Great piano playing - nice chord progressions. Dynamics in the chorus work well. Nice pop tune.

Out of interest how are you recording your vocals? You have a good voice but they sound a little dry, bordering on the distorted in the mix. This is the kind of song where the vox need to be clear and up front - maybe something you should consider?

Overall I really like this. Will check out your back catalogue.

Cheers,
Phil

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again, thanks for the nice review. I'm a (super) poor college student and don't really have any access to a real recording studio so all of my instruments are recorded with my midi keyboard and i record all the vocals in the microphone on my MacBook Pro, its obviously not ideal but it works well enough for me. I'm obviously not trying to produce a demo-quality recording because I just don't know enough about mixing and don't have the right recording equipment and live instruments to do so, but I'm doing the best that I can I think. My sound (i think) is very "demo for a demo" i guess you might call it that. I'm really just interested in composing for other artists so long as the initial style and feeling of the song comes through thats all I'm concerned with. Wow this has been a long reply but thank you so much for the comments, they really mean alot to me since I'm very new at this (just started writing music about 8 months ago, so I still have MUCH to learn!). Again, thanks so much!

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...you've only been writing and recoding for 8 months then you're doing pretty well, so don't sell yourself short!

Re: your vocals -

Like you I also have to use the built in mic on my MacBook, which is not ideal, but with some practice you can get some fairly good results. If you check out my song "Something's Going On" you'll get an idea:

http://www.macjams.com/song/34451

This was the first new song I recorded after joining MJ's and I was encouraged to really push my voice up front - which I was initially reluctant to do, but now have to agree that it works.

So, two tips I can give you -

1) Play around with all the effects in the Details panel of GarageBand. Try adding a little Compression and Reverb to your vocals and see what happens. Then the thing I found really makes a difference is experimenting with the Gate slider. Once you have a decent sound, save it and play around some more. You'll find that you can really start to bring out a richness in your voice just using these basic tools.

2) Try double tracking your voice to thicken it out. Someone gave me this piece of advice and now I always double track. Try it and see what you think:-))

p.s. I'm also a real beginner at this, and there are people on this site that have much more technical expertise than me. But at the "Demo for a Demo" stage I think this might just help a wee bit.

All the best,
Phil


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Same Same, But Different

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thanks for the advise I'll be sure to check these things out!

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Really like the song and I like the rough demo sound...the piano sounds great...how'd you get it to sound so nice?

Is this garageband or Logic?



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I tend to use a various amount of AUMatrix Reverb on a most of the tracks, it gives it a "real" recorded sound. play around with the small and large densities and the wet/dry mix. And yeah just garageband. All the instruments are software. Thanks for your comment! Good luck!

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