Newbie's funk / indie attempt, comments greatly appreciated!

[red&othercolour]

ATTACHMENT BROKEN - TRY; soundcloud.com/jameskuht/satellite Thanks!

Recorded this song in my garage over the last few days, not got very much equipment (bass and drums are free midi instruments and so are all the plug ins) but it was a lot of fun to make. I'd really appreciate it if you had a gander and any feedback would be massively appreciated. I'm happy to return feedback too - joined the website last night so sorry for the low number of posts.

My main problem that I find with mixing this song and my others is that I'm really not confident at using compressors (I have some free software ones). I understand what all the parameters mean, but my compression doesn't seem to translate very well - and the songs sound 'pumping' through some speakers....

I'm really not sure what I'm doing wrong as it doesn't sound like that (pumping) when coming through my monitors in the garage - I assume its my compression of the overall mix when I'm 'mastering' (hmm not sure whether you could call my attempt at this mastering haha!). I use parallel compression when mastering - is this a good idea on this sort of song?

Would massively appreciated help/feedback on any aspect of the song, so thanks a lot for your time.

James
Red & Other Colours

 

[Whatmysay]

Sorry James - file corrupt when downloaded got another link?

 

[red&othercolour]

Thanks for flagging this! Oddly I cant remove or re-upload the song!

try this link; soundcloud.com/jameskuht/satellite

Thanks,
James

 

[TripleM]

The download worked for me. I thought it was very well performed. Cool song. Liked the lyrical delivery.

The vocal has a little harshness to it - I think it's just part of the singer's voice. Looks like there is a little peak in the mix just above 2700hz or so. I suspect a lot of that energy is the vocal. You might want to try to notch out a spot with EQ around there.

I thought the clean guitar had a little too much bite. But that's just me.

The bass gets real boomy around :50 or so.

The mix gets real loud at around 1:20. It was cruising along just fine, and then the volume level jumped. Happens again in every chorus.

Another personal preference, but I'd prefer an overall dryer mix.

 

[red&othercolour]

Wow thanks very much for these very useful and kind comments!

When you say 'there is a little peak in the EQ around 2.7kHz' I understand you are correct and EQing this out had a positive effect - but how did you know this? Is this just experience or do you have like a frequency analyser and if so should i invest in one?!

I'll have more of a fiddle with it later on in the week to implement some of your suggested changes. The reason the chorus is louder is because I upped the volume of the hi-hat for those parts, to try to make it more dancy..however i can see that yes the volume increase doesnt really flow quite right... I think maybe I need to pan the hats better and EQ it so it stands out in the mix a little more.

Thanks again,
James

 

[TripleM]

When you say 'there is a little peak in the EQ around 2.7kHz' I understand you are correct and EQing this out had a positive effect - but how did you know this? Is this just experience or do you have like a frequency analyser and if so should i invest in one?!

I didn't exactly "just know" where the problem was. But I could tell from the vocal that there was a problem somewhere in the range of about 2400hz to 3000hz. That's just from listening to lot's of stuff (especially my own voice, which has a similar problem). That is the "ear grating - baby crying - nagging girlfriend" frequency range.

To narrow down the problem, I loaded up the song in Audacity. Audacity is freeware, you can google it and find a download link. It's a DAW - but not a good one. I do like its frequency analyzer though. It's "static" in that you can highlight a portion of the track and have Audacity analyze it. So there is no "bouncing" EQ curve going on.

Anyway, there were several peaks in your track, but I noticed one at 2700hz. That was in the range that I knew was a problem, so that was what I recommended.

But you need to be careful when cutting that range. You can lose a lot of clarity when cutting there. So I would make the cut VERY narrow.