Hey all,
I’ve just finished 2 new songs I’ve been working on for a while
Things You Do
and
Hey You
They can both be heard HERE
I used Jamstix for the drums for both songs.
Vocals need some fixing up here and there but we tracked these a while ago and have now pretty much decided to leave thees as is and move on with the songs we are now currently working on.
Any feedback (good or bad) on either the songs or the production would be appreciated.
thanks,
Rich
Hi Rich,
Just had a listen to the tracks. I am glad to see that jamstix can be used so effectively. I’m thinking about buying a copy for myself.
Things You Do -
(1) The first thing I noticed was that there is a problem with the compression of the acoustic guitar. It sounds like there is a rather long attack setting on the comp and a medium release setting. This introduces a “burst” of sound at the beginning of every new phrase of the acoustic guitar. I have used a “long attack” setting (~50ms) on acoustics in the past to even out the volume yet keep the percussiveness, but I’ve found that I needed to reduce the decay (and/or release) settings to about the same amount.
(2) I wlso noticed that there is a big mismatch in the ambience of the different tracks. This is a bit of a sore spot, as many tracks are completely ruined by adding in too much low quality reverb! I really love SIR as a reverb unit ( as I can use any impulse function I can get your grubby hands on 
). The vox and guitar could use a small amount of plate 'verb to give them some ambience without having a noticeable amount of reverberation, per se.
(3) This singer sounds a bit like Rebecca St. James. Very interesting. It seems that there are some pitch problems at the end of rising phrases. It is especially notable during the outro where she’s going for the 7th (?) You may be able to use some kind of pitch correction to adjust just these notes. Again, this is another sore spot, but re-recording is sometimes just not an option!!!
Hey You
(1) There seem to be a lot more “pitch problems” in this song. It may seem this way beacause of te way she is sliding into pitches all over the place. The chorus sounds perfectly fine, so it might just take some discipline to get this “slide-y” vox to sound right. If possible you could record the melody using a keyboard or some other pitched instrument on a separate track for her to listen to while recording. That has always helped me with harmony parts, so it could probably help with complex vox, as well!
(2) again, the vox during the verses seems to be a bit too dry compared to the backing tracks. Whatever you are doing to the acoustic seems to match the ambience of jamstix quite well.
Cheers,
Ben
Thanks for the feedback Ben.
I was worried about putting too much reverb on the vocals.
I used 2 reverbs, both SIR.
a long one on AUX 1 and a short on on AUX 2.
I then sent adjusted the sends on the vox group, guitar gorup and the 4 drum channels to what I thought sounded about right.
I wanted the vocals to stand out a bit more than the rest so tried not to go too heavy on the reverb.
I didn’t use a plate verb though so might try that…
For the guitar in Things You Do I had an outboard compressor in between the pre-amp and soundcard to tame the peaks but only had about 10ms set on the attack for that.
I think I may have overcompressed in the mix though as I can hear what you mean with the guitar sound…
thanks for listening.
Rich