Our EP is dunzo!

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ZoSo58LP

ZoSo58LP

rock guy
so i'm sure a few of you remember me coming in here with all sorts of drum track samples, asking to critique on them and help me get a good tone....and like many of you said, 'come back when the songs done.'

very true, and i realized that afterwards. just getting a drum tone without any music is hard..but i did my best, and i set my levels, and i took your advice about panning the toms, etc, and we have our finished amateur home studio EP! woo! only 4 songs, but check them out at our website and let me know what you think!

Dinosaurs Take France

i used adobe audition 3 on this one..i'm loving it over 1.5 now!
 
Guitar and bass sounds good, but the drums are way to weak. They should come up overall, and the snare needs more punch. How many mics did you use?
 
yeah, as in the other topic, drums were the hardest to do. 6 mics: snare, kick, high hat, overhead stereo condenser, rack tom, floor tom. problem is, i'm recording it from a mixer to adobe. therefore, it's only ONE track..so it was hit or miss once it's recorded, and i went through tons of different test tracks before we recorded. only thing left to do is just raise the volume of them in the mix (one track) but other than that, they've already got a bit of compression, and some songs have a second drum track in the background for a snare reverb. sucks being able to only record them onto one track!

funny thing is, on the drums alone, the snare sounds loud and fat as hell. once in the mix, the frequencies all mish mash so there goes the nice snare sound lol. people were even telling me that my snare itself was too loud when i was showing random solo drum tracks when i was testing for levels.
 
Listened to Heatseeker and 20's in 67, really good stuff there. Squibble's right though, those drums just aren't cutting it. One problem is there's very little separation between bass guitar and kick. The drums should be really pumping. Maybe you should try to compress them better. The way they are now is more of a garage sound.
 
i'm not great with mastering really, and compression on drums to me isn't the greatest field. i use adobe audition 3, so i tend to use their compressions that are built in. i WAS able to raise the volume on heatseaker's drums by about 4-8 notches on there by adding more amplify effect to it, and the new mix sounds sort of powerful for drums. as for more compression, the other compressors out there bring out the snare, yes, but they just make the overall sound of the drums WAY too compressed, to the point hwere you NOTICE compression in the mix. as an avid hater of compression on bass (lol), i hate noticing compression in a song. to me, that ruins the song. i like it to the point where you don't notice it's being compressed, which is how the drums are now, but they do sound weak. suppose i'll experiment a bit
 
Yeah them drums is getting killed. If it's a whole kit on just one track, I'm afraid you're screwed.
 
Yeah, you defenitly need to go few rounds on mixing these tunes, I heard two of em, heatseeker and with a vengance.
I think your tunes are great, so is the bass and guitar sound, vocals are real good to.
Just get them drums up higher.

Btw I just read that the drums were recorded to one track, if it is so and you cant record them again.
Try duplicating the track and compress the hell out of it, add some lows to it to see if that kick can come up up a tad and mix it in with the uncompressed track to taste, that could perhaps help you we bit, if you cant record em again.
 
nakatira, good call. so what you're saying essentially, is have maybe a track of drums per each mic, almost? for example, let's say i want to bring up JUST the snare in the mix. what is a way in which i can try to isolate the main frequencies of the snare on that track, and then boost it? same idea with the kick? i tried a multiband compressor, but the one that's built into adobe has only 4 bands. the two mid bands are where the snare lies, but it's also where some of the kick, high hats, cymbals and toms lie as well. do you have any suggestions for a good VST plugin for compression?

what i did on everything but 20's was use the program "ambience" for some reverby stuff. there's a preset on there , snare room 01, where it somehwat isolates the snare drum from the mix, and adds a buttload of reverb (it's all wet signal , no dry), and then i put the second drum track on there, and turned the volume lower, so it sounds as if the snare frequencies being found in the ambience track are on the original track. so there's actually 2 drum tracks on all of those that you're hearing.
 
Well I dont think you'll be able to separate each drum from that 1 drum track, even if you use verb.
as for the snare its eq with stretches from around 100hz and all the way up the specter.
I was suggesting that you take the track that you have, and copy it, copy it twice for that matter :).
Line up the original as good as you can get it with the other instruments, (leave it dry, no effects, eq)
Then process the duplicated track, you might get some transients/prescense in that track it will probabbly sound horrible and squashed alone, but might make the drums sound a tad better if mixed with the original tracks.

