AndyB01

Of course, I meant to say 'I love the decay on those early chords' but you got the point 🙂

Got to love autocorrect 😂

Love the delay on those early chords, if you really focus you can hear the notes naturally decay to nothing. I also really liked the panning at around the 4:00 minute mark.

Great track to zone out to.

Andy

On 6/27/2021 at 10:02 AM, garybrun said:

Andy I thought this was a great song.

Great lyrics and harmonies in the right place and also what a great piano sound.
The vocal has a lot of emotion...  have you tired without melodyne/autotune?
Our own vocals always sounds worse in our own heads 🙂

Your voice reminds of an artist Graham Kendrick  from years ago in my teen years.

Well done.

Thanks @garybrun, well where to start?

I did a lot of work on the lyrics and went through several iterations before I settled on a final version, I really did want to tell a story through the imagery I was trying to paint with the words. The piano chops are not mine, but I did choose the instrumentation.

Your own vocals may sound worse in your head Gary (they always sound sublime to me btw), mine unfortunately also sound worse in the heads of others - of that I am quite convinced - but thank you eternally for the vote of confidence; I shall treasure it always. 

As to Graham Kendrick, I had never heard of him so I trundled over to YouTube to see what I could find. Wow, that's quite a compliment and company I'm very happy to be compared to any day of the week - he has a great voice. 🙂

Thanks again for the comments and for taking the time to listen and feedback.

Andy

Sven, I agree with Nigel, this is terrific work. I love the chord progressions in this, everything about it in fact. Mix sounds just fine here through decent studio cans. Thanks for sharing.

Andy

14 hours ago, PhonoBrainer said:

You already have great emotion in your vocal . . . it could also be down to the original mic choice - what mic did you use? Some condensers can be brittle and spitty to begin with. Ribbon mics are a bit more pleasant to mix vocals from.

Tom, mic is a good old Shure SM58 - it's all I have. I keep meaning to treat myself to a Rode NT2A one of these days but there always seem to be too many competing priorities for my spare $ - ain't it always the way. 🤷‍♂️

I'll dig out the original unprocessed vox and see if I can do a better processing job; alternatively perhaps I should find a new vocalist and just stick to BGVs... 😂😂

Thanks as always for your ears and your time.

12 hours ago, Lynn Wilson said:

Andy, if you didn't change a thing, this would still be a marvelous song and performance.  I haven't had much time to hang around here lately, but I'm glad I caught this song!  Well done!!

Thanks Lynn - appreciate the feedback.

6 hours ago, PhonoBrainer said:

What a lovely composition. For me the drums should definitely be a bit louder in the mix, not that they have to be there all the time or anything.

Killer piano chimey yet substantial. Perfect tone for this!

The vocal itself is wonderful considering the Melodyne, only in one spot I think did it go full-tilt Cher. I think the overcooking might be on a compressor setting somewhere? It is a lovely vocal with sublime lyrics and I think it could easily be dropped a full db throughout the entire song, just as an experiment, does the mix breathe more? Do the drums perk up? Is that "overcooking" solved?

I dunno. The bgv's are in such good spots. Your piece is a complete study of the effective use of intervals. Loved it!

cheers,

-Tom

Thanks Tom for your kind comments

You've inspired me to keep working on it - I will re-cut that damn vocal if it kills me 😉

Andy

Lovely lyrical craft there Bjorn - sooo many truths in there. 😂 I thought the vocal delivery sat well with the lyric, although I detected a tiny drop of mouth noise - was the mic close? I've found RX8 to be a good post fix for this, as I'm one of the worst offenders when I try to sing.

Mrs AndyB01 woke me at 4:30am the other day to tell me she could hear the low battery indicator bleeping on the smoke alarm. Oddly enough, she didn't seem to appreciate my suggestion that she could have just changed the battery without waking me. 😂

Great job, thanks for sharing.

Andy

Well it may be 'normal' but it still has touches of that furry magic. Some very impressive keyboard chops on display here - as always.

Don't get too normal 😉

Andy

22 minutes ago, scook said:

Most of this is wrong too but I will leave it for others to decide for themselves.

+1

@bjornpdx I know and I agree - you can clearly hear where it has been overcooked. I wish I didn't need to use Melodyne but it's a necessity. I have to practice my vocals more and and get better and using the FX so they are less noticeable. Appreciate the feedback. Andy

11 hours ago, Bajan Blue said:

Hi Andy

Good track - i heard the sibilance and i thought i did hear some over use of a desser, but these are small criticisms - what did you use as a  Desser?

Otherwise all good

Nigel

Nigel, I tend to use RX8 for vocal processing but since I did this I have purchased an upgraded version of Melodyne - which I believe has a few additional tools and tricks to deal with sibilance but I haven't tried those on this yet. To be brutally honest, I need to put the time in and start again with the raw vocal and if it isn't good enough just bite the bullet and re-record it. With vocal comping tools I don't even need to do it in one take any more, so there really is no excuse. Thanks for your ears and your time.

Andy

Cheers Jim, I thought the bass sounded about right on the mix (I was using SoundIDReference on cans though) - I'll see if that shouldn't come up a  touch.

2 hours ago, noynekker said:

The one thing that jumped out to my ear was right at the end, the lyric "so in love with you" has a noticeable kind of electronic gliss slide up sound in the vocal, not sure if that was intended. 

