive rocker/metal head, but I love writing this music and performing it (for some reason I can't quite understand, haha).
You're a nice guy, so I think I'll forgive the radio-ready comments, but don't let me catch you suggesting we have mainstream appeal ever again!
(Thanks.)
PoeticIntensity
MagicJones.com (is a website)
Hey Steve. Nice to hear another tune. Nice song and its mixed good. My only beef and its just me, is... I hate the snare.
Heh... The snare is the part of the tune I liked the most. (apart from the vocalist.... and the bass... and guitars... and the mix in general - sheesh, this whole thing shines!)
Dang... The whole time I was listening to this, I was thinking - "Man, it'd be nice to be given tracks professionally tracked to work with", and then I find out you tracked this sucker, too!?!? This can't be a "home recording" - it's too good.
Okay... Some questions (just because I *really* want to be able to produce music like this someday)
What type of snare was used in this recording, and what mics were used? The only snare I've ever heard of which sounds that good is the Pearl Reference. (If you used a consistent brand of drum-kit, what was it?)
What's the room like you tracked in? Is it treated? Is it totally dead? Specifically tuned for music like this?
Dang... Listening to it again - man... *great* work.
Do you let people come and watch you work? I'd travel quite a distance to be able to learn some of your technique.
Okay. I'm done - but far from finished.
Thanks for sharing.
S
Steve-0
New member
PoeticIntensity, I'm really glad to hear you like the mix so much. I appreciate you taking the time to post. I did indeed write, play, track, mix, and master that sucker and I'm darn proud of it too.
Note: After I typed it I realized this post is actually VERY long, but hopefully it isn't too dull and it answers any questions you may have. If not, the short story is my equipment is cheap and crappy and my room is a tiny awful bedroom. Skip to the last 3 paragraphs if you get bored.
I'll give a quick rundown here of the main pieces of gear that I use to make my music. You might be surprised at how cheap my studio really is, because I'm pretty sure the most expensive thing in this room is my guitar amp.
I run Cubase SX3 on an old gaming PC that I've upgraded a million times. Windows XP etc. etc.
I mix entirely on the virtual console in Cubase, I have no hardware console or control surface whatsoever, just my mouse and keyboard.
My monitors are a fairly cheap pair I got from Guitar Center, the M-Audio BX5a. They ran me about $200, which isn't bad for these monitors. They aren't ADAM or anything great, but they work for what I want them to do.
My only means of sound input into my PC is a Line6 Toneport UX2. It provides enough inputs for 2 xlr microphones, an instrument in (guitar or bass) and line in (keyboard etc). I bought it because it had phantom power on the two preamps (I can use condenser mics), it was USB (I have no Firewire), and it has balanced outs to go to my monitors. It is operated by means of a software called "Gearbox" which models a few different preamps, a handful of bass amps and a lot of guitar amps and cabs.
When I practice guitar I choose to use the Gearbox modeled ones because they sound good, they are low latency, and they are very simple. When I record I sometimes use the amps from gearbox, but usually mic up my guitar amp, which is a B-52 AT212 tube combo (which was under a thousand bucks when I got it, and can probably be had for $400 or so now).
The guitar tracks you hear on "Mother May I" were a combination of the virtual amps from Gearbox, and my tube amp.
I'm a guitarist first and foremost so I have a hot-rodded Jackson Dinky I've done a million mods to, but the cost never topped $700 or so and it'd be a lot cheaper to build a similar guitar now (the Jackson DK-2 now comes standard with a much better tremolo, and real Seymour Duncan pickups, for the same price mine cost with a cheapo aluminum trem and crappy factory pickups).
The bass amps are entirely virtual. I output an amped track and a direct track from Gearbox, blend them the way I want, and that's my bass tone. I record the tracks with my cheap Squire bass, and let the bassist replace them with his Schecter when he's over to record.
As far as mics go, I only have 2. I have one Shure SM-57. If you don't have this mic, get one. You will use it all the time, it won't break, and it's inexpensive. Probably every album you've ever heard from the late 60's on has this mic on it somewhere. Every decent studio you ever walk into will have at least one, and some have tons of them. This is what I mic my amp and lots of other things with.
My other mic is a cheap Chinese condenser mic, and AKG Perception 120, which I use for acoustic guitar and vocals. You've probably never heard this mic on any record, and I highly doubt any decent studio has one. It's probably pretty crappy compared to a lot of mics, but it's cheap and has served me well, and sounds good when my singer is singing into it.
