BradoSanz

Thank you! And thanks for the tip, I really not great at working with vocals. And sure! I'll certainly see if I can come up with something!

Hey, I guess I've already sent you this track haha! Cheers!

Brado, thank you for listening, apparently more than once! I would probably not be mistaken if I said that this work was as far from intended to be listened to on a phone as is possible. I don't even have a phone of my own any more, and I've never had a smart phone. It is more intended for listening to a first generation cassette copy on any system, or the digital remaster on a hi-fi system. I'm sure that the desktop was much closer to this, so I'm happy that it translated well. No vinyl was harmed in the making of this recording, what you hear is the wow and flutter of the Sansui 2-track cassette deck which it was recorded to. Surreal is definitely a good word from my point of view. It seems that people are able to connect to the work, so I am happy. Thank you for the comment!

Hi Brado,

So very glad to hear this from you both. I'm a big fan of yours and AustinMusic. You two are very talented and inspiring, so I know you guys will come up with something.

Thanks for the comment.

I played the guitar through Guitar rig 5, I think it was atmospheric guitar setting. The project is on my desktop, I'll have to look what I did, but I think I left everything pretty raw.

Cigar box guitar with a handmade maple neck, oak fretboard, tuners salvaged from an old Yamaha acoustic, a humbucker pickup from an Ibanez guitar with Earnie Balls strings, played using a glass slide. The nut is a piece of threaded rod, some bolt I found and cut to length, string trees are just screws, the bridge is a piece of brass rod from a sink drain stopper with a spoon for a string anchor/tail piece. This is my favorite one and first built using a magnetic pickup. Been using piezo pickups in them all but this one. I believe the drums are addictive drums.

Thanks man! Happy New Year :)

Brado,

Acknowledged, but no comment my dear friend.

- Marnie

I like your first suggestion better! :)

Brado: that is a very kind offer! I would be very interested in having you try a remix. BUT, I think I do need to get some lyrics worked out first and I would want to re-record the vocals before I create the stems for you. For the record, the vocal track does have compression, and EQ, and reverb, and I used Auto-Tune to fix up the warbling pitch issues which permeated the entire track. Except that either I don't know how to use Auto-tune properly, or the warbling it so bad that even Auto-Tun can't fix it. :) As I mentioned in a previous response, I think I just need to find a range I can work in comfortably and I need to stop trying to hold notes. And, probably, I should use my condenser mic instead of my iPhone. Anyway, I much prefer the idea of having you do a mix instead of your suggestion of mounting a competition. That's way too much attention. What I really, really, want, is a competent singer. I don't understand why it is so hard to find people who can sing and who are willing to help out on tracks. Loads of producers and lots of rappers. There must be thousands of decent singers out there someplace.

That makes me feel good in a way, like I'm being at least a partially positive influence. I'm a pretty major psychonaut, but still I feel like I am more sober than most humans I meet in life. . . Like people are so repressed and over-medicated, that they can not even sense the obvious. It's hard to feel this way, but also rewarding. When people, such as those around this site, treat me like I'm not a complete nutter, it helps make it easier. Thank you so much for leaving your comfort zone for a few minutes!

Thanks ^^ i know i don't work it good to be honest... it was just a little test , quickly ^^

I'm so glad that you liked it! I was hoping that I would do it justice and would live up to your expertise. It took a while to try to come up with something that will work. To answer your other question, those vocal chops came from a user here on the loop. I kind of just added it in there temporarily until I could find something else to enhance the hook but I decided to keep it. I believe the user got it from a famous song from the last Fast and Furious movie hence why it sounds so familiar. But thank you so much again! You literaly ROCK!!

Thanks Brado :)

I hammered this track out in one session a couple of days ago when my internet was down (nothing else to do but write music haha) . Now that my ears have had a break I see some changes i wanna make so you should check back on submission deadline day.

Also.. if you DO choose this track, you'd be welcome to suggest edits or whatever - I want this to be as good as possible :)

Thanx for the chance. :)

Hey Brado,

That was one of the things I wanted people to realize, that when you are mixing a record you are not solely mixing it for your environment or for your monitoring system and that mix needs to translate well on everything.

Nowadays people listen more and more on earbuds, laptop speakers, portable speakers, phones, tablets etc. so it's really essential to get a balance that works on everything. How you do that? well...you listen, listen on multiple playback sources, use reference tracks etc., of course after a while experience kicks in and you basically know without crossreferencing if it sounds good everywhere. A good way to set balances (at least for me) is to monitor at really low volumes as that clearly evidentiates to me atleast what stands out and what doesn't.

As for the drums sound, I almost always add samples, even if they are really low in volume. I might add a kick sample that has more low end and one that has a nice midrange and some top and blend those with the original then buss those to an aux and eq them overall as one piece so basically I'm using the samples as EQ. The same goes for snare although I trigger just one sample which is really close tone wise to the original snare and use that to emphazise lows and highs and trigger a reverb, that way I get a clean reverb sound without all the spill. Sometimes if the drums are clean enough I'll get my samples from the actual tracks.

A lot of my sound comes from my EQ curves, I tend to boost a lot in the low end and the high end to get a really hyped EQ curve (the smiley face curve if you wish to call it that) and then compress and use another EQ to round off any edges.

The biggest secret is automation though. I use a lot of automation especially in the overheads and the toms and the room tracks. Recently I've started using parallel compression as well so during the chorus I'll unmute the paralllel compressed track for more punch...or I just duplicate the kick track for example and use the second track as a parallel track just for volume.

Sounds complicated but the secret is really in riding those faders and making everything exciting and dynamic.

Cheers!

Thank you Brado!