Play around with this plug, its free to try: Transient Monster | Stillwell Audio - It's About The Sound

It could perhaps make it sound a bit more punchy.
Also dont be afraid to play around with some eq on the duplicated track.
 
Cool stuff but the snare & bass drum get lost early on so the reality is that your EP isn't done YET! A little more work to be done before it's done.
 
ZoSo58LP said:
nakatira, good call. so what you're saying essentially, is have maybe a track of drums per each mic, almost? for example, let's say i want to bring up JUST the snare in the mix. what is a way in which i can try to isolate the main frequencies of the snare on that track, and then boost it? same idea with the kick? i tried a multiband compressor, but the one that's built into adobe has only 4 bands. the two mid bands are where the snare lies, but it's also where some of the kick, high hats, cymbals and toms lie as well. do you have any suggestions for a good VST plugin for compression?

what i did on everything but 20's was use the program "ambience" for some reverby stuff. there's a preset on there , snare room 01, where it somehwat isolates the snare drum from the mix, and adds a buttload of reverb (it's all wet signal , no dry), and then i put the second drum track on there, and turned the volume lower, so it sounds as if the snare frequencies being found in the ambience track are on the original track. so there's actually 2 drum tracks on all of those that you're hearing.
Click to expand...

Don't go copying and compressing. I mean, try if you must, but it's gonna sound like shit. You can't "isolate" anything in a stereo drum track without butchering something else. Compression murders cymbals. Just chalk this up as a learning experience and move on.
 
Retracking the drums to individual tracks is the only pro option.

If you can't do that for some reason, and you want to try and salvage it as a demo, you might try copying the track a couple of times and doing motown compression on the primary snare and kick frequencies. I thnk kick might benefit from it, but I don't know about snare.

Another thing you can try is automating the fader to spike the volume on the snare crack. It's tedious work, and retracking the drums would probably be easier.
 
yeah, believe me i always hated compression on a full drum track. it really does screw the cymbals bad. this is how i've been recording for years; everyone's suggesting to re-record drums for 1 track each but i guess i failed to mention i don't have the means to do this. i don't have any firewire input device or anything, i just have a mixer and a behringer USB port thing that takes the RCA out from the mixer and puts it into the PC. and we obviously don't have the money to go buying any sort of firepod or something, as if we did, we would've professionally recorded this demo instead of doing it in my basement lol....i'm happy for what i got out of doing it myself in my own home with amateur gear, and i suppose that's all that matters in the end. after all, it's just to get people aware of our new music, and we're giving the cd's out for free at our show on friday anyway
 
You could collectively save money and get a firewire interface with 8 inputs. They're only a couple hundred bucks, and you'll be able to record high quality shit as often as you want forever and ever amen.
 
yeah i know, i want a firepod. they seem cool, and i think my laptop can handle it (it's relatively new, from 08 i believe, dual core, 2 gigs memory lenovo). i think firewire stuff works wtih adobe audition 3 as well. it sucks, right now the three of us don't have jobs (so much for college degrees, right?) and we're hoping that we can pull some money from gigs...but it looks like we might only make a little bit on our first gig, and the rest we'd probably just break even. sucks.
 
guys, check this out:



compare that to the original version of easy goes it...i think this mix came out mcuh better. raised the drums, and mastered it. i didn't master any of the originals....good thing i came here for opinions first lol. i think the new sound is better and less muddy than the original, so i'm going to do that to the rest, and post them tongiht when i finish! tell me what you think. this is ONE drum track, no compression this time, just amplified.
 
i remixed all of the songs all night tonight, and mastered them all like the above example. they're up on our website now, 320kbps mp3's, so the quality should be pretty good! check em out!

Dinosaurs Take France
 
Hey heeso here , I do agree with you,,, guys,,,, save money and get fire wire,,,,,
 
Seems like a decent demo now. But the kick and snare are still quite lacking, but its a free demo, so who's gonna complain?

In the future, if you can just get those two miced separately and layed in with your overheads, you'd get a significant improvement. Even one track of those two together woul dbe easier to split off in the box with eq.
 
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