My room is a horrible square shaped bedroom. It is not treated in any way except that it is used to store boxes full of things, so one wall is entirely covered in cardboard boxes. I'm not entirely sure how they effect the acoustics of the room, but I don't really care, because in the end the band doesn't like how hot the room gets and I usually track vocals with the window open and the ceiling fan on anyway, which is horrible tracking etiquette.
The most important thing I can tell you at this point is about drums. I can't record drums well (because I do not have the inputs, the mics, or the room) so I don't. Drums are so important to the sound of a song, and in my opinion are the most important part of any rock song. I could spend $800 on mics, $800 on an 8 mic preamp, rent the biggest and best room I could find, put the best kit I have access to inside that room, have a fantastic drummer play the kit, and if I'm lucky it will sound "pretty good".
That's a LOT of money to spend on pretty good. I want a great drum sound in every song, and I don't have a lot of spare money. The only option that fits my needs and budget is a great collection of samples.
For a few hundred bucks I can have the drumbeats I want, recorded in a million dollar room, with thousands of dollars of expert quality mics, and the invaluable experience of amazing engineers that actually know what they're doing, not to mention probably $100,000 in drums.
When it comes to drums, there is simply no substitute for any of these things.
We are at a point and time technologically wherein I could track an entire song with only virtual amps for bass and guitar, and you'd probably never know the difference, because people make a big allowance for all different types of guitar sounds. Even some horrible guitar sounds are allowed because they fit the song, and nobody says anything.
But the one instrument that still takes an absolute mastery, and a large budget to really do correctly (without samples) is a drumkit. The gap between "cheap" and "great" is still huge.
I've been an EastWest fan for a long time, ever since I bought Drumkit from Hell 2 back in the day.
I now use Superior Drummer 2.0, and I believe it is the best drum sample software out there, or at least the best I've had my hands on. Every drum hit was sampled through every different mic on the kit, and 4 different sets of room mics. This allows me to control the bleed between mics. If I set up a midi file that is just quarter notes on the snare, I can solo up the tom mics, the hat mics, the kick mics, the overheads, or whatever else I want, and I can hear that snare drum bleeding through those mics, just the way it would in real life (unless I don't want to, in which case I have full mic-by-mic control over bleed levels). This is VITAL for a realistic drum sound.
The other reason I use Superior Drummer 2.0 is because the samples are completely raw. They haven't been EQ'd or compressed or dressed up in any way. I just enter the midi for the drum beats I want, and I get a completely dull sounding raw kit coming out of my monitors. I can then mix that kit any way I want to fit the song, instead of being stuck with pre-mixed drums that sound good, but are stuck in one style that can't be changed.
This also forces me to learn to mix drums, so if I ever did encounter great drums through a great set of mics, I would know how to mix them to suit my needs.
As far as the drums in "Mother May I" go, the samples were recorded at Avatar Studios. The snare I chose (as I most often do) was a Ludwig Black Beauty. Other than that I used the default kit setup of toms, kick, and cymbals. I muted all the ambient mics except those furthest from the kit, which gives me a pretty big sounding drum ambiance.
I programmed all the beats in MIDI. I only slightly humanize them, both because the software automatically does a halfway decent job at that, and because I was going for the modern pop-rock record sound, where every hit is replaced with a sampled hit of a specific and even velocity anyway.
The most invaluable piece of music making equipment I have is a great singer. She can sing for hours without getting tired, she doesn't really even need to warm up at all, and she consistently nails take after take after take effortlessly. I usually hit record, and let her sing the entire lead vocal from the start of the song to finish. I then do that a couple more times and pick my favorite take to be my lead vocal, use the others as doubles where I need them, and go back and let her do harmonies in one take. I then double the harmonies.
That's it. I never have needed to pitch correct her, and the only time I make her stop a take and start over is when I have an artistic suggestion, virtually never a technical error on her part. We do an entire song worth of vocals in an hour or two depending on how much we're joking around wasting time, and that's it. None of us want to stay in this cramped room very long if we can help it.
That's it. I use mostly free plugins off the internet for mixing. I have a few payware ones I like, but you never really NEED more than 1 or 2 compressors, reverbs etc so it's best not to waste money.
