Anybody want to talk about the process they went through to make their cover for the latest CoverFight? Or ask somebody else how they made their cover? I'll start:
Puce, I really like your cover of my song! I'm curious about some things. How did you get that guitar tone? Is it a normal guitar dropped down to B? Or a 7-string? Or a baritone guitar? And what did you use for the distortion? Also, what program did you use to do the strings?
talk about your cover
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Adam!
- Ice Cream Man
- Posts: 1426
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- Instruments: Drum 'n' Bass (but not THAT Drum 'n' Bass)
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- Location: Victoria, BC, AwesomeLand
- Contact:
Whoa, an interrogation.
The process: I was going to school and working full time during the CoverFight, so it was easy to put it off until the day before it was due (sorry). Woke up bright and early that morning, grabbed my keyboard and started tabbing out all the guitar and string parts in your song, Lunk. After about an hour I realized that you are four-hundred times better at playing guitar than I am, so I completely gave up on trying to recreate the song. Instead I set up a beat and started recording vocals, and didn't stop for about 8 hours. By 11:59 PM August 29th I had two simple drum loops and a 10-part vocal ensemble culled from over a hundred takes. At this point I ran out of ideas, so I defaulted to a nu-metal arrangement. The version that I submitted on the 30th had no strings, but instead a strange synth landscape and a badly clipped soprano choir. When I heard about the extension I pulled all the clipped vocals and added a string track that was a little more faithful to the original song.
I use an Ibanez Gio electric with very heavy gauge strings (I can barely tune my guitar as high as Drop D). In my cover it's in slide-B tuning. My bass is a Jackson something-er-other with active pickups and Ernie Ball slinky strings, which seem to tune down from E to B no problem. The guitar tone itself is alright, but most of the crunch comes from the bass, which is heavily distorted. I record both guitar and bass clean and distort them with a medley of buzz machines distortion plugins, amp modelers, and a little Fruity Loops reverb added on top. I need to find a new way of doing guitar distortion, because my setup is a bit of a one trick pony right now. I always record two nearly-identical guitar tracks and pan one hard left and one hard right, which sounds a thousand times better than any chorus plugin I've heard. The strings are done in FruityLoops (well, everything was done in FruityLoops) using soundfonts. I believe the font is a free one called Cadenza Strings. They sound a bit like ass at first, but if you spend a lot of time tweaking the various parameters they start to sound alright. If anyone is really interested in hearing how I do things I've been thinking of posting the source wavs for remixing.
The process: I was going to school and working full time during the CoverFight, so it was easy to put it off until the day before it was due (sorry). Woke up bright and early that morning, grabbed my keyboard and started tabbing out all the guitar and string parts in your song, Lunk. After about an hour I realized that you are four-hundred times better at playing guitar than I am, so I completely gave up on trying to recreate the song. Instead I set up a beat and started recording vocals, and didn't stop for about 8 hours. By 11:59 PM August 29th I had two simple drum loops and a 10-part vocal ensemble culled from over a hundred takes. At this point I ran out of ideas, so I defaulted to a nu-metal arrangement. The version that I submitted on the 30th had no strings, but instead a strange synth landscape and a badly clipped soprano choir. When I heard about the extension I pulled all the clipped vocals and added a string track that was a little more faithful to the original song.
I use an Ibanez Gio electric with very heavy gauge strings (I can barely tune my guitar as high as Drop D). In my cover it's in slide-B tuning. My bass is a Jackson something-er-other with active pickups and Ernie Ball slinky strings, which seem to tune down from E to B no problem. The guitar tone itself is alright, but most of the crunch comes from the bass, which is heavily distorted. I record both guitar and bass clean and distort them with a medley of buzz machines distortion plugins, amp modelers, and a little Fruity Loops reverb added on top. I need to find a new way of doing guitar distortion, because my setup is a bit of a one trick pony right now. I always record two nearly-identical guitar tracks and pan one hard left and one hard right, which sounds a thousand times better than any chorus plugin I've heard. The strings are done in FruityLoops (well, everything was done in FruityLoops) using soundfonts. I believe the font is a free one called Cadenza Strings. They sound a bit like ass at first, but if you spend a lot of time tweaking the various parameters they start to sound alright. If anyone is really interested in hearing how I do things I've been thinking of posting the source wavs for remixing.
