Less Like A Whisper (was Untitled Experimental track), WIP looking for feedback

[Amberwolf]

version 9, some fixes based on above feedback, realigned some percussion, etc.

110124 000001 100110O

https://www.soundclick.com/amberwolf/?more=14898248

 

 

On 11/30/2024 at 3:13 PM, treesha said:

Im coming in at version 8. I like it, evocative and interesting. I think as for the mix, some things are too prominent to me. Like the shakers seem too loud. Some of the hi things sound bit harsh to me. I love the low end and the vocals, if I was mixing this I would start with the low end and vocals most being most prominent, then add in the other tasty stuff behind those.

thanks for listening and replying!

i did some fixes based on the above.  

which hi things sound harsh?

 

i havent' yet tried pushing the low end and vocals up and the rest back yet, am still exhausted from the last more-than-a-day of being physically beaten by the bass from the assholes' party down the street, which started around 6pm and went on and on thru the night, turning the music part down some around 2am but continuing with the earth-shaking bass.     went quieter later until by daylight it was just the bass thumping enough to be felt but not shaking everything, and it continued that way the rest of the day utnil a couple hours ago they finally stopped. honestly surprised that they didn't keep having the party all night tonight too but i'll take what peace i can get. 

 

 

On 11/30/2024 at 3:13 PM, treesha said:

Reminds me when the male voice comes in of the album by Gaudi + singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan ‎on the album Dub Qawwali. I like how Gaudi mixes. I believe he made the album after Ali Kahn had passed making the songs around his previously recorded vocals. Anyways, you might get some ideas from that album’s mixing. Keep working on it, its worth it.

when i have recovered enough from the sonic assault of the last day, i will take a listen, i found the whole album on youtube.   will probably be a while though; i'm just too stressed to listen to anything that i didn't make myself (because i can predict every note as it sounds) and even that's tough, which is why i couldn't do more with this track today. 

[bjornpdx]

What you're doing reminds me of Deep Forest who blended ethnic and western music into some nice compositions. Check out Best of Deep Forest on You Tube.
-Bjorn

[Amberwolf]

new tenth version, i doubled the volume of the vocal tracks, brought the strings up with them but only about half that much, and did some more percussion / etc tweaks (couldn't sleep)

110124 000001 100115P

https://www.soundclick.com/amberwolf/?more=14898340

 

 

2 hours ago, bjornpdx said:

What you're doing reminds me of Deep Forest who blended ethnic and western music into some nice compositions. 

thanks for the reply and the listen and the comparison!

i haven't heard their stuff since last century listening to musical starstreams on the broadcast radio stations....    (along with (pardon spellings) kitaro, andreas wollenweiter, david lanz, suzanne ciani, ray lynch, tangerine dream, yanni, and many others i can't recall the names of atm, most of which i haven't even thought about in so long i don't recall the last time....)

 

 

 

 

Edited December 2 by Amberwolf

[Chaps]

Pretty impressive. If I were going to nit-pick I would suggest brightening up the vocals a bit. They seem to be buried in the lower frequencies in the mix. Also, that slap/wood block kind of percussion sound is a bit repetitive compared to the other song elements. Is that played by MIDI?  If it is, I would consider using the MIDI FX to randomize the velocity of that instrument to humanize it. But all in all, I it's a very nice piece of music. I wish the stuff I'm working on sounded half that good.

[Amberwolf]

34 minutes ago, Chaps said:

Pretty impressive. If I were going to nit-pick I would suggest brightening up the vocals a bit. They seem to be buried in the lower frequencies in the mix.

thanks for listening and replying!

what specifically do you mean by brigthening up the vocals?   someone else suggested taking out the low ends whihc i tried but it takes away the character of the vocals when i do that.  so if you can give me specifics things to try i can see how they work with what i've got.

 

34 minutes ago, Chaps said:

Also, that slap/wood block kind of percussion sound is a bit repetitive compared to the other song elements. Is that played by MIDI?  If it is, I would consider using the MIDI FX to randomize the velocity of that instrument to humanize it.

the only parts generated by midi in this one are the synth bassline and the three different strings used to back the vocals up and fill them in here and there (they also back / fill the bassline here and there, along with a mutated vocal clip set). 

all the percussion is trimmed from and built out of assorted percussion loops that are not actually meant to go with each other. 

i'm not sure which one is the slap / wood block that you're referring do.  there is a clap in some sections, whcih seems to have about four different variations within the clip used to create the sections in the percussion track with it.   

if you can tell me which sound it is somehow, or at which times it is a problem, i can alter the sound at those specific times to make them different, either by clip gain envelopes or other gain/cut means, or effecting them to change their sound (such as by splitting those soudns out of the clips into their own, then using various clip properties to stretch or shrink or tune / detune them slightly.   

