What do you guys think of this track?

Minisweeper

If it's entirely not your kind of music then leave your flames elsewhere, otherwise i'd be interested to hear. track

giginger

It's asked me for a password mate.

Minisweeper

ahh. Yeah it would do that. Try now.

giginger

Whilst the music isn't to my taste it's really well produced.

Minisweeper

Haha, thats extremely daintily put. Thanks.

giginger

Well, I'm very much an electronic music person

Bergamot

Guitar work = awesome.

*something* is off about the vocals. She's clearly a really good singer but something just doesn't click. I suspect it is at least partly due to the pretty heavy echo effect.

Overall, really good track, and it's the sort of thing that I would probably buy if i heard it live.

Kosmo

Today is your lucky day, as my friend is visiting, we both are avid musicans and HE is actually a professional studio technician and sound engineer. First, we both loved the guitar work, needs bit more editing, the impurities came out way too clearly. Everything seemed to be on the same volume level and they made each other sound unclear, you might want to silence the guitar a tad and bring the vocals to the front, leaving the electric guitar to the back covering the ambient range, and to further improve that, you might want to think about replacing the electric guitar with a bass, since the song lacks of a solid base and it is too hard on the treble (had to adjust it when we listened, always a bad sign since I have close to studio quality equipment home). She has an amazing voice, soft, maybe she could try to vibrate her voice more, to give it more lively sound, now it is great, but doesn't move anywhere. But that is what we would call an excellent start where to begin the editing process.

Minisweeper

Wow. Interesting comments. Here's two more by the same people. I hasten to add at this point that neither the guitar work or the singing is myself, i just dug it out yesterday and reminded me of it so i wondered what other people thought. Personally the recording of the first one i posted isnt my favourite either - i'm not a fan of the echoing. I saw it live on the shoddy equipment in our school hall and it fucking melted me. I'd never heard her sing properly before and i nearly cried. Why they had to muck around with it on the recording i'm not entirely sure but i still love the song.
Anyway, thanks on their behalf for the comments, check out those two and see what you think.

leason

I have some limited experience with studio work. My band has done some recording and I spent a great deal of time hanging out with the technicians and editors that worked on the details. I'm no pro, but aside from Kosmo's good observations, one other thing I noticed is that the frequency from the guitar is running over the vocals. One way you can work with that is through balance, another way is through compression. Try putting the guitar a tad on one side and the vocals a tad more on the other. If that does not come out right for you then you can try compressing the guitar a bit and freeing up the vocal range - it sounds like the mids to me. But I really like the acoustic work; I play too and by far enjoy acoustic driven music more than any other. You ever heard of Patti Griffin? You should really check out her stuff if you liked that girl's vocals, Patti's stuff is amazing. All her albums are pretty folk styled except one called "Flaming Red" which is more rock type.

chimaira

Why they had to muck around with it on the recording i'm not entirely sure but i still love the song.

I produced my bands EP, and its very tempting to add almost pointless effects and over-produce a track. I guess thats what happened here.

I love her voice. It's quite different. The acoustic isn't right though. It feels like its recorded direct, rather than using a mic to pick up the warmth of an acoustic amp. Try leason's idea of putting guitar on the one side slightly, and the vocals on the other.

Nice track overall though.

leason

Another neat trick to try when recording an acoustic... Use two mics and record two tracks for each take. Place one mic over the sound hole and another one up on the neck a bit. Then use balance to put one track in the left and the other in the right. You can even take one track and push it a bit ahead and the other just a tiny bit behind. What you end up with is a really incredible sound from the guitar with no need for compression or effects. If you tweak it just right you don't have to use any delay and the sound is so much more pure than using a reverb or any other digital effect. I think its because the neck mic balances out the pick sound from the soundhole, while preserving the range from the soundhole mic. It's way cool. Whenever I do acoustic guitar recording we always use high quality vocal mics straight off the guitar. I've just never been that happy with the amp sound - and that was trying it with a Taylor 410 with the expression system and a Fishman loudbox amp. The mic always sounded better.

giginger

I can hear good production on a record but can I do it for myself? No, I just don't have that gift.

Sample 01
Sample 02

Now, I did the first one all by myself. I thought it sounded good, at first. Someone who knows what they're doing came along and asked if they could do a proper mixdown of it. This person being who they are I said yes straight away. That second sample is their end product. You can hear the difference so well. I wish I had those skills.

Minisweeper

/me gets the cd cleaner out and plays gigingers track again. But yeah, doing stuff is easy, doing stuff well is a lot harder :(

chrissy

she's an amazing singer
hannah