Please critique my song...

N

noiseordinance

New member
Ok, this is my first song for review. Let me start by explaining a couple things. One, I'm buzzed as hell but it's really the only way I can get the nerve to post a song, so forgive any typos. Two, I'm a guitarist that is ok at bass and drums. Three, I suck at vocals. I have a deep voice and I'm one of those people that refuses to acknowledge that I need to sing in lower octaves, so I spend a lot of time trying to sing out of my range. And four, I just had braces put on AND had four extractions, so if being a bad singer isn't enough of an excuse to suck at a solo project, this surely intensifies things.

That said, I'd like some help. I have recorded once or twice, but it was really half ass. This is my first decent attempt. I have pinpointed several areas where I'm WAY off key so I plan to update my vocals a little. However, I'd love some input on EQ, levels, compression, things to make my mix louder, etc. Also, I'm off key a lot and I'd be thrilled if there was any programs ya'll recommend to do a subtle pitch correction throughout my song.

Finally, this is my own rendition of a song by The Smiths, so I don't take credit. I figured what better way to learn recording than doing a cover? So with all that explained, please review my song, tear me and my techniques apart... I want to get better at this... thank you!!!

The link: http://www.box.net/shared/lteogx43nk
 
Hello man, cheers, first of all, you don't suck at singing at all. There are some notes out of key, but that's why people created Auto Tune, don't be afraid of using it, everybody does. The mix is great, don't raise the levels it will kill the dynamics for your song with the limiter, right now is very good.

I would double the distorted guitar and pan it over 70 L/R to open the sound a little.

I wasn't crazy about the kick sound, is like the kick for a heavy metal tune, is too tight for this particular song.

Cheers...
 
Thank you for the compliment on singing... it's really not my strong suit, but I enjoy doing everything on my own, as selfish as that sounds. What do you recommend for auto-tune? I know nothing about auto-tune except for programs that make people sound like Cher...
 
Hahaha, the auto-tune gives you the possibility to sound like Cher, but if you make some adjustments, the result is awesome. I use the one that comes with Cubase 5, is great, but there are also many more, like Melodyne (awesome), Antares Auto-Tune, etc.

I'm like you, i do all by my self too, and i'm a truly bad singer, if you don't believe me, check my signature...
 
The recording is good quality. The vocal sound is really good, it just needs to be tuned in a few places. I agree with spreading out the guitars. Also in some places you have the kick and bass hitting on the same beat, which makes it really hard to distinguish the two. I'd try to separate them if possible as much as you can. Hope you don't get a hangover!
 
Thank you guys for the suggestions, they all seem very useful. Right now, the L/R guitar is 30/-30, so I'll push it closer to 70 in both ways as mentioned. The kick is at 0 and the bass is also at 0, should I move them like 5/-5 or is that not wide enough apart? I thought the same thing about the snappy kick sample too, will definitely update that to something a little smoother. You guys have great ears! Very impressed.

As for the auto-tune, I have Antares 5 but whenever I search tutorials the only things that I can find are walkthroughs to get the voice to sound intentionally auto-tuned. I need to keep looking around then if it's possible to use for subtle corrections.

Well, thank ya'll!
 
There are some great tune programs that are very transparent if used correctly. The one I'm familiar with is Waves Tune. You can download a free trial of almost any program from a company's web site and use it for usually 10-15 days, then decide if you want to buy it.

Waves Tune is kind of expensive, but I'm sure there are cheaper ones. Just make yourself a sample track to play around with. That way, if you do irreparable damage to the track, no biggie.
 
Hey, one quick question about guitar, I already have my guitar doubled, one track 30, the other track -30. An earlier suggestion was to double my guitar, so would you guys suggest doubling my double? Or does it seem like just spacing them by 70/-70 will be thick enough? I also have a tremelo picking part towards the end that I didn't wanna double since I don't want it to get even muddier sounding... would you leave this single guitar just slightly panned off center since it's just a single track?
 