So there it is, as you can see I have a very cheap home studio, with very limited equipment. My philosophy is that my equipment always exceeds my experience. What that means is, I can buy $10,000 worth of extra recording crap, and how much will my sound improve? Probably it won't sound $10,000 better. Maybe not at all. It's not about having $10,000 worth of stuff in your room, it's about spending every dollar effectively, and knowing exactly how to utilize every piece of equipment you have as best as you possibly can. I'd rather spend $100 on a mic, and practice with it for 6 months, and triple the quality of sounds that I can get to come through it, than spend $1000 dollars treating this room, to get a sound quality increase of 10%.
Experience is what you get when you practice. I record and mix every single day, usually for a long time. I love doing it, so it's never a chore for me. I sacrifice a lot of sleep to mix. I sacrifice free time to mix. I record crap just so I have something to practice mixing. Until I am good enough that I am 100% effective with every peice of gear I own, I won't spend any more money on gear. I have been really mixing (not just piddling around recording little riffs and stuff into Audacity) somewhere around one year, with maybe some here and there experience trying and failing from about a year before that.
Everything I know about mixing I've learned on my own, in the last year or so. If you want to make recordings that sound good:
-Get access to a DAW (they're not all expensive) buy a couple of mics and something to plug them into your computer with, and record music.
-Read about mixing music from the internet. Listen to great mixes and learn to listen to a song both on a songwriting level and a production level.
-Listen to all the Britney Spears, Metallica, and Fallout Boy you possibly can, because nomatter whether you like those artists or not, you do want your mixes to sound that good.
-Listen to pop radio and judge everything about every song that comes on from a mixing perspective. Learn to hear compression (it's hard at first). Learn to hear subtle reverb.
-Don't buy $1000 monitors when you only have $80 ears. Don't get better mics, don't get better rooms or effects, get better ears. Mix CONSTANTLY.
-Don't go to Full Sail or some other school that tries to teach you something only time and experience can teach you, you're better off paying a real studio to mix your songs that you've tracked, and insisting they let you stay and watch.
-It's very hard at first to make a mix sound good, or even know if your mix does sound good. Save your mixdowns, and go back and remix the whole song in three months, YOU WILL BE AMAZED AT HOW MUCH BETTER YOU ARE. You will sit there and wonder why you were so stupid the first time you mixed it. Do the same again in three months. You will wonder why you were so stupid the second time you mixed it. Mix it again in three months. I think you see where I'm going with this. Mixing is great because as long as you save your old stuff you have a very tangible timeline of improvement that is great motivation.
So there, that's my ULTRA LONG TREATISE ON WHAT I DO. I wrote it because I wanted to, you helped because you asked. If you're careful, you can have everything I do for under $1,000-1,500, not including instruments, singer, and ears. The rest is up to you. If you ever have any questions feel free to PM me.
Thanks again, so much, for your reply and kind words.
-Steve
Note: After I typed it I realized this post is actually VERY long, but hopefully it isn't too dull and it answers any questions you may have. If not, the short story is my equipment is cheap and crappy and my room is a tiny awful bedroom. Skip to the last 3 paragraphs if you get bored.
I'll give a quick rundown here of the main pieces of gear that I use to make my music. You might be surprised at how cheap my studio really is, because I'm pretty sure the most expensive thing in this room is my guitar amp.
I run Cubase SX3 on an old gaming PC that I've upgraded a million times. Windows XP etc. etc.
I mix entirely on the virtual console in Cubase, I have no hardware console or control surface whatsoever, just my mouse and keyboard.
My monitors are a fairly cheap pair I got from Guitar Center, the M-Audio BX5a. They ran me about $200, which isn't bad for these monitors. They aren't ADAM or anything great, but they work for what I want them to do.
My only means of sound input into my PC is a Line6 Toneport UX2. It provides enough inputs for 2 xlr microphones, an instrument in (guitar or bass) and line in (keyboard etc). I bought it because it had phantom power on the two preamps (I can use condenser mics), it was USB (I have no Firewire), and it has balanced outs to go to my monitors. It is operated by means of a software called "Gearbox" which models a few different preamps, a handful of bass amps and a lot of guitar amps and cabs.
When I practice guitar I choose to use the Gearbox modeled ones because they sound good, they are low latency, and they are very simple. When I record I sometimes use the amps from gearbox, but usually mic up my guitar amp, which is a B-52 AT212 tube combo (which was under a thousand bucks when I got it, and can probably be had for $400 or so now).
The guitar tracks you hear on "Mother May I" were a combination of the virtual amps from Gearbox, and my tube amp.
