Byron Dickens

There's not a whole lot of movement in this vocal melody:

But when you hear Rob singing

There I was completely wasting, out of work and down
All inside it's so frustrating as I drift from town to town
Feel as though nobody cares if I live or die
So I might as well begin to put some action in my life
Breaking the law, breaking the law....

He's got you absolutely convinced. You can feel the frustration.  

The lyrics 

"...We fly through this godless endeavor
We try to explain the black forever

I feel helpless and alone, trapped on the third stone

I feel permanently stoned, this godless endeavor the only cage I've known

Our organic equation has shown it's flaw
Can we agree to disagree on the concept of god?
As I lifted up my brother he said to me
"Abandon naive realism, surrender thought in cold precision"

I feel empty and deranged, denied one last epiphany and ushered from the stage..."

sound pretty ethereal to me

But the delivery is full of existential angst. 

Yeah,  I  know it is a totally different style & genre, but my examples demonstrate  a lack of movement in the melody or deeply  introspective, existential lyrics are no excuse for a  dead and lifeless vocal.

Nor is playing all (or most) of the instruments yourself any excuse for a lack of  soul:

Actually,  the mix itself  is pretty good .  Everything is clearly heard and nothing clashes or gets obscured.  Mostly it is a matter of performance and arrangement. 

The song doesn't really go anywhere.  Despite the interesting little ear candy bits, it sort of just sits there.  Static. 

The reason the vocals sound dead and lifeless is because,  well, they're dead and lifeless.  The whole performance seems kinda phoned in. Her pitch timing and diction are right on, but she just ain't convincing me. No passion.  She is good, but needs some coaching to bring out a PERFORMANCE. It sounds like it was recorded in a very dead space. That's not bad,  it is often a technical necessity.  I Have to do the same thing. So do many others.  It sure beats having all those nasty flutter echoes and comb filtering flying around,  but yeah, you have to add the room in later during the mixing stage. 

Also, all the instruments sound like they were step sequenced or quantized rigidly to the grid.   Totally lacks human feel and that is the number one thing making the song sound lifeless.  See, in the '80s - when your reference song was done - everything was recorded onto 2" tape being played in real time by humans. That's the key difference,  not the right  VSTs. 

Oh, those bas....

I noticed they all made a major mistake about a minute in.

Trying again to make this music related:

So is that artistic  geniuses or autistic?

Muse Score is great! To get anything that does more costs hundreds. 

On 3/10/2019 at 12:28 PM, JohnG said:

Now, here in the UK I get my hearing aid batteries for free.

I'm not suggesting you move here, that might cost a decade's worth of batteries or significantly more. And then there's Brexit.

But there are certain advantages to the NHS system. Not many, I grant you, but free hearing aid batteries is one.

Nothing is free.

If I could only be half as humble as you, my own greatness would soar to  the very heigjts of immensity. 

I admire your humility.  

Cool tune. Sounds a bit like Alice in Chains. 

This is something I wrote back when I was in school. It was originally conceived as a film cue for a class I was taking. I tried to just realize it as it was on paper but found that it did not sound the way I thought it did; it was a real mess in places. So, I set about to rework it and naturally it took on a life of it’s own and ended up completely reorchestrated and greatly expanded.

I wrote it out in Muse Score and exported it as MIDI. I then opened it in SONAR and spent a godawful amount of time  tweaking it. Then I used Miroslav Philharmonik 2 to play it back. "Mixed, " such that it was, in Mixbus. I had rendered each section (Strings, Brass, Winds & Percussion) separately to better adjust the balance among them. Also a bit of mild parallel compression with IK Multimedia's Fairchild model.

I think it came out okay.

To turn this music related:

1 hour ago, paulo said:

That would be sexist.

Beat me to it.

If a man says something in a forest and there isn't a woman around to hear him, is he still wrong?

Now you people know what BandLab's business model is. 

3 hours ago, Sean Michael Robinson said:

... And in one case, my bandmate found out (the hard way) that he was located right near the broadcast tower of the local NPR station. How did we know? His Fender Bassman (and several of his older ribbon mics, including two Beyer 16os) started picking up the station almost as loud as any audio coming into them! We had to rotate/reorient them (and the guitar cable) in the room to avoid the problem.

 

 

Thank [insert moniker for your favorite non-religion-specific deity type being (or nonbeing if you prefer)]  it was something at least halfway intelligent .

9 minutes ago, Johnbee58 said:

....But Hey, if that's how the guy wants to fly who are we to say he's wrong?  As long as it makes him happy........

?John B

But you can't fly on the back of a pig.

There's all kinds of people with FAR less computer running SONAR/ Cakewalk without any of these issues at all. 

DITCH THAT SOUNDBLASTER AND GET A REAL AUDIO INTERFACE!

Seriously. 

Who cares that "it was working before?" It ain't working now. They are known garbage.  Get rid of it. Pull it out and smash it with a hammer. And don't tell us you can't afford a real interface; you have an i7 and 24GB of RAM.  And Miroslav 2.

No offense, but you are like the guy with a $140,000 Mercedes SL complaining it doesn't run right but instead of putting premium unleaded in the tank like they tell you to, you insist on running the 50/50 mix of turpentine and dirty water from the Cheesy Mart.

8GB is really weak  these days. Even 16 is a bit slim. 

My bank account (and wife!) thanks them for not having left handed versions. 

Another vote for the RODE NT1-A.

Also the MXL R144. This works better on my wife; tames some of the harsh sibilants.

Good job. The mix sounds good even on my phone,  so I'm sure it is even better on real speakers. 

I end up with timing issues on drums too. And for the same reasons.  But they sure are fun to play. Nothing quite like real drums.

The UAD plugins run on their own proprietary cards.

She reminds me of Joe.  Joe used to love to run part way up a tree and then turn around to look at you like he was saying  "check this out, man. Cool, huh?"

He stayed right beside me the whole time I was laid up in bed for two weeks terribly sick, getting up only to eat or use the litter box.  I was Joe's official person.

He ended up dying of some condition that messed up his intestines so they wouldn't digest food. Poor guy.