Kevin Walsh

Larry, sorry, I'm referring to a mic shield. Here's a picture of my setup. As you can see, I also use a pop filter.

Thank you Larry! I appreciate you giving it a listen!

Really nice take on a truly great song. Everything sounds so nice! The mix is sweet and warm and the vocals are a different but very enjoyable take on the original. The mix of sung and melodyne-create harmonies works really well here.

I'm with Wookie, too much reverb on the pianos, but the vocal tracks seems okay, just needs a bit more presence. You have a good voice, and your personality comes through with it. Just keep singing and you won't need to hand your songs over to others to sing. As you keep writing and singing, you may find yourself naturally evolving styles and structures that favor the way your unique voice works. Of course, then you'll be stuck with songs that don't really work for anyone else ha!

Not a think wrong with your voice, it's very rock' and roll. Great start here. I'm a big fan of your covers, you're always so faithful to the spirit of the original song. Can't wait till this one is finished! Larry's advice is good on dealing with noise between the blobs on vocal tracks. Another route is to use a gate, which is a device that senses the dB output level of your track and when it drops below a certain level it essentially mutes the output. You can set that level to any value you like. Play your song and fiddle with the threshold value till it does what you want - silence the stuff you don't want and plays the stuff you do. Gates are fun for other types of effects too, but that's for another day! I personally just manually split and crop clips till they only have the parts I want in them. I zoom in very tight to see exactly where the audio I want starts and I trim the clip right up to that point. It's tedious, and so is going through vocal parts and manually adjusting volume automation to get nice levels, but the results are worth the effort. Particularly if you're like me and you record in a room with your dog snoring and the AC running and the TV blaring in the next room! One thing I've recently invested in that has made a big difference in the quality of my vocal recordings is a mic shield, which is a bit of acoustic foam-coated steel that mounts on the mic stand and blocks room reflections and noise from getting into your mic. Saw one at GC and picked it up for a lark and man, what a difference! Turns out the less noise you have in your vocal parts, the less distortion compression imparts to the track and the nicer the sound. If you're going for warmth and clarity, it's great. Nowhere near as good as a real studio room but no way I'll ever have something like that. Some dudz on the interwebs have declared them snake-oil, but I think they're wrong. YMMV!

Wow, just incredible vocals! You have a great song here, Nigel and the mix lives up to it. Love Devine Lie!

I re-arranged the ending, give it a listen. Thanks!

Dup, please ignore!

I added a low pass filter to the toms, thanks for the feedback!

Thanks for the feedback! I dialed it back a bit in the new mix, give it a peek!

The new arrangement I just posted adds a bit of oomph to the snare. I did dial back the toms with a low pass filter. Let me know how it sounds.

Good stuff in here, particularly the last section which is a bit mesmerizing. I always like your work.

Thank you, David!

Thanks for your feedback, Tom. I always struggle with bass eq and tone and getting the levels right. Good feedback on the snare, but I'm unsure of how I vary the samples. I know I can run a humanize function on the MIDI note velocities, but that's not quite what you're talking about, is it? As for guitar, gotta love S-Gear, right? By the way, some of the clean tones are from the XLR out of a Fender Mustang GTX 100 I picked up a while ago. I'm pretty amazed at how good this thing sounds DI.

Thanks, Kurt!

Thanks, Wookie, I hear that as well. I appreciate it!

I'll give your idea a try, Nigel. I was considering that as well, thanks, I appreciate your advice.

Thanks for listening, gary!

Here's one I'm working on, your feedback is very much appreciated! Thanks in advance for your help. PS: Wow, I'm amazed at all the new songs pouring in to the forum! I'm way behind on my listening. Update 1: I added another snare track with different drum and a bit of reverb and blended it in with the original. I re-worked the bass a bit. Tamed the solo in the center a bit, not too much I hope. I also re-did the ending with a bit of a different arrangement. Thanks for your help, folks!

Thanks! You were absolutely right, I did the entire mix in offset mode. Painful mistake. I've been using Cakewalk/Sonar for years and I never knew about it.

I ran into an interesting problem that I've not seen before. Two tracks side by side had problems with the slider maintaining the correct position and the inspector view of the slider would also get out of sync with the console view. The tracks are 30 and 31 in the video below. I have no idea what I did to get the behavior to show itself. cbb.mp4

Thanks for jumping in on the update. I hate to resurrect posts that have had their run, but gary did great work that I wanted to expose. He's right though, the MP3 I posted doesn't do the mix job he did a lot of justice. I'm still very appreciative of his taking my stuff under his wing and I learned quite a bit from him as he worked through the various decisions involved.

gary is referring to my reference track for the tone I was after, "It's Good to be King", from Tom Petty's Wildflowers album. Needless to say, I didn't get there. I felt the drums were a bit of a drag on my original mix, so on my final mix I bounce the drum track to a wave file and nudged it ahead a bit so that the drums were hitting a tiny bit earlier than when lined up on the grid. I felt like that little change did a lot for the feel. But a real drummer would certainly have been better!

Added garybrun's mix, please feel free to comment. Thank you @garybrun !

I wonder if you have not set the midi track's output to the drum synth you are using?