I'm a guitarist first and foremost so I have a hot-rodded Jackson Dinky I've done a million mods to, but the cost never topped $700 or so and it'd be a lot cheaper to build a similar guitar now (the Jackson DK-2 now comes standard with a much better tremolo, and real Seymour Duncan pickups, for the same price mine cost with a cheapo aluminum trem and crappy factory pickups).
The bass amps are entirely virtual. I output an amped track and a direct track from Gearbox, blend them the way I want, and that's my bass tone. I record the tracks with my cheap Squire bass, and let the bassist replace them with his Schecter when he's over to record.
As far as mics go, I only have 2. I have one Shure SM-57. If you don't have this mic, get one. You will use it all the time, it won't break, and it's inexpensive. Probably every album you've ever heard from the late 60's on has this mic on it somewhere. Every decent studio you ever walk into will have at least one, and some have tons of them. This is what I mic my amp and lots of other things with.
My other mic is a cheap Chinese condenser mic, and AKG Perception 120, which I use for acoustic guitar and vocals. You've probably never heard this mic on any record, and I highly doubt any decent studio has one. It's probably pretty crappy compared to a lot of mics, but it's cheap and has served me well, and sounds good when my singer is singing into it.
My room is a horrible square shaped bedroom. It is not treated in any way except that it is used to store boxes full of things, so one wall is entirely covered in cardboard boxes. I'm not entirely sure how they effect the acoustics of the room, but I don't really care, because in the end the band doesn't like how hot the room gets and I usually track vocals with the window open and the ceiling fan on anyway, which is horrible tracking etiquette.
The most important thing I can tell you at this point is about drums. I can't record drums well (because I do not have the inputs, the mics, or the room) so I don't. Drums are so important to the sound of a song, and in my opinion are the most important part of any rock song. I could spend $800 on mics, $800 on an 8 mic preamp, rent the biggest and best room I could find, put the best kit I have access to inside that room, have a fantastic drummer play the kit, and if I'm lucky it will sound "pretty good".
That's a LOT of money to spend on pretty good. I want a great drum sound in every song, and I don't have a lot of spare money. The only option that fits my needs and budget is a great collection of samples.
For a few hundred bucks I can have the drumbeats I want, recorded in a million dollar room, with thousands of dollars of expert quality mics, and the invaluable experience of amazing engineers that actually know what they're doing, not to mention probably $100,000 in drums.
When it comes to drums, there is simply no substitute for any of these things.
We are at a point and time technologically wherein I could track an entire song with only virtual amps for bass and guitar, and you'd probably never know the difference, because people make a big allowance for all different types of guitar sounds. Even some horrible guitar sounds are allowed because they fit the song, and nobody says anything.
But the one instrument that still takes an absolute mastery, and a large budget to really do correctly (without samples) is a drumkit. The gap between "cheap" and "great" is still huge.
I've been an EastWest fan for a long time, ever since I bought Drumkit from Hell 2 back in the day.
I now use Superior Drummer 2.0, and I believe it is the best drum sample software out there, or at least the best I've had my hands on. Every drum hit was sampled through every different mic on the kit, and 4 different sets of room mics. This allows me to control the bleed between mics. If I set up a midi file that is just quarter notes on the snare, I can solo up the tom mics, the hat mics, the kick mics, the overheads, or whatever else I want, and I can hear that snare drum bleeding through those mics, just the way it would in real life (unless I don't want to, in which case I have full mic-by-mic control over bleed levels). This is VITAL for a realistic drum sound.
The other reason I use Superior Drummer 2.0 is because the samples are completely raw. They haven't been EQ'd or compressed or dressed up in any way. I just enter the midi for the drum beats I want, and I get a completely dull sounding raw kit coming out of my monitors. I can then mix that kit any way I want to fit the song, instead of being stuck with pre-mixed drums that sound good, but are stuck in one style that can't be changed.
This also forces me to learn to mix drums, so if I ever did encounter great drums through a great set of mics, I would know how to mix them to suit my needs.
As far as the drums in "Mother May I" go, the samples were recorded at Avatar Studios. The snare I chose (as I most often do) was a Ludwig Black Beauty. Other than that I used the default kit setup of toms, kick, and cymbals. I muted all the ambient mics except those furthest from the kit, which gives me a pretty big sounding drum ambiance.
I programmed all the beats in MIDI. I only slightly humanize them, both because the software automatically does a halfway decent job at that, and because I was going for the modern pop-rock record sound, where every hit is replaced with a sampled hit of a specific and even velocity anyway.
