your honest opinion please

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chris-from-ky

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The band is made up of 18 to 22 year olds that have been playing as a band for a couple years now. This clip is from one of their more popular songs. I'm trying to get it to be as good as it can be. I need your advice. Be honest and candid! You won't hurt my feelings. Anything you say can be useful to me.

Thanks,
Chris
 
Tune the toms before recording them, tighten the snare, and check the mic placement.
I like the timbre and tone of the vocalist. Also, get the drummer to play to a click. He's sloppy at times. Was this done live/together? Maybe drop a little reverb off the vocalist and sharpen it a little.

From a writing perspective, it needs a little more. Maybe a second guitar or a variation on the present riff.

All in all a decent demo, but if you want to send it out/sell it, it needs to be better!

Hope that helps!

Rich
 
Sounds like the recording wasn't very well done. For a demo you should spend the small studio fee (mostly around $25.00 / hr for small mom and pop places) and get some good recordings of the drums and bass. Everything sounded too far off like the whole band was in a tin can.

As far as the drummer... he's not bad at all. Just gets caught up and looses his rythm for a second. I would agree to have him play to a click track. No shame in it when you want to impress the judges. ;)

What were you recording with? What do you have access too? Overall sound isn't bad, but just needs to be refined.
 
I tend to agree with the others about the drummers timing. You should try recording the drums and maybe the bass or a scratch guitar track with a click and then go back and fill everything in. I think the guitars sounded good.
The vocals have that recorded live off the board sound. I will admit that I am at work and listening on my crap desktop speakers.
I like the song and with some tweeking you could get it much better. If it were my project I would re-track everything and start from scratch.
Sorry to be so critical. I'm not even this hard on my own stuff but I'm not sending my stuff out to record companies. When my band finally gets around to recording our demo, I won't sleep easy until it's mastered. :D
 
Thanks for the comments.

I should point out that I am NOT in this band. I am a recording hobbyist with a (relatively) meager setup. I used Behringer DDX3216 pres and track to an HD24. The room was your typical basment bonus room w/ carpet floors and sheetrocked walls. I sent my stereo mix from the DDX to my PC and recorded this with Audacity (freeware). Quality apparently suffered.

The drummer did play to a click track with guitars and bass already there. I'll try to get the verbs worked out so they don't sound like they're in a tin can. I heard it too but, I was mostly concerned with mix placement. Was all the instruments/ vocs in the right place?

Any more comments would be appreciated!!

Chris
 
First thing is consider the enviorment. If it's a basement with sheetrock your sound is not going to be absorbed by anything. Carpet is not enough being just on the floor.

I don't know your age or if this is something possible. The reason i'm saying this is, if it's your parents house, they may not want you putting things on the walls. ;) If it's your house, something like "Honney!! OMG! The dog ran outside!!" and then she forgets what you're doing. ;)

Assuming low amount of resources first...

Blankets (thicker the better) and allow some distance from the wall (a foot or two). Build a rack for the blanket in the shape of an L and then you can easily move them around the room until you get the room as dead as possible.

Another thing to consider is EQ. I had an old Fostex X-4 (I believe that was the number) many years ago. I recorded direct from an ART SGX2000 and Peavey DPM2 SE, but in the mixdown, I ran into an EQ and trimmed off the 12khz range and removed the tape hiss. Came out MUCH better. May want to try that on your recording and see if you can kill off some of the background noise. Just try some of the different EQ settings. Correctly set, this should help in the overall sound of the recording.

If this is going to be a permanent studio. Then you would be looking at going into more details and considerations. Contact me if this is the case and I will be happy to point you in a good direction there.

[--edit--]
How are you recording the instruments? Are you recording them all with mics or running everyone into the board? You wouldn't have to worry about accoustics (and get a cleaner sound that you can work with MUCH better) if you ran everyone direct into the board.
 
I used SM58's on the guitar cabs. Direct to the board is not an option with overdriven guitars. In that regard, direct stinks. I'm 27 and happily married and don't have a permanent place to record in. This space was the band leader's grandmother's basement. I should've used all the crochet'd blankets laying around! I agree that sound treatment would've helped this recording. I simply can't retrack... I'll try to remix/EQ and resubmit again without using my PC as a stereo mix recorder.

Look for me next week. I'll expect your new review, OK?

THANKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Chris
 
chris-from-ky said:
I should've used all the crochet'd blankets laying around! I agree that sound treatment would've helped this recording. I simply can't retrack...
Click to expand...

LOL, it's all good. Least you all were sure to stay warm in the basement. ;)

chris-from-ky said:
Look for me next week. I'll expect your new review, OK?
Click to expand...

Sounds great! Just drop me a PM and let me know. I'll jump in and have a listen. You can try a program call Audacity that is quite nice and freeware. The cool thing about this is the quick, down and dirty editing. Just something to consider. If you have all the tracks and such I would be willing to lend a hand and see if we can get it cleaned up. Just a suggestion.

Let me know and I'll catch you later on.
 
You can improve the drum SOUND a lot, with EQ, in my opinion. I'm familiar with that snare sound, lol...but it's not how you want it to end up in the final mix if you actually have an isolated snare track. I'd cut some of the fundamentals out of it (500Hz) and try boosting the upper mids and the top end of it a bit...doesn't take much. For the overheads, you can make those sound a lot livelier by just compressing them with a soft knee setting of some sort. I wish I could be more specific, but I just can't without totally talking out of my ass.

However, I do think the kick needs to be louder in general...quite a bit, actually. Carve some of the lower frequencies out of the bass if you need to get it out of the way of the kick. It's just a phantom at this point. You can kind of get away with it in country sometimes, but not with pop rock. Just getting the drums to sound bigger and less roomy will help this 100%. Oh, and when you get the kick to a level in the mix where you can actually feel it, just for fun, try boosting it a touch at 2k AND ALSO AT 6K...it'll add some click - don't go nuts with it like I do though, lol.
 
Sounds pretty good. The tracks have a live sound to them that's a little distant, but it sounds cool. Could use more kick drum.
 
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