 

34 minutes ago, Chaps said:

But all in all, I it's a very nice piece of music. I wish the stuff I'm working on sounded half that good.

i was going to check out the tracks you've posted but they seem to be deleted / removed from the threads?  

what do you think is not as good about your tracks?

 

[Amberwolf]

over at another forum (for ebikes, but i've been there a decade and a half and post a lot of different things there) someone pointed out that their eq/spectrum analyzer shows lots of content in "all" my stuff at 20hz and below, and said that nothing will ever play that back and you couldn't hear it if it did, so there's no reason to have it there since it just takes up bandwidth/power away from the rest of the song.

 

so i looked at the master bus wiht voxengo span, witht eh lowest low setting it has of 5hz, and it shows there is some stuff but the spectrum doesn't look anything like what their image shows, it shows it rolling off down there but their image shows it flat / going up. i think tehyre using fabfilter q-something. 

either way i went ahead and stuck the sonitus 6-node eq in there and set all the nodes for a high q 24 and -18db for a steep notch to get as surgical as i could, and stacked the bands from the zero end to 20hz, so it should be completely taking out the whole area from just above 20hz on down without taking much above that. span doesn't show any difference with it in the masterbus (span is the last thing in the entire chain and bus path), and even if i insert the same eq setup into every bus, it doesn't change the span readout or the waveforms on the buses which are realtime drawn by the playback.

i can't hear a difference either but i'm sure the vizio soundbar i'm listening thru isn't capable of that low a frequency anyway (nothing is from what he said, though i think that systems with subs liek the one used to assault my neighborhood with by the partiers yesterday/today can). 

i know hte eqs are working because if i take their master gain down it drops the whole output down.

have to use the steep notching stacked up because the lowpass fliter or the shelving modes have a nonchangeable very low q and they roll off lots of stuff way too much above the center frequency, up to 50hz or more above the point it is flitering, and that's with the q at 2. if i up the q it doenst narrow the filter, it just greatly *increases* the output in the octave or more above the filter frequency, so i cant' really use the lp or shelf modes for this; they take too much out and/or change the whole balance too much even using just one band.

i'll have to load up the exported wave file from the master bus into audacity where i can access other newer stuff like filtron and see what that will do (though it's already past the multiband compressor at that point) but if anyone here can help with advice or explanations, i'm all ears.

[Chaps]

32 minutes ago, Amberwolf said:

thanks for listening and replying!

what specifically do you mean by brigthening up the vocals?   someone else suggested taking out the low ends whihc i tried but it takes away the character of the vocals when i do that.  so if you can give me specifics things to try i can see how they work with what i've got.

 

the only parts generated by midi in this one are the synth bassline and the three different strings used to back the vocals up and fill them in here and there (they also back / fill the bassline here and there, along with a mutated vocal clip set). 

all the percussion is trimmed from and built out of assorted percussion loops that are not actually meant to go with each other. 

i'm not sure which one is the slap / wood block that you're referring do.  there is a clap in some sections, which seems to have about four different variations within the clip used to create the sections in the percussion track with it.   

if you can tell me which sound it is somehow, or at which times it is a problem, i can alter the sound at those specific times to make them different, either by clip gain envelopes or other gain/cut means, or effecting them to change their sound (such as by splitting those sounds out of the clips into their own, then using various clip properties to stretch or shrink or tune / detune them slightly.   

 

i was going to check out the tracks you've posted but they seem to be deleted / removed from the threads?  

what do you think is not as good about your tracks?

 

I downloaded the song as an MP3 and imported it into Cakewalk by Bandlab. It's hard to isolate the frequencies but I used the PC EQ Low Pass Filter, and SPAN, to see where the vocal frequencies reside. There's a lot going on at 200 Hz and below.  Using the Low Pass Filter I can hear the voices much better and  boosting the freqs at 1,933 Hz and 2 kHz seemed to add a little clarity. Hard to tell how much it would actually help since the boosting/cutting the vocal freqs also boosts/cuts everything else.

The percussion sound I'm referring to is the one playing on the 2 and 4 through much of the song, especially in the beginning starting around 21 seconds into the track.

The songs I had online were done in the 80's using a 4-track cassette deck and were basically recorded for my mother. I just got tired of hearing all the things I wish I had done better, thinking I would just record them  again using Cakewalk and virtual instruments to back my guitar and voice. Health/medical issues got in the way and  I never got around to doing anything. Now that I'm giving it another go I find that years of not playing guitar or singing has really affected my abilities. I can work on my voice but I seriously doubt I'll ever have the ability to play the things I hear in my head on my guitar again. I'm practicing every day, though.

I still have some old things online, but nothing to brag about. The last piece of music I uploaded was an instrumental based on a trip to Bodie, California. It's a great ghost town of an old mining settlement.  