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Guest
i did the background thing tappin' my cheeks... haha... opening and closing my mouth... however... i thought i had more time left... then i did... so it's relatively pretty shitty... cause i didn't get to do as much as i wanted 2... or do the high vox better... they sound crappy... haha... altogether it sounds really bad... specially compared to everyone elses haha
hahaha... damnit was hopin' no one would notice 
... i meant for that to be on that other page for the songskirmish... i really need to pay more attention to the places i put stuff O_o
... i meant for that to be on that other page for the songskirmish... i really need to pay more attention to the places i put stuff O_o"You haven't been really bad in a long time." - jim of seattle
<a href="http://www.soundclick.com/bands/5/poorj ... htm">music page</a>
<a href="http://www.soundclick.com/bands/5/poorj ... htm">music page</a>
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Future Boy
- Push Comes to Shove
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Puce's Way of "Doing" Things.
I would be interested in the source wavs for use in a remix. I am obsessed with remixes/remixing. The notion of remixing a <i>cover</i> is <i>really</i> interesting to me. I am a remix junkie.
New Album: Comes Apart | Missed Connections | With Johnny Cashpoint: A Maze of Death | modular synths on Youtube
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Lunkhead
- You're No Good
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lunkhead covers sven mullet
Puce: Thanks for the info! I'll check out some of those distortion plugins. The tone you had for the guitars on that track was awesome.
Sven, in case you're interested, here's how I covered your song:
The instrumentation in the original was just right, I thought, but I couldn't re-use that style (lots of heavy distorted guitars, etc.) without winding up sounding too much like the original. I decided to switch it to mostly acoustic guitar for the sake of contrast with the original. I'll probably add another track with some occasional distorted guitar to flesh things out more, though.
The arrangement was good but could have been tightened up a little, I thought. Some people wrote comments to that effect in their reviews of the original, too. There were a few places where I repeated sections fewer times, and I think I sped the whole song up a bit. I managed to trim out enough to stick in another chorus and leave in the guitar solo, while still trimming the song down >20 seconds.
I also rewrote the music for the verses. At first I wanted to just rewrite the music for the second half of each verse, to add more variation to the song, but I felt like the original melody and guitar parts just weren't going to fit my voice and the instrumentation I had chosen. So, I wrote a new chord progression and melody.
I tossed a brief instrumental pre-chorus, too, mostly because I liked how it sounded and it was another place for me to use 12-string guitar. Also that let me avoid singing the chorus immediately after the verse, which I didn't think I could do.
Lastlly I had to change the ending because I had no idea how to replicate the end of the original. I took the idea of the strange pitch shifting from the original and tried to apply that to the instruments and vocals.
Sven, in case you're interested, here's how I covered your song:
The instrumentation in the original was just right, I thought, but I couldn't re-use that style (lots of heavy distorted guitars, etc.) without winding up sounding too much like the original. I decided to switch it to mostly acoustic guitar for the sake of contrast with the original. I'll probably add another track with some occasional distorted guitar to flesh things out more, though.
The arrangement was good but could have been tightened up a little, I thought. Some people wrote comments to that effect in their reviews of the original, too. There were a few places where I repeated sections fewer times, and I think I sped the whole song up a bit. I managed to trim out enough to stick in another chorus and leave in the guitar solo, while still trimming the song down >20 seconds.
I also rewrote the music for the verses. At first I wanted to just rewrite the music for the second half of each verse, to add more variation to the song, but I felt like the original melody and guitar parts just weren't going to fit my voice and the instrumentation I had chosen. So, I wrote a new chord progression and melody.
I tossed a brief instrumental pre-chorus, too, mostly because I liked how it sounded and it was another place for me to use 12-string guitar. Also that let me avoid singing the chorus immediately after the verse, which I didn't think I could do.
Lastlly I had to change the ending because I had no idea how to replicate the end of the original. I took the idea of the strange pitch shifting from the original and tried to apply that to the instruments and vocals.
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thehipcola
- Ice Cream Man
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Buzz Machines
Puce:
I d/l Buzz Machines yesterday and installed it on my XP DAW.
I'm scared now.
That was the most insane installation process I've ever seen! HUGE! And the program looks as alien to me as Reaktor...but it also looks pretty kik-ass powerful too...
Looking forward to learning how to make some noise with it...Thanks for the info...
Cheers!
I d/l Buzz Machines yesterday and installed it on my XP DAW.
I'm scared now.
That was the most insane installation process I've ever seen! HUGE! And the program looks as alien to me as Reaktor...but it also looks pretty kik-ass powerful too...
Looking forward to learning how to make some noise with it...Thanks for the info...
Cheers!