The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Hahaha, it's almost like I have a fan!

I am participating in this: http://flashband.org

This month's theme is "country", so I'm in a little pickup band that is playing some country songs.

One of the requirements of the event is that the group perform an original song.

So I made this: http://johnorama.com/songs/guy_n_guitar ... t_Demo.mp3

It's a demo, and it's very hayseed, I'm just warning you.

Made in Logic X, just singing into the compressor microphone on my laptop.

I'm posting it because Paco asked for new music from me.

JB

JB, that's great. Thanks for sharing, seriously. Nice demo, please share when you spiff it up. Perhaps a peppy-ish brushed beat to smooth out the rhythm a bit? Regardless of how far you do or don't take it, I am impressed.

Thanks Paco. Good advice on the brushed beat. Needs to go a bit faster as well, and I've since come up with a more squared-off, predictable (within the song that is) melody. I'll repost if I ever redo it (you know how these things go).

JB

one of the groups I write for/play in down here in Miami Fl

Here is our first track we have recorded, just posted it on soundcloud. Listen and comment, like follow etc. post your own stuff and I'll check it and do the same.

Juke Box(I Wanna Be A) by flymachinemusic

http://soundcloud.com/flymachinemusic/j ... wanna-be-a

Darricklucas wrote: Listen and comment, like follow etc. post your own stuff and I'll check it and do the same.

Already did. Your turn: http://songfight.net/forums/viewtopic.p ... 13#p189078

Wrote a tune over the last day or so, and put it together in Logic. This is the first time I really tried to use Logic's "Drummer" intentionally. Still didn't use a lot of planning, more like just shifted regions around to fit the song, but it turned out OK. I mixed in my 7506's but then wound up doing like 3 other versions because on other speakers the mix was all muffled. So this is about version 3 of "Summer Changes".

http://johnorama.com/songs/fun_pop/Summer_Changes.mp3

Lemme know what you think.

JB

Sounds pretty good, although the drum track did get a bit boring, which is the risk you run with the automatic drummer. I usually like to go through and fiddle with the knobs a bit just to break things up somewhat, or sometimes I'll convert the drummer regions to MIDI so that I can tinker with things a bit more specifically. I also have only used it to make the rhythm programming for abstract electronic glitchy crap.

One thing you could try is converting the drummer regions to MIDI regions and then running the "humanize" filter on it, to make it seem a bit less mechanical.

Yeah, good tune. The vocals sound great, although the double thing on the lead one is distracting (to me) at times. I'd like to hear a bit more pop in the instrument tracks, without threatening the vocals if you do a re-mix. Drums aren't perfect, as mentioned, but are a good start. Catchy tune, though, thanks for sharing.

I wonder if the distracting nature of the doubling is due to haste-- if I took the time to make an exact match it would be more cohesive. Plenty of spots where I sort of forgot the melody and they diverge, and they're not perfectly matched microphone-wise, and not matched well compression-wise either.

Not sure precisely how to get more pop in the instruments, though I wager it had something to do with a subpar mixing environment. I was too lazy to plug in my monitors.

The Drummer tracks are interesting. I managed to get something I liked for the choruses, but it's true that for a lot of it they're kind of samey samey. Something to work on.

Thanks for the feedback, Paco!

JB

I think that the divergence in the melody is okay, but the timing could be tightened up in a couple spots, especially early on (around 0:20 or so). Since you're using Logic anyway, FlexTime is pretty good for that. I actually like classic FlexTime way better than FlexPitch for plain timing adjustments, since FlexPitch tends to crap up quiet, atonal sounds with very audible artifacting (especially things like breath noise).

Good song! This would be a fun one to remix, if you felt like posting the individual tracks somewhere (soloed, without effects or other mixing).

I agree with fluffy about the timing of the doubling track. For me "more pop" makes me think of vocals, drums, and bass being the primary focus of the song. Make sure the kick is loud and has good low end and comes through clearly. Make sure the bass is also rich in low end, near the kick frequency wise, and compressed tight, and loud-ish. Make sure to EQ and pan things that might compete with the vocals (guitars, synths, etc.) to make room for the vocals. Make the vocals nice and tight with compression and a high-pass EQ, etc. Like I said, if you wanted to post tracks I'd be interested in remixing it and others might be too. We could then talk about what we did. I'm feeling creatively drained after Nur Ein so just mixing somebody's song feels more my speed at the moment, and like more fun than doing nothing.

I'll take you up on that Lunkhead! Here is the source, with all effects and Channel EQ and panning and automation removed.
There are two files, one with all tracks exported as audio, the other is just the MIDI tracks (bass, chorus arpeggiator, bridge arpeggiator, strings, and drummer) in case you want to play with what sounds get used for those sections.

Audio is ~207MB : http://johnorama.com/songs/remix_source ... Export.zip
MIDI is ~8KB: http://johnorama.com/songs/remix_source ... Export.zip

If you want to cover the song or add any of your own parts to it in your remix, here is a Chords and Lyrics PDF: http://johnorama.com/songs/remix_source ... Lyrics.pdf

Looking forward to the result, if anyone cares to do a mix!