Nice you are  "revisiting some old stuff" . . . what else do you have in the vault ? ("Art is never finished, only abandoned")

Thank you for the kind comments, I hear that 'gliss' too and anything odd-sounding in the vocal is almost certainly a combination of three things:

1. Poor vocal technique
2. Over-dosing of effects
3. Over-cooked use of Melodyne

Certainly not intentional, so if it sounded good it's more luck than judgement. 😉

I have a couple of others I have plans for - one is crying out for a female lead vocalist, unfortunately I don't have access to one; apart from Mrs AndyB01 and although she has many fine qualities and talents - singing isn't one of them.

Appreciate the time and crits, as always

Andy

Very nice David - suits the video short - I was getting just a touch of distortion at the top end on my old Sony MD7506 cans - but that might be down to YouTube compression and codecs. I'm sure it must degrade the audio signal.

I like the way your chord changes take me to unexpected places and the way you play with tempo and timing. It messes with my head but in a good way. 🙂

Andy

Cheers folks, the 'piano' Jack is actually three different samples: an EZkeys upright ballad piano, a Bosendorfer 225 B sample from Synthogy Ivory (including a lush pad) and an old DimPro sample of some DX Tines - which I still love the sound of.

'Wistful nostalgia' is exactly what I was going for David 😂 - I may have cropped the fade out a little too early (good spot thanks - I'll check).

Kurt, I had stronger drums in the original and grew to really dislike them; so I went for a really light stick on the pre-chorus and chorus only. I might try more weight towards the end as you suggest.

Really appreciate the feedback and your time as always gents.

Andy

Hi All

I haven't posted anything in a while, I've been revisiting some old stuff and this is a re-work of one I posted on the old Sonar forums about four years ago; but it didn't get much traction at the time.

I've taken off the original drum track, which was far too heavy and added a bass track; but the vocal is unchanged. It's heavy on verb and delay for a reason - this was a very challenging vocal (for me anyway) and I didn't fancy re-cutting it; there is some sibilance and I must attend to that at some point.

The piano track is built from EZkeys, with a few subtle tweaks and embellishments but the lyrics are all my work. I guess it's about two people entering the sunset of their lives.

I'm in the process of porting my stuff from SoundCloud to Bandlab (too many ads and too much spam in SC). This is one of the songs I have completed so far.

Anyway, enough of my rambling, see what you think; nits and crits welcome as always.

https://www.bandlab.com/revisions/10d7d068-62cb-eb11-a7ad-0050f280467f

Andy

Jerry what an unusual technique (well to me anyway) and a fascinating result. You're right in that whilst the words are not perfectly formed, the acoustics and reverb in places where choirs perform often have that effect. Impressive stuff. Thanks for sharing, Andy

Lovely guitar tone David and some really nice jazz progressions, love that early high harmonic (around 00:38) - it rang like a bell. I'm with everyone else on the percussion, less is more I think. Great job.

Andy

I suspect it will mean the end of the road for my old Gen 1 Focusrite 2i4, it causes enough blue screens as it is in Windows 10.

Still, it's been a good workhorse and it doesn't owe me anything.

Andy

Terrific guitar tone and I thought the mix on the sung vocal suited the song perfectly. Really well executed - the whole package - great work.

Andy

Steve you certainly nailed those lush harmonies - stellar work there.

Keep it up and - if you're doing requests - how about Till There Was You which is one of my favourites? I know it's a cover they did of an old show tune but I still love their take on it.

Andy

So many layers to this track and stellar performances from the vox, sax, bass and guitars - all absolutely stand out. Great mix too - sounded good on my old Sony MDR-7506 cans.

Andy

On 5/10/2021 at 6:29 AM, emeraldsoul said:

Howdy Andy! Thanks heaps! Thanks for the tinfoil remark as well, I'm looking forward to a mix cleanup and vid for that one as well. Hope I get to hear some of your new stuff soon?

 

Cheers Tom, been pretty busy of late so no time for music - I have so much half-baked stuff and stems of ideas - probably only ten percent of it is worth progressing but I'm an eternal optimist. 😉

I'd also like to remaster a lot of my old stuff - I listened to some of it recently and - ouch.

Andy

Yep nobody gets their hands on my laptop either - the only thing mine seriously dislikes is disconnecting the audio interface while the laptop is on. It's an old Gen 1 Focusrite 2i4 and if I disconnect it 'hot' the laptop immediately blue screens.

But that's just a quirk of my setup and not a general problem with laptops AFAIK. As for disconnecting from I/O and my monitor - not a problem.

Whatever you decide, hope it goes well.

Andy

Hi I went through this recently as my laptop needed a complete rebuild from the ground up. I used it as the opportunity to do some major housekeeping, delete all my old 32 bit plugins, dump a lot of accumulated crap and sort out my VST folders.

I was a SPlat owner but I chose not to reinstall it - I just installed CbB instead and I find it better to be honest, there was very little in SPlat I miss apart from Dim Pro (however I had the executables for this so was able to reinstall it successfully).

For backups I did the following:

Acronis full disk backup so I could access everything off the old build.

Full data backup to Cloud as a belt and braces. 

I didn't try to preserve my settings because I hadn't customised much and as above - my DAW and VST config was a mess. Plus something was continually blue screening my system (never worked out what) so I didn't want to restore anything that reintroduced that problem.

Probably not the perspective you were after but I hope it helps.

Andy

I have a 2i4 - it's an ancient Gen 1, unbreakable and works like a charm. It just doesn't like USB3.0 ports much (but that's very much a Gen 1 issue). 

Great advice from John V, as always.

Andy