The most invaluable piece of music making equipment I have is a great singer. She can sing for hours without getting tired, she doesn't really even need to warm up at all, and she consistently nails take after take after take effortlessly. I usually hit record, and let her sing the entire lead vocal from the start of the song to finish. I then do that a couple more times and pick my favorite take to be my lead vocal, use the others as doubles where I need them, and go back and let her do harmonies in one take. I then double the harmonies.
That's it. I never have needed to pitch correct her, and the only time I make her stop a take and start over is when I have an artistic suggestion, virtually never a technical error on her part. We do an entire song worth of vocals in an hour or two depending on how much we're joking around wasting time, and that's it. None of us want to stay in this cramped room very long if we can help it.
That's it. I use mostly free plugins off the internet for mixing. I have a few payware ones I like, but you never really NEED more than 1 or 2 compressors, reverbs etc so it's best not to waste money.
So there it is, as you can see I have a very cheap home studio, with very limited equipment. My philosophy is that my equipment always exceeds my experience. What that means is, I can buy $10,000 worth of extra recording crap, and how much will my sound improve? Probably it won't sound $10,000 better. Maybe not at all. It's not about having $10,000 worth of stuff in your room, it's about spending every dollar effectively, and knowing exactly how to utilize every piece of equipment you have as best as you possibly can. I'd rather spend $100 on a mic, and practice with it for 6 months, and triple the quality of sounds that I can get to come through it, than spend $1000 dollars treating this room, to get a sound quality increase of 10%.
Experience is what you get when you practice. I record and mix every single day, usually for a long time. I love doing it, so it's never a chore for me. I sacrifice a lot of sleep to mix. I sacrifice free time to mix. I record crap just so I have something to practice mixing. Until I am good enough that I am 100% effective with every peice of gear I own, I won't spend any more money on gear. I have been really mixing (not just piddling around recording little riffs and stuff into Audacity) somewhere around one year, with maybe some here and there experience trying and failing from about a year before that.
Everything I know about mixing I've learned on my own, in the last year or so. If you want to make recordings that sound good:
-Get access to a DAW (they're not all expensive) buy a couple of mics and something to plug them into your computer with, and record music.
-Read about mixing music from the internet. Listen to great mixes and learn to listen to a song both on a songwriting level and a production level.
-Listen to all the Britney Spears, Metallica, and Fallout Boy you possibly can, because nomatter whether you like those artists or not, you do want your mixes to sound that good.
-Listen to pop radio and judge everything about every song that comes on from a mixing perspective. Learn to hear compression (it's hard at first). Learn to hear subtle reverb.
-Don't buy $1000 monitors when you only have $80 ears. Don't get better mics, don't get better rooms or effects, get better ears. Mix CONSTANTLY.
-Don't go to Full Sail or some other school that tries to teach you something only time and experience can teach you, you're better off paying a real studio to mix your songs that you've tracked, and insisting they let you stay and watch.
-It's very hard at first to make a mix sound good, or even know if your mix does sound good. Save your mixdowns, and go back and remix the whole song in three months, YOU WILL BE AMAZED AT HOW MUCH BETTER YOU ARE. You will sit there and wonder why you were so stupid the first time you mixed it. Do the same again in three months. You will wonder why you were so stupid the second time you mixed it. Mix it again in three months. I think you see where I'm going with this. Mixing is great because as long as you save your old stuff you have a very tangible timeline of improvement that is great motivation.
So there, that's my ULTRA LONG TREATISE ON WHAT I DO. I wrote it because I wanted to, you helped because you asked. If you're careful, you can have everything I do for under $1,000-1,500, not including instruments, singer, and ears. The rest is up to you. If you ever have any questions feel free to PM me.
Thanks again, so much, for your reply and kind words.
-Steve
Last edited:
jeffmaher
New member
It is not treated in any way except that it is used to store boxes full of things, so one wall is entirely covered in cardboard boxes.
I store blankets, sheets and towels in the boxes...absorb bass freqs...maybe a cut better.
-Don't go to Full Sail or some other school that tries to teach you something only time and experience can teach you, you're better off paying a real studio to mix your songs that you've tracked, and insisting they let you stay and watch.
Gospel. And paying a small fee for an hour or two on engineer's time to walk through something you want to learn is cheaper! I nicked about 4 hours of general instruction for $100 from a real gold-record producer...lessons learned are still crystalizing two years later.
A good post all the way around. Rep Power your way for the effort!
I store blankets, sheets and towels in the boxes...absorb bass freqs...maybe a cut better.
