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I'd forgotten about this thread - cheers for the reply, Rook!

I ended up pulling it from SoundCloud after sending it to a few close friends and receiving sufficiently mixed feedback to make me lose confidence in it, mainