Kevin Walsh

Thank you, Wookie, high praise indeed! Thank you for taking the time to listen and comment.

Thanks for listening and commenting, glad you enjoyed it! My wife has long since learned not to ask me how I record stuff, her eyes glaze over after about fifteen seconds of jibber jabber. If I recall (it's been a while) I recorded on whatever version of Cakewalk Sonar was current in 2015. Sonar X3 maybe? For instruments I used a 2005 American Strat and a 2004 Indonesia Epiphone Sheraton into various Guitar Rig 5 presets. To update things I re-recorded the intro lead guitar using the Sheraton into a Tonex Marshall profile I grabbed on ToneNet somewhere. The bass was a 2013 American Precision Bass direct into a Guitar Rig 5 bass preset called "DI". For synths I used Z3+2A for a few patches and for the hammond keys patches. I'm not very good at cobbling together synth sounds. All keys parts were hand-programmed using the PRV. I typically use a separate reverb bus and a delay bus. These days for the reverb bus I use a Valhalla plugin but back then I used the Rematrix convolution reverb plug in in the pro channel. For delay bus I used and still use the Cakewalk Sonitus delay. I love that thing. I put prochannel eq high pass filters on both busses. I'll typically route lead vocal bus and bg bus vocals into both delay and reverb bus and adjust send gain to taste. For guitars I put sends on individual guitar tracks rather than on busses. I also add a reverb send on the drum buss too but easy does it there. I may have put some mild compression on the various busses. For mastering I used Ozone 7 I think, and used some vintage presets to get a nice old-school sound. I'm a big preset guy, mostly because I don't know what I'm doing and I couldn't hear the difference if I did. I may have used the Ozone tape emulator on the master, or maybe the pro-channel tape emulator. I love those but if you go crazy with them things can get pretty noisy. The hardest part was getting the drums to sound right. I use Addictive Drums 2 using a vintage dry patch or a Fairfax patch (can't remember which one right now) with canned midi tracks that get pretty heavily monkeyed with by the time I'm done. I put a pro channel tube driver with some nice saturation on the drum buss to smooth things out and I put an ozone vintage limiter on the bass/drum buss to squish them together. All vocals and acoustic guitar (an old Martin D16GX, a 2000 model I think) were mic'ed with a Microphone Parts T-12 mic I built from a kit. Awesome LDC mic that has a nice old school sound and pretty cheap too. That's about it I think. Thanks again, I'm really encouraged by the great comments here!

I agree with @freddyj, it's got a great '60s feel to it that could easily fit into a pop or even Motown format with ease. The mix sounds good even in my crappy bluetooth hearing aid buds, and that takes some doing. I very much like the chords, lyrics and the arrangement. They keep my interest, and the performances are first rate. Nice tele sound in the solo. Well done!

Thanks. Makke, for taking the time to listen ans comment!

Thanks, Lynn, your feedback is always appreciated!

Really good song with outstanding performances! Loved the video too.

Lovely little suite, here, looking forward to part 2. The gull sounds were very good indeed.

Great mix for a good song with excellent guitar tone and playing. Sadly, they don't make them like this anymore, glad you're still doing it!

I'm responding because you quoted my post. He's suggesting (or someone suggested somewhere) that your guitars sound somewhat isolated and that ambient reverb can help. Adding a reverb to a single track will have the reverb being panned along with your signal. To fix that, don't use a track-based reverb plug in, use a bus-based plug in that will spread the reverb across the sound scape regardless of where you have the individual instruments panned. To that, create a new stereo bus, name it reverb. Then add a reverb plugin (or use the pro-channel Re-Matrix Solo plugin) and set the mix to 100%. Then go to your guitar track and go to the Sends box and add a send, then select the reverb bus. You can adjust how much of your guitar signal to send. This has the advantage of being a stereo reverb and you can eq the reverb signal without monkeying with your guitar tone, and it creates a nice fill of sound to your track. Adjust the reverb bus slider or the individual sends to control the level of reverb. You can also do sends for multiple or even all your guitars to that one reverb bus, or even (like I do) send drums, guitars and vocals to the reverb bus to get everything to sound like the instruments are all in the same room. I do the same thing with delays and vocals.

Killer cover! JP days are a fuzzy distant memory for me, but the ones I do remember are fond ones. I too am a closet cover maker but I don't have the guts to post them, mostly because they are nowhere near as good as this.

Thank you for listening and thank you for your comments!

If this was something I had done it would be the final mix, and I would quit playing because I could never do anything better than this again. This sounds fantastic. As always the playing is wonderful. I can't wait to hear the final.

Hey freddy, I think you nailed the sound that you were after. You have a very cool voice and it sits in this song perfectly.

Hey larry, nice job on the new mix! There's a real sense of spaciousness in the new mix and everything sits together more cohesively. Step by step right? By the way, ambient reggae is a new genre to me. I like it.

I don't have a clue how you did this but I sure like it. Sounds great to me!

I'm no professional, but I think the mix sounds pretty good. You've done a really nice job here. Look forward to a cut with the vocals in it.

Thanks for the kind words, Steve. Speaking as a rank amateur, it's incredibly gratifying to hear people with your kind of talent say such things. My wife says I need to get a hobby that pays better.

Thank you bjorn!

Fantastic track, Nigel with an amazing video. You have such a great vocal going on here. Love the keys in the breaks. As always, just wow. Am I the only one hearing a Duran-Duran vibe here?

Wow, steve! I feel like I just left an opera! You have a great skill for vocally negotiating these bouncing, rolling chord changes that makes for an endlessly interesting experience. Very tight arrangement and the vocals are just great. Oh, yeah, the guitar break was great and the bass that walks all over the place under it is amazing. Great work, worth the effort!

Glenn, this is a beautiful song with a powerful message. You have a wonderful voice and you use it perfectly here. I was kind of yearning for a cathartic breakout too, but I get the drone thing. The repetitive cycle matches the intent of the lyrics. The background vocals are amazing. Love it! Kevin

Thanks! I re-amped the guitar from a Guitar Rig marshall to a Tonex marshall. Night and day. I should have centered the guitar too but whatever. Thanks!

Thanks for the listen, Steve! I added the lyrics above, just for you. I'll the take the Clapton reference, dusty or no, with thanks! Kevin

Hey, Lynn, really like this one, nice way to stretch your legs. The mix is damned nice. Really like the vocal treatment and the lyrics are great. I liked the break too and the lead work is great. Really like the overall vibe and the arrangement, it's a good song. One nit is that, to me, the vocals feel like they're sitting on top of, and separate from the rest of the mix. I admit this is my personal preference for how vocals should blend with the instruments so take that with a grain of salt. If you feel that's the case too, here's the two main things I focus on. Please excuse me if my amateur advice is a bit presumptuous, and of course, you're probably already doing something like this anyway so feel free to ignore me. First, I like to put a side-chain compressor on the instrument bus and do a send on the lead vocal to the input. Then I can drop the vocals into the mix volume-wise without losing definition. Play with the compressor threshold to avoid pumping on the instrument mix. I'll also sometimes put Izotope's vintage limiter (with the analog glue preset) to get a nice cohesive mix. When it works right it's magic. The second thing is that I tend to do some mild eq cuts on the vocals at various points on the low and low mids (varies with the vocal performance) to avoid clashing with guitars, bass and keys. Mind you, the song is good as is and doesn't really cry out for anything else. Thanks!

Pretty damned good, Jesse.