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The weather wouldn't allow me to go to work today, so I stayed home and worked on some music this afternoon.
I originally posted a jam from my Zoom H2 called Arctic Voyage.
http://www.macjams.com/song/48744
The song was a jam I had with two friends that kinda turned out cool towards the end. I have been adding it to jams with various friends and it has been evolving. I finally decided to do some 'official' studio recording with this and here is the result.
I am especially interested in production critiques this time around because I worked on it slightly more than other songs in my catalogue. In particular I played my Rhodes again and took the sound more seriously, I plugged the pre-amp out into my interface and then tweaked the eq a bit in GB. My homemade silver electric guitar was the rhythm in the left ear. I panned the rhodes and the rhythm guitar hard right and left and then played the lead on my Hofner Jazz guitar. The Bass was direct in and both the bass and lead guitar are center on the mix.
As far as any effects added, there were none added to any of the rhythm instruments including the bass, just direct-in. But I did eq these because of some suggestions on my previous recordings mentioning that I needed to give each instrument its own space. I subtracted eq in the rhodes and rhythm guitars where i added it in the lead guitar. Also, I doubled the track for the lead guitar and added just about 20% of the GB generic reverb.
I even did some tweaking of the midi drum tracks. Instead of letting them loop all the way thru. I still used only Lounge Jazz Drums 06 all the way thru, but I deleted some of the hits on the ride and tom and moved some of them up or down the pencil track to another sound, I don't know if it makes it less repetitive or not.
The only thing I'm sure I don't like is the ending, but I thought i'd take suggestions and fix that in a following version.
Also, is there anyone experienced with Logic that thinks they could take what I've already done and add some professional slickness to it??? I've always wondered if I could really make my songs any better if I upgraded to logic.
Thanks for listening.
I originally posted a jam from my Zoom H2 called Arctic Voyage.
http://www.macjams.com/song/48744
The song was a jam I had with two friends that kinda turned out cool towards the end. I have been adding it to jams with various friends and it has been evolving. I finally decided to do some 'official' studio recording with this and here is the result.
I am especially interested in production critiques this time around because I worked on it slightly more than other songs in my catalogue. In particular I played my Rhodes again and took the sound more seriously, I plugged the pre-amp out into my interface and then tweaked the eq a bit in GB. My homemade silver electric guitar was the rhythm in the left ear. I panned the rhodes and the rhythm guitar hard right and left and then played the lead on my Hofner Jazz guitar. The Bass was direct in and both the bass and lead guitar are center on the mix.
As far as any effects added, there were none added to any of the rhythm instruments including the bass, just direct-in. But I did eq these because of some suggestions on my previous recordings mentioning that I needed to give each instrument its own space. I subtracted eq in the rhodes and rhythm guitars where i added it in the lead guitar. Also, I doubled the track for the lead guitar and added just about 20% of the GB generic reverb.
I even did some tweaking of the midi drum tracks. Instead of letting them loop all the way thru. I still used only Lounge Jazz Drums 06 all the way thru, but I deleted some of the hits on the ride and tom and moved some of them up or down the pencil track to another sound, I don't know if it makes it less repetitive or not.
The only thing I'm sure I don't like is the ending, but I thought i'd take suggestions and fix that in a following version.
Also, is there anyone experienced with Logic that thinks they could take what I've already done and add some professional slickness to it??? I've always wondered if I could really make my songs any better if I upgraded to logic.
Thanks for listening.
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Andy-bm
and well played. Nice Jazzy feel. The midi drums sound great. As far as production, I could address the mixing for you. Panning is double edged sword. You want to add a spatial feel to things, and not crowd the instruments, but there is a down side in that it can become distracting. It has to be done very carefully. I find that, in general, the bass and all lower freq's sound better centered. The parts that you have panned, in particular the guitar track that is hard left, has too many lows in it for the hard left. There are two ways to address that. One is by bringing it back center and using a multi band stereo imager to "move" the sounds left and right by frequency band (like the one included in Qzone). The more simple way is to EQ the lows out of the signal that you are panning. You want to make room for all the instruments with the EQ. In other words, check to see if that guitar track is sharing the low and low mid bands with the bass line. If it is, eq it out and the bass line will have more definition. Then the track will sound more spatial and natural over in the hard left. Anyway, that's my critique. Considering all the work that you have done, that's not much to critique. Nice job!
//Andy