My Rocked Up Cover of "Strawberry Fields Forever"

[PavlovsCat]

Once again, thanks to everyone who commented, I greatly appreciate people taking the time to listen and then offering me constructive advice or posting something encouraging. I have been pretty reluctant to share any of my recordings that I've recently made, especially when I hear the quality of some of the stuff people are sharing. 

The specific advice people are giving is especially useful as it will help me zero in one areas I need to improve this mix, otherwise, frankly, it can be overwhelming trying to figure everything out. I'm certainly not going to be able to create a great mix anytime soon, but if I can improve this mix considerably, I'd be pretty happy.  Just getting back to playing after two decades after stopping (not because I didn't love playing --- I enormously love playing -- but due to tendonitis, I couldn't play without experiencing pain, even playing one song on the drums with say an 8th note cymbal pattern, I'll get pain after a minute and besides that completely sucking, it really made it incredibly difficult to keep good time; now, while  I won't be realistically be able to play live with other musicians, I've learned how to play for say 3 minutes without letting the pain destroy my timing, which was something I previously thought would be impossible). Anyhow, I've always loved this community for how kind people are to one another and the comments in this thread are people being really kind to me and I want to make sure that everyone who commented in this thread is aware that I read every word and I am thankful. When I was on my phone I gave every comment a like, but then I got on my computer and changed those to thanks. 

I will be doing my best to digest and implement the advice everyone has provided, but there is a learning curve. I will update this thread with my progress in making the suggested improvements. I think everyone was way too kind about the vocals which I know find ruins the whole song and want to re-record. I'm sure I can do better, but I sometimes my enthusiasm for a song or a performance can outweighed my objectivity and I need time to step back to something I've done and listen with fresh ears. I tend to do everything as a first take, which I could do twenty some years ago when I practiced all the time and was a good musician, but now, I listen back to something a week after I recorded it and I suddenly hear the mistakes, bad vocal notes and hear the mix more critically.  Anyhow, this has been really helpful and everyone has been very kind.  

- Peter 

[Larry T.]

Hi Peter....in case you haven't heard about a You Tube channel called #creativesauce i strongly suggest checking out Mike Enjo's video tutorials on the Cakewalk by Bandlab DAW as with those videos and this Forum you will have all the info you need to get up to speed very quickly....here's a link:  https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/creativesauce

[PavlovsCat]

8 minutes ago, Larry T. said:

Hi Peter....in case you haven't heard about a You Tube channel called #creativesauce i strongly suggest checking out Mike Enjo's video tutorials on the Cakewalk by Bandlab DAW as with those videos and this Forum you will have all the info you need to get up to speed very quickly....here's a link:  https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/creativesauce

Absolutely great advice. I follow him on YouTube and Facebook. I have watched his EQ basics video twice so far, but I'm still not really grasping everything. But Mike does an excellent job. Thanks, Larry. 

[Jim Fogle]

Interesting and enjoyable.  I wish there was more floor tom hits and I'm not hearing much low end.  Great work though.  I like your drumming.  Nobody has mentioned what a good job you did assembling samples into a recognizable and coherent song.  I liked the way you used one repetitive piano note to drive the song.   You may think this is a silly question but how much time do you estimate you spent on selecting and assembling the samples you used?

I'm looking forward to hearing future covers from you.  I'm sure I will enjoy them

[PavlovsCat]

On 1/30/2022 at 1:34 PM, Jim Fogle said:

Interesting and enjoyable.  I wish there was more floor tom hits and I'm not hearing much low end.  Great work though.  I like your drumming.  Nobody has mentioned what a good job you did assembling samples into a recognizable and coherent song.  I liked the way you used one repetitive piano note to drive the song.   You may think this is a silly question but how much time do you estimate you spent on selecting and assembling the samples you used?

I'm looking forward to hearing future covers from you.  I'm sure I will enjoy them

Thanks for the compliment. I'm pretty familiar with all of the sample libraries I used so it was easy to select the libraries for each part, especially the drums, bass, guitars and piano.  I mean, I've created a bunch of templates for various types of rock songs, like hard rock, acoustic rock, folk rock and other styles, which is useful, but along the way, it also helped me to understand what works best for each style and for me, when I have a creative idea -- say, a idea of how I want to play a cover or I come up with a new original song or a new arrangement of an old song I wrote, it makes things a lot quicker. I'm often trying to duplicate instruments I've played in real life -- my mother was a music teacher and I took piano, organ, drums and guitar lessons growing up (obviously no voice lessons!) and played in a family band that played around Chicago as a kid and in the school band before playing semi professionally as adult for many years  -- or own with the sample libraries I choose. In this case, I used a bunch of Orange Tree Samples' libraries -- and some of the guitars are ones you wouldn't expect. Like a lead guitar I use in the song is their heavy metal library , Drakus. I have M-Tron and other Mellotron VSTs and sample libraries. 

Although I use sample libraries, I don't use loops. I love playing, so everything I shared was played on a midi controller and all of the drums were played live, that is, I don't program anything, I play it live and hit record. Even the bridge drum part that sounds -- intentionally -- very drum machine like -- was me playing live. But everything on here was pretty much a first take except for vocals with 26 tracks. I really have been doing covers to get myself to play more because I stopped playing professionally decades ago due to tendonitis, but I've recently decided to play try playing again as a hobby and I can play simple keyboard parts like on this song for 20 minutes or more without pain and drums, often only a few minutes, which means it's not realistic to play with other musicians anymore, but I can still record stuff like this, which is still fun, even though I can't play very well anymore and my voice is not very good. I have a 13 year old daughter with a good voice I'm trying to replace me. Hopefully, as I improve no one will have to hear my voice anymore!  

Some of the sample libraries I used: 

Guitars: Various Orange Tree Samples libraries
Bass Guitar: Orange Tree Samples
Sound Dust Dulcitone
Embertone Walker Piano 
Superior Drummer drums
Drum Machine Sounding Kit: NI Drum Lab
Mellotron: M-Tron Pro
Strings and Woodwinds: IW Orchestral Colors 

Edited February 7, 2022 by PavlovsCat

[PavlovsCat]

I tried another mix of Strawberry Fields. I think I'll eventually try re-singing this or parts of it, because I think I can do a better job.

(DELETED THAT ONE) 

 

Edited February 8, 2022 by PavlovsCat

[PavlovsCat]

Okay, this mix is definitely better than the previous ones. Yes I still don't know now what I'm doing, but I think the lead vocal is louder and I put different effects on my vocal, ADT and Waves Chris Lord-Alge Vocals. @Starship Krupa offered to remix this and I'm taking him up on his kind offer (Erik: if you see this, could you PM how I need to save everything for your to mix things; the only collaboration I did, I only sent the entire mix to my collaborator and he sent me back an audio file for me to add to a track, so I don't know how to best save an entire project so that you can use it without having all of the same plugins and libraries -- Thanks).  

What I hated about the earlier mix was that my voice -- which admittedly isn't very good -- sounded really shrill. With the ADT and CLA Vocals effect, that shrillness was tamed. I have no idea how to do that manually using various tools -- beyond presets and AI tools -- or even where to start. Back when I was a working musician, I focused on playing and had sound people and engineers to rely. on, at most, I learned about micing my drums and using effects. I sang background vocals, but I had nothing to do with mixing. I bought some effects one of our sound pros told me to buy. I didn't really know how to use them beyond what our main sound showed me to do to get the desired sounds. True story.  

 

Edited February 8, 2022 by PavlovsCat

[Makke]

Cool. Great version of the Beatles song. I enjoyed the performance and sounds.