This is an original tune I recently finished with Ardour 3, I put an in-progress draft of it up here a year or so ago and hopefully this is the finished product. The drums were done in Hydrogen with a custom bits and pieces kit and the bass is actually a Square Wave synth patch from my old beloved and now regrettably obsolete Turtle Beach Pinnacle ISA Sound card which featured a Kurzweil MA-1 chipset on it. It makes a big fuzzy bass and also has linuxDSP’s Autowah plugin running on it. The guitar is a Fender Tele through a Pro-Junior tube amp and the solo utilizes the Calf Vintage Delay. I played and recorded the Tambourine and Bongos and gained a whole new respect for those who play hand percussion…after a few takes my arms were numb! The vocals were done a few years ago, some of the falsettos are a bit wooly so I was hoping to redo them only to discover that my middle-aged larynx doesn’t do that any more…: (. The master section has linuxDSP’s SR2B, Barry’s Satan Maximizer, linuxDSP’s PEQ-2A and the Calf Stereo Tools Post fader in that order.
Really like your track in the other thread BTW! Just hadn’t gotten around to posting in it yet…
The Satan Maximizer is a very crude and oversimplified compressor, it was actually formerly called the ‘Stupid Compressor’. I’m not a plugin developer so I can’t tell you what the specifics are under the hood but I find it is indispensable and use it on almost every mix I do. The ‘secret’ is to use it at very conservative values on a master mix, on stuff like drums and hand percussion and really any percussive type sounds you can really make stuff pop out in a mix with it.
For mastering I use this: Top slider set the Decay Time to 24 samples and the bottom slider (Knee point) to -6.0 db, obviously adjust to your personal taste. On a master mix I really just want it to add some punch to the overall mix. On the bongos in Joy Revised I have it at 24/-10db and if you could hear an A/B comparison with and without you’d swear the bongos were recorded completely differently all because of what the Satan Maximizer can do.
Sounds really good! I hear people saying good things about the satan maximiser, but I never could figure out how to use it. It seems to just distort the sound in a bad way everytime I try it out. What is it for, anyway?