Bodie 1

 

I still have some of the old songs on Soundcloud, some of which I hope to replace with updated versions when I finally finish something I feel is worth sharing.

Chappel/Javadude54/Casey Jones on Soundcloud.

 

 

 

 

[Martin Schiff]

I was out of town for a couple of weeks, but I really liked version 8. Nice work!

[Amberwolf]

 

On 12/2/2024 at 11:53 PM, Martin Schiff said:

I was out of town for a couple of weeks, but I really liked version 8. Nice work!

Thanks--i'm still working on it, but got stuck so have been working on this one

to get my mind off things i can't figure out and let it percolate back there instead. 

 

On 12/2/2024 at 3:00 AM, Chaps said:

I downloaded the song as an MP3 and imported it into Cakewalk by Bandlab. It's hard to isolate the frequencies but I used the PC EQ Low Pass Filter, and SPAN, to see where the vocal frequencies reside. There's a lot going on at 200 Hz and below.  Using the Low Pass Filter I can hear the voices much better and  boosting the freqs at 1,933 Hz and 2 kHz seemed to add a little clarity. Hard to tell how much it would actually help since the boosting/cutting the vocal freqs also boosts/cuts everything else.

The percussion sound I'm referring to is the one playing on the 2 and 4 through much of the song, especially in the beginning starting around 21 seconds into the track.

Thanks--I started poking at these things, but am stuck as noted above, so iwll  come back to it once i can hear stuff in it clearly again. 

 

On 12/2/2024 at 3:00 AM, Chaps said:

The songs I had online were done in the 80's using a 4-track cassette deck and were basically recorded for my mother. I just got tired of hearing all the things I wish I had done better, thinking I would just record them  again using Cakewalk and virtual instruments to back my guitar and voice. Health/medical issues got in the way and  I never got around to doing anything. Now that I'm giving it another go I find that years of not playing guitar or singing has really affected my abilities. I can work on my voice but I seriously doubt I'll ever have the ability to play the things I hear in my head on my guitar again. I'm practicing every day, though.

I still have some old things online, but nothing to brag about. The last piece of music I uploaded was an instrumental based on a trip to Bodie, California. It's a great ghost town of an old mining settlement.  

Bodie 1

I still have some of the old songs on Soundcloud, some of which I hope to replace with updated versions when I finally finish something I feel is worth sharing.

Chappel/Javadude54/Casey Jones on Soundcloud.

i have some thoughts but i'm wiped out atm so will post them later. 

[steve@baselines.com]

On 11/5/2024 at 9:02 PM, Amberwolf said:

Still in early stages of composition and creation, using primarily sample libraries from GhostHack, Black Octopus Sound, and Image Sounds, as well as stuff I already had, and stuff I had made myself, as well as Z3TA2+ synth, and various effects.  

https://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=14881842

 

Looking for detailed / helpful critiques of any part of the track, technical, musical, or otherwise.   Give it to me straight.

 

Stuff I already know about that I'm working on:  There's too much going on in several places, and some of the transitions are pretty abrupt.   It has a LOT of work still to go, but I have a direction to go in, at least.  I expect it will end up at least twice as long as it is now with the interludes and intro stuff I haven't built and played yet.  Many of the samples in the libraries need trimming / chopping up / key changing in various ways to create the melodies and harmonies I'm after (I already did some of this for certain sections, but there's a lot yet to go).  The percussion I still have to build transitions and "thinner" sections of to clear out some sections where there's too much going on.  

 But any feedback about those is also still welcome. 

 

I wish the libraries had a "lyrics" translation for the non-English vocals.  I love the sound of them but it would be nice to know what they mean.   (one of them has translations for the Elvish parts, but nothing for the real languages). 

 

 

 

I haven't read what other people have said.  It's got an evocative beat and driving bass.  Sounds like it is mixed pretty well.  I usually like more structired stuff, but this has definite possibilities.  I think it needs a compelling storyline to pull everything together.  Try some of the AI sites to try and see what they can supply for lyrics.   Maybe even a talking vocal.  

[Larry T.]

On 11/28/2024 at 4:43 PM, Amberwolf said:

version 8 with the changes above.   

https://www.soundclick.com/amberwolf/?more=14896411

 

trying to figure out kerovee to more naturally retune the segments of the vocal clip samples that are a different note / key than the song is at that point, since the present retuning is very unnatural, having been done by just splitting that section of the clip off and using the clip properties note +/- to set it to a different note.  (which works fine to test them, but in most places isn't suitable for the result I'm after.

this is pretty ahead of its time, imho. you've constructed the various elements together well in some places but other need some tightening up, just my two cents. fascinating piece, good luck 🎵 🎶 🎵 🎶