JB

Oo! these can be imported as WAV or whatever, right? I'll give this a go. Re-mix fight!

I just tried it on those flat files and FlexTime does a nice job of correcting the imprecise doubling on the lead vox. I used the "Monophonic (auto)" mode of FlexTime. I will always pick "auto" things when available.

Fun, thanks JB! I'll get the tracks and see what happens.

I'll have to spend some time playing with this too. Thanks for making the raw tracks available!

jb wrote:I just tried it on those flat files and FlexTime does a nice job of correcting the imprecise doubling on the lead vox. I used the "Monophonic (auto)" mode of FlexTime. I will always pick "auto" things when available. :)

Yep, 'monophonic' is almost always the right mode for vocals. I mostly use that and 'slicing' (which just cuts up the signal and shifts the transients around). 'polyphonic' tends to color the audio too much, but you can get some pretty cool effects out of it.

I also like 'tempophone' for ambient stretch pieces.

[EDIT] Oh, and there's one really cool thing you can do with Flex Pitch that you can't do with the Flex Time modes: you can export a MIDI track of the detected notes, which can also be used for some pretty neat effects. At a minimum you can have an instrument follow your voice perfectly (which you can use for a bunch of things, like humming a tune to be used by an instrument or simplifying the way that you build a vocoder track), but you can also do cool stuff like mapping it to drums or running filters on the derived MIDI to do other cool shit. Also, Flex Pitch only works correctly on monophonic sources, so if you feed a polyphonic source into it and derive a MIDI track you get wonderfully unpredictable results that are great for making weirdly-dissonant accompaniments.

Hey JB: Do you remember the BPM on these tracks? Thanks.

Paco Del Stinko wrote:Hey JB: Do you remember the BPM on these tracks? Thanks.

105. Key of G.

I just got a chance to try to work with these files. Any particular reason you recorded the main guitar and vocal tracks at the same time? There is a lot of bleed of each into the other.

Also, recording-wise, I think one improvement to this would be to track a second acoustic guitar track doubling the one you've got, and pan them hard left and right. That way they'll sound nice and thick but they'll sound very clear and distinct from the vocals. In your vocals too it sounds like maybe you're too close to the mic, or maybe you didn't use a pop screen? You're "b" sounds in particular in the early part of the track at least are a bit overly forceful. Overall I feel like there's too much low frequency, which is stuff I normally just cut anyway. It kind of sounds like also the noise gate on your harmony vocals is closing too soon and is chopping off part of the vocals at the end. You may need to lower your threshold and/or increase the hold and/or close time on the gate.

I've got a mix I'll post in a bit. I'd like to re-track the acoustic and then double my re-track, but I'm probably not going to have time.

OK, here's my first take on it. Let me know what you think.

Summary of what I did. I started with the drums. I set up the drum EQ to give the kick some more thump. I put on a tape saturation plugin to give them some analog warmth. Then I ran them through a maximizer, rather than a compressor, so they'd be real loud. Then I worked on the bass. Here I did a high-pass at 60Hz to keep the bass from interfering with the kick (I'm not sure I'm using the right frequencies for this stuff, Ken would know better than I do about it), and gave a little boost a bit higher up than that so the bass would have a nice low round sound. I also ran it through the tape saturator and put it through a compressor. Then I moved on to the acoustic guitar, which also got EQ and compression. I panned it hard left. If I had a doubled track I'd have given it the same plugins and panned it hard right. I then worked on the vocals. I set up two groups, one for the lead vocals, one for the backups. I put EQ and compression on each lead track individually. I ran them all through EQ and compression. The first lead track got lead presets, the second and third got backup presets. I also moved the high-pass frequency up to 120Hz on the first lead, and 140Hz on the second and third lead. I also made the second lead several db quieter than the first lead and panned it slightly off center. Just because it's a double doesn't mean it's got to be aligned in panning and equal in volume. For the harmonies, I panned one regular and one falsetto track hard to left and the others hard to right. I put EQ and compression on their group channel, rather than on each individual track. I then set up a reverb for all the vocals, just a nice sounding "LA Studio" preset, and put some on the lead group and more on the backup group. Next I went for the whistle solo, gave that some EQ and compression and gain boost, put a little delay on it, and fed it into the vox reverb too. Next came the chorus arpeggiator, which I left in the center, and fed a little bit into the vox reverb. Otherwise I just compressed it a touch, but didn't EQ it. The bridge arpeggiator was more complicated. It's centered when it starts. Then when the vox come back I leave it centered but drop it a few db. Then when the song switches to the final choruses I bring it back up but move it to hard right. It's also EQ'd and got some reverb on it. Lastly were the strings. I EQ'd them a bunch and put a lot of reverb on them, and for whatever reason I thought it would be cool to fade them in during the final choruses till their full volume right before the main instruments cut out. Then I tried to clean up the ends of all the tracks a bit. Lastly I ran the master bus into a maximizer to make it louder.