-Don't go to Full Sail or some other school that tries to teach you something only time and experience can teach you, you're better off paying a real studio to mix your songs that you've tracked, and insisting they let you stay and watch.
Gospel. And paying a small fee for an hour or two on engineer's time to walk through something you want to learn is cheaper! I nicked about 4 hours of general instruction for $100 from a real gold-record producer...lessons learned are still crystalizing two years later.
A good post all the way around. Rep Power your way for the effort!
joeym
New member
Very nice song, great singer, nice mix!
No nits from me, this is really good.
Joey
No nits from me, this is really good.
Joey
B
Bulls Hit
Well-known member
Yeah good build ups and the vocals are great. Nice variations in the arrangement, mix is well balanced. Reminds me vaguely of a Smashing Pumkins tune. Good stuff
S
Steve-0
New member
Thanks Jeff, Joey and Bulls hit.
Jeff, it's great to be able to go into a studio and work with a great mix guy for a while. I payed $100 to go to a local studio I'm familiar with, and both engineers came down with a case of beer and we bs'd, talked about the amp miking setups they had up, and mixed all the way through one of my bands tunes for a few hours. Best $100 ever. I had a notebook and a pen handy, and I find myself referring to the notes I took often.
It's a great strategy for people who are trying to learn to mix.
Jeff, it's great to be able to go into a studio and work with a great mix guy for a while. I payed $100 to go to a local studio I'm familiar with, and both engineers came down with a case of beer and we bs'd, talked about the amp miking setups they had up, and mixed all the way through one of my bands tunes for a few hours. Best $100 ever. I had a notebook and a pen handy, and I find myself referring to the notes I took often.
It's a great strategy for people who are trying to learn to mix.
PoeticIntensity
MagicJones.com (is a website)
Hey Steve-O... Thanks for your reply. I think there is a lot of wisdom in what you said, and thank you for that.
I do have one point of contention, however, that pro-quality (or very near thereto) acoustic drums are possible within the homerecording crowd. I hope he'll forgive me for mentioning his name, but Greg's tunes are totally home-grown, and his drums sound fantastic. My amateur ears would mistake his stuff for professionally produced music any day of the week, but I have a lot to learn.
Anyway... Thank you again for your reply, and words of encouragement.
I do have one point of contention, however, that pro-quality (or very near thereto) acoustic drums are possible within the homerecording crowd. I hope he'll forgive me for mentioning his name, but Greg's tunes are totally home-grown, and his drums sound fantastic. My amateur ears would mistake his stuff for professionally produced music any day of the week, but I have a lot to learn.
Anyway... Thank you again for your reply, and words of encouragement.
S
Steve-0
New member
PoeticIntensity, I suppose you're right, there are probably many examples of great sounding homegrown drums out there, it's just that my major discontent with 90% of the home-recorded music I hear is the drums (which is also usually the first thing I dislike about a recording of my own, or a professionally produced radio record).
It's probably more accurate to say that I personally would likely only get a barely passable drum sound, even given the best room and mic's etc. Part of that is because I'm a guitarist. I have a very hard time even writing realistic drum patterns (which shows in my recordings, I think). It's hard for me to think about "What could/would a drummer actually play here?" so I tend to rely on simple beats with a few fills, unless it's metal, which I listen to most and find easiest to replicate. It's often difficult for me to even distinguish between a great sounding drum and a poor sounding one.
To sum it up, I'm nowhere near at the experience or equipment level I need to be at to record acoustic drums and do it well.
Anyway, I'm glad the post helps. If you have any questions or anything just let me know.
-Steve
It's probably more accurate to say that I personally would likely only get a barely passable drum sound, even given the best room and mic's etc. Part of that is because I'm a guitarist. I have a very hard time even writing realistic drum patterns (which shows in my recordings, I think). It's hard for me to think about "What could/would a drummer actually play here?" so I tend to rely on simple beats with a few fills, unless it's metal, which I listen to most and find easiest to replicate. It's often difficult for me to even distinguish between a great sounding drum and a poor sounding one.
To sum it up, I'm nowhere near at the experience or equipment level I need to be at to record acoustic drums and do it well.
Anyway, I'm glad the post helps. If you have any questions or anything just let me know.
-Steve
G
Greg_L
Banned
There's some noise at 2:12 during the quiet part. Other than that, good mix.
S
Steve-0
New member
Thank you Greg, I hadn't noticed but I'll make sure to fix it.
Perhaps, one day, I too can have bionic hearing.
Perhaps, one day, I too can have bionic hearing.