New Album in Progress - Would love some input.

[overseer]

Hello all,

I have been reading these boards for a good long while and thought I would post. I am currently in the midst of producing an album and I thought I would post for some feed back. Here's some back story.

This is my first major attempt at producing/engineering an album for some one. I am not a player in the band at all, just acting as the producer/engineer. The singer/guitarist is a friend that I approached after seeing him live and hearing several of his original songs. I felt the boy has a lot of talent and I wanted to help him get his music up and going.

We met, went over his music and did a good amount of pre-production to include working out vocal, tempos, etc. Like a lot of young musicians, he had never worked with a click track, so that was a tough battle, but we came to a middle ground using a general midi track to include kick, snare, and hi-hat at the appropriate tempo for the songs.

After having the artist work with the click for a while, I then had him track scratch tracks of all the songs using the midi track. Next we had to find other players for the CD. The other players have consisted of different friends that he and I know to put this together. This was due to the artist not having a full band at the time of starting the project.

So that's a good bit of the back story. So we are about a year into this project and nearing the end (hopefully). What you will be listening to are the early edits of each song. No mix (eq, comp, etc) has been applied to these tracks, just the edits to get all the best parts together out of all the takes. All that I have done is a bit of level adjustment and panning as I work through them.

I have several notes on things that need to be fixed or touched up in regards to the lead guitar on several songs, some vocal parts here and there, etc. I am not going to go into any greater detail than that for now because I would like to know what all you have to say.

Oh, there is one more thing, you will find a song in the list called 18 Wheeler and I will take what feed back you have, but FYI this one has already been discussed on this forum due to timing issues. This was a late addition to the CD and wasn't recorded with a click like the others. However, after much discussion here & with the band, I am taking this one back to the drawing board and starting again with a click track.

Anyway, enough of my rambling. Please feel free to check out the link below for the tracks. Thanks, enjoy, and I look forward to your input.

For Review

 

[PoeticIntensity]

I listened to fish daddy. Your drums have incredible phase issues, and a really far back in the mix. Snare is coming out of right ear almost exclusively... Is that intentional? The guitar solo was pretty horrendously mixed. Vocals sound like someone was singing in a closet, and were dry as a bone. Acoustic guitar sounded quite mono... The performance wasn't pro, but it didn't suck, either. As far as fixing this stuff, I really don't know where I'd start. I can find quite a few problems with everything.

 

[TripleM]

"Drinkin' booze till the economy improves." That was a good line.

Small pitch problems in a couple of spots.

Drum performance is a little loose. Snare on the right is weird, but might be what you want. Snare is a bit roomy for my tastes. PI - what phase issues are you hearing?

Mix to me is lacking a low end. Nothing holding down the low frequencies.

Didn't care for those little guitar riffs bouncing back and forth form left to right.

 

[komposer]

We met, went over his music and did a good amount of pre-production to include working out vocal, tempos, etc. Like a lot of young musicians, he had never worked with a click track, so that was a tough battle, but we came to a middle ground using a general midi track to include kick, snare, and hi-hat at the appropriate tempo for the songs.

Then someone, or all of them need to rehearse. The timing is off all over the place.
I didn't listen to every second of every track, but sounds just like 18 Wheeler.
Drums are way out of phase. Guitars are rather sloppy.

Boy oh boy. I listened to the Fish song all the way through and considering the lyrics, I wondered if
maybe everyone really did have too much to drink?

 

[Tobe]

I liked Angel but found it hard to judge because, as you say, it's not mixed. Same again for "Back". This is all a bit odd for me, because mixing is the easy part... finishing songs is the hard part. It sounds just like you said it would, like a bunch of tracks that haven't been mixed.

I don't mean this as a put down, the songs have potential. But I'm not sure how we can help when you haven't started to mix?

All I can say is put a compressor on the vox (start at the begining).