When you say you "doubled" the guitar, are you saying you played it twice and recording each take, or played it once with two mics, or just duplicated a mono track?
 
I recorded it two separate times with two separate guitars / amp models... though truthfully, guitar 1 I hit more of the lower strings, and guitar 2 I hit more of the higher strings, though they are both essentially the same rhythm track using the same chords, just slightly different emphasis between them.
 
Ok, you double the guitars, space them harder, 70 L/R or more, we didn't noticed the double with the previous panning.

Cheers
 
Sounded pretty good. Yeah a couple of pitchy notes here and there. You could punch them in and fix them. Cheaper than Autotune. It isn't cheating either. :)

You could probably turn up the vox a little. Especially in the louder section. Doubled vox would sound cool on this one.

Love the kick sound. It's a sample I assume. But it had great attack.

Huge level difference between the soft section and loud section. That might cause listeners to turn it up too far early in the song, only to be overly-blasted later on. I might balance those just a wee bit.

Good sounding guitars.
 
OK, so the guitars are double takes, that's good. Just spreading them out more will give more width to the mix. One thing I like to do with guitars to give more depth is creative use of delay and reverb. Send L guitar to a bus and put a 20ms delay on it and pan that hard R. Send R guitar to a bus and put a 20ms delay on that and pan it hard L. When you add reverbs, The pre-delay moves sounds back in the soundscape. Try 10ms (depends on the size of the room you are trying to emulate). I do acoustic guitars and not much electric, so if it gets too muddy, just shorten the times and turn it down. These effects if used correctly will give the brain the impression that the R guitar is reverberating off the left wall, and the opposite for the other guitar. Sound travels at about 1 foot per ms, so a 20 ms delay panned the other way will sound like it's reflecting off a wall 20 feet away. You want a bigger room, increase the time. Then just turn it down so you can barely hear it, then turn it down one more click. Your brain will still hear it, just won't really be conscious of it being there. It will just sound more three dimensional.
 
Heck yeah you guys, tons of great advice. Stoked to mess around with creative reverb busses. I'm kinda curious, and this may be a program-specific question... I have about 40 tracks on this song, about 12 of which are drum tracks running through a light reverb bus. The rest of the tracks have specific channel effects, and running through busses as well (low pass filters on vocals and guitars, high pass on the bass guitar). The thing is, with all these effects, as soon as I unfreeze one single track, my program gets really stuttery. Is this common when dealing with so many tracks and effects? I have a pretty high end computer with fresh install of XP, totally optimized and everything. Just wasn't sure if this type of behavior is to be expected on even the most optimal configuration. Sorry, totally not mixing related! Anywho, thank you guys a ton for the pointers, this is all good stuff!
 
noiseordinance said:
Heck yeah you guys, tons of great advice. Stoked to mess around with creative reverb busses. I'm kinda curious, and this may be a program-specific question... I have about 40 tracks on this song, about 12 of which are drum tracks running through a light reverb bus. The rest of the tracks have specific channel effects, and running through busses as well (low pass filters on vocals and guitars, high pass on the bass guitar). The thing is, with all these effects, as soon as I unfreeze one single track, my program gets really stuttery. Is this common when dealing with so many tracks and effects? I have a pretty high end computer with fresh install of XP, totally optimized and everything. Just wasn't sure if this type of behavior is to be expected on even the most optimal configuration. Sorry, totally not mixing related! Anywho, thank you guys a ton for the pointers, this is all good stuff!
Click to expand...
The problem you describe is definitely a symptom of too many tracks with too many effects. You may need to bounce a few tracks together to lessen your track number. Also increasing your buffer size may help when mixing something like this.
 
Dumb question, but what does it mean to bounce tracks? Doesn't that mean to combine them? Basically uneditable after that point right? I know I have a lot of compressors frozen onto tracks, but to save resources, maybe I should just compress it in edit mode and save the track so it's not running on-the-fly compression on all my tracks?
 
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