seablade: Yeah, I'm in Canada. A little bit north of Toronto. Aurora/Newmarket, if you happen to know the area.
Sadly a bit farther north than me;) However I am trying to remember, not to far off from there IIRC was a fantastic school that I knew someone that went through and he is now fairly successful based in no small part due to some of the experience he got there. Sadly I can’t remember the school off hand though, and technically he worked there rather than was a student, but it was still a good experience for him.
At any rate, Ill try to give some mix advice first which I think will feed into the life advice. I have to go off memory from earlier tonight as I am on a cellular connection now instead of at my work, so listening to your music again is a bit difficult.
Mix advice, note that this will sound very pessimistic, but don’t get discouraged, and youll read why you shouldn’t later:
On Compression: OverCompression might be a step down from where you sit with the recordings I listened to(I listened to a few of them, but not all). This is from both a technical aspect and artistic aspect. Back off the compression, start to learn to enjoy the dynamics of your work and playing, and some of your pieces will have MUCH more impact. Find places to play softer and possibly change the arrangement, so that when you have sudden dramatic changes they can have more impact. IIRC there were several pieces where you seemed to go for the unexpected and lead into what most people would expect to be a quiet peaceful part of your song only to turn it around and go for loud and in your face sound. These parts suffer from the amount of compression you are using and the lack of dynamics in the arrangement, so this can help.
On Recording: I would probably need more info on your setup to give you to much advice, you seemingly had good isolation between instruments, but I assume this comes from tracking each instrument/vocal separately. However the sound of each instrument or voice could use more attention as often they came across as harsh, and not generally in a way that is musically pleasing to most listeners(Though that may have been intended and I just disagree with artistic choice, I don’t suspect based off what I heard this is the case).
On Mixing: You have a hard time finding appropriate balance between instruments and vocals especially, but also in between instruments in the mix. This can come from many different aspects, including arrangement/composition of the music, but more of it in this case I think came from just a lack of direction or example on how to approach this(And some of the recording notes above). You have points where your vocals get drowned in the music, or where the combination of the voices and instruments creates somewhat of a mushy mess.
Ok these are general notes, and as I said, fairly pessimistic. To put it bluntly at the moment, I wouldn’t be trying to impress anyone with your abilities in as far as making money off of this. But don’t take this to mean I don’t think you should continue on this path, but that you would benefit from studying under someone. At this point I will toss out a disclaimer of I do teach sound at a local university near me, so I suppose that could make me biased. But a university isn’t your only option(By the way, I had to have a similar talk to one of my students that was at the same point as you skill wise at the beginning of the year and was trying to impress people off his portfolio then, which would have done him more harm than good, so you aren’t alone here;). Along with local universities, you could start approaching local studios and volunteering, expect to be getting a lot of coffee or whatever and just take in what you can by watching and learning. Call up local live sound companies and do the same, except expect to be pushing a lot of boxes and doing grunt work. It will take time to learn anything, but you can. Of course on the other side of this, if after a few months you haven’t learned anything, move on. There are sadly some that will simply take advantage of you.
But my honest opinion for where you are at right now, would be to talk to your parents and see if you can go back to college, in particular a community college (Or whatever the equivalent in Canada is) to just work on your GenEd requirements and get your grades up. Do this for a year and knock out what GenEd stuff you can but primarily pull up your grades so that you might be able to transfer into a more dedicated school.
Decide what you want to do, do you want to do the engineering side of things? Composition? Both? Where do you want to work? Live Stage(Be it Concerts or Theater)? Recording Studios? Game Development? Or something else like R&D or Engineering for electronics companies that manufacture tools for musicians or engineers? How you answer these will determine where you should be looking at going for schooling. I do think that college/university is a viable option for you, but don’t discount other opportunities as above.
Now where does this opinion come from? The fact that I spent several years after High School myself working varying jobs ranging from minimum wage janitorial work(Not joking) to IT work(Above Minimum Wage but boring as all hell). After a number of years I went back to school and worked my ass off working minimum wage jobs to pay my way through that with loans. But on the flip side, after spending a grand total of at least 8 year in various colleges(I also had to spend time in community college to bring up my grades before I transferred) I am in a position where I would consider myself somewhat successful at a job I enjoy. And by that I mean that I have worked in sound or related jobs across the US and currently work full time as an audio technician for a church, teach sound at a local university, and work as an independent consultant designing reinforcement systems for installations, along with a variety of other side work including recording commercials for TV and Radio, sound designs for animations, and misc other audio engineering work(Mixing live concerts, tracking and producing demos of those concerts for bands, theatrical sound design, etc.) Am I someone I expect anyone to ever recognize my name, not at all. But I make a living off of this work I enjoy so I am happy.
On the topic of colleges, you have I am sure run across tech colleges that are single year things that churn out as many students as they can, and cost as much in that single year as a four year institution. The guy you talked about who told you the networking is probably the most valuable part of it probably wasn’t far off. Get in touch with people that work in the field you want to and ask their opinion of these places. I can tell you some of the more notable ones on my side of the border have rather interesting reputations. In general the graduates often come out thinking they are much better than they are, and don’t work, or they come out and do three years of pushing boxes or grunt work, much like I mentioned above, and they work successfully. Of course I have also seen shady advertising by some of them, listing their graduates as working with companies I know for a fact they didn’t(As I also worked with these companies and checked specifically on this as well). So in the end, like many possible paths for you, if you get anything beneficial out of it it is because you are putting at least as much effort into it.
On standard 4 year universities or colleges… My advice is that they are the place to go to screw up. If you screw up in a college or university it likely won’t follow you in your professional life(Provided you don’t get yourself kicked out). It is a great time to learn and experiment, and like other paths, you will get out of it what you put into it. Don’t ignore the volunteer/grunt work opportunities I mentioned above just because you are in college. Work your ass off and try to get as much non-college experience as you can at the same time.
On skipping both and diving in… Well I described this somewhat above, it certainly is a good path. A college degree by itself will not get you a job most likely. That degree and work experience however will put you in better standing for some jobs(Not all) in this industry than someone that just jumps in typically. However if you jump in and build a reputation for yourself instead of going to college and not working outside of it, you will likely be in much better shape in 3-4 years than the person with a college degree and no real world experience, so long as you don’t screw yourself over badly.
On all of this, this is not an industry where you will make a good amount of money. Period. Be you a musician, an engineer, all of the above, etc. don’t expect to make much money and expect to be struggling to make ends meet for quite some time, if not permanently. The VAST majority of folks aren’t exceedingly successful and many leave this industry as a result. But if you go in knowing this and are willing to do whatever it takes to continue working in an industry that can at times be very enjoyable, then at least you will enjoy life, and personally I find that more important than making lots of money.
I am sure I am missing a lot of information here, but after a nice 16 hour day, my brain is now just about fried, so I hope this helps:)
Seablade