When the Dark Closed In and Night Eclipsed Day

[Amberwolf]

When the Dark Closed In and Night Eclipsed Day

https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/when-the-dark-closed-in-and-night-eclipsed-day

 

All constructive criticism welcome.   

(I'm no professional; it's just a (very important to me) hobby, so improvement is always possible, and easier with help from others.  Heck, I'm not even a musician, or a real composer, etc.)

 

I played in the electric guitar parts with the Ibanez 6-string bass with Shred as an effects rack; the rest was played into the system as MIDI notes from a keyboard into various synths (multiple instances of Z3TA+2 and Dimension, each with various effects such as Sonitus Multiband Compressor, Sonitus Reverb, Channel Tools, VX64 Vocal Strip PX64 percussion Strip, etc), then edited as MIDI for the original basic arrangement and mix.

Some further editing was done in MIDI, but most of it after that has been rendering the synths as audio and editing the individual clips / notes.

There are also some background "operatic" vocalizations from an old free library by MusicRadar, edited and pitched / stretched as needed.

 

 

 

More of various styles at

https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com

 

with older and more experimental / unfinished work at

http://soundclick.com/amberwolf

 

Edited September 2 by Amberwolf

[jack c.]

spooky well done.jack c

[Wookiee]

Sounds OK, a little hot for my taste and it does seem to breakup in place because of the heat.

[KSband]

Sounds distorted to me, I'm with Wookiee.

[bjornpdx]

Would make a nice soundtrack for a Halloween movie. I think it needs more variety though because a lot of sections just sound similar to me. But overall well done.
-Bjorn

[Amberwolf]

It is almost certainly hot, especially in the bass...I found I accidentally had two instances of VX-64 Vocal Strip in the big giant morphing bass soundtrack (one in the track fx bin, and one in the bass buss fx bin), both set to Bass Blaster preset.  😊 

For curiosity, since I don't see any red meter markers or clip indications on the master bus (or any other tracks/busses) from SONAR itself, I setup EAS Inspector on the master bus, and in the default or moderate modes, it doesn't show any clip incidents (says I have 0.1db headroom on both L & R), so the distortion must be before then, and kept from clipping in the later parts of the chain by one of the compressors or limiters after the distortion happens. 

I usually use the Sonitus Multiband as a limiter by bypassing all the bands and just turning on the limit, then setting the master gain on it for the max output I want a track to have; of the few working limiters I have this process seems to give the best results so far.  ** 

I have to disable one of them and rerender the track and repost it; I'll make a post here when that's done.   (it will replace the original version on the Bandcamp page, so you won't be able to A/B them, unfortunately.  I don't make new BC pages for each song version because it would fill my site fast that way, and make it hard for people to see what is really there. 

 So I just keep the latest version in each song page, and just add version numbers in the song notes on the page so if someone remembers they listened to it on a certain date and liked it better then than now I can go back to the version that was there then to provide it to them, but so far that has never happened. ***

 

It probably is repetititititve in places; I often have issues with my variations not being sufficiently varied for others to listen to.****  Like most of my tracks, it's still a work-in-progress (though I don't know when I will be able to get back to it, at present I am working on Ookami no Kami no Yume (Wolf's Dream of a Hunt).  https://discuss.cakewalk.com/topic/81204-ookami-no-kari-no-yume-wolfs-dream-of-the-hunt/

 

**I can't install new VSTs because if I run the VST adapter scan in any mode, (SONAR 8.5.3) it breaks existing working plugins for no reason, and then I have to restore the previous registry entries....if I could find out what the VST IDs were for new plugins, I could probably hack them into the registry manually.  I've tried many solutions over the years but nothing works.  The only way for me to use new things is to host them outside SONAR and use a virtual audio cable between them.   

Edited September 6 by Amberwolf
removed whiny crap

[Amberwolf]

New version:

https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/when-the-dark-closed-in-and-night-eclipsed-day

I fixed the bass plugin problem and reduced the master bus final Multiband-EQ/compressor plugin output by 1dB.   

Does that fix that problem?  If not, could you tell me about what times in the song that the problem occurs?  (I can't see it on the monitoring plugins or meters, or hear it here, but my tinnitus masks quite a few frequencies / etc, and I don't have any "good" mastering stuff that shows me much).