Destined for Disaster

https://soundcloud.com/user482683479/destined-for-disaster

Be kind.

Ardour 4.1
Ubuntu Studio 14.04

Little piece of kindness from me :wink:
I like the song, but - of course it’s a matter of one’s preferences - it’s quite unlikely to put the bass on either side, all lows (basses, kickdrums, dunno… low electric samples in all kinds of electro genres) are usually in the center and that’s what disturbs me a bit in your piece. I know you’d do that to split the bass and the guitar. Here’s what I’d try: leave the bass in the center, duplicate the guitar, direct one to the left and other to the right, and, maybe detune one of them a bit (a few cents), set different EQ, and eventually give both a bit of short, warm stereo room reverb. Then I’d lower wide-band mids in all of the instrumental tracks to make some room for the vocal. Is the vocal a tiny bit to the right?
Still, I like it more, the more I listen to it. the dirt, the lack of exactness (The Black Keys or sth not so far away). And I love the piano. Srsly :slight_smile: I can smell the underground, rocky-bluesy-rockabilly pub :slight_smile:

Cheers

Sorry about my late reply, but my energy levels haven’t been especially high this few weeks.
I did reply but I probably missed to press send because (read above). This is roughly what I wrote:
I have finally been able to complete my studio with drums (mapex set, converted to digital w a Roland VH11 sound module), and try some experimenting with ardour.
I know it’s a deadly sin to uncenter the bass ;), but I tried to make it sound like it was a live take, with the bass player and the guitar player on opposite sides of the singer, and the snare behind (and from the last remark it seems that it worked ;)). The piano isn’t following that pattern since it wasn’t supposed to be a piano at all, but I needed a solo…

I am a sound tech, but recording is something I never really eh mastered (sorry). So I try to create the sound of each instrument before recording and just work on letting all the nuances through. The wide band mids won’t happen on this one, because i like it as it is, but I will certainly try it out on my second recording, since it’s a more conventional mix (yes bass centered).

Thanks for the input.
Ralf

Ralf,

I enjoyed the song and it’s great to see something a bit different genre-wise like rockabilly here, my only reservation is that the mix is a bit dry, some genres of music don’t benefit from too much Reverb but Rockabilly almost demands that tape machine echo.

I would also very strongly urge you to pan the bass wherever you see fit, I almost never pan bass in the centre and I think one of the crimes of music production in the latter part of the 20th century is the lack of imagination with panning and rigid rules like “bass and kick drums always have to be in the centre”. If you listen to stuff from the 50’s and better yet the late 60’s where they were just getting their heads wrapped around what could be done with stereo you will see that anything could be potentially anywhere in a mix… The early Beatles recordings are an extreme case with vocals on one side and instruments on the other but there are all kinds of great classic recordings out there that have bass on one side and the entire drumkit on the other, or the classic bass left, guitar right and drums up the middle… etc.

Rockabilly is still a huge underground genre and there are scores of one-hit wonders from the 50’s and 60’s that have absolutely insane production techniques going on. I suggest to freshen this song up that you experiment with tape echos, reverbs and crazy panning schemes instead of worrying about conforming to a bunch of cookie-cutter production rules that have unfortunately made listening to much of today’s earbud approved popular music quite boring and predictable…

Keep up the great work!

@GMaq
I agree, I tried something that I’d thought about for a long time, recording everything dry (except the guitar) and then adding a room reverb to the master track, and in this case it didn’t work 100%. In retrospect, I should have added echo to the lyrics too.
I am not in to rockabilly, so I’ll probably not record another one, but this song happened to be one, so I though I would go all in.
Well, now my Ardour studio is finally up and running, so maybe I will post some of my other songs here (I have to record them first tho), and since I have my own way of doing things, it probably will be other things not “up to code”, so to speak
even if I don’t really plan to break any boundaries.
I have listened to a lot of old recordings in my days so I know what you mean, and I can promise you, that hard compression, four guitar tracks on top of each other, added bass frequencies or such, won’t happen.
As I tried to explain to another technichian: I am not creating a sound, I’m just recording my instruments, the best I can.

Anyway.
Glad you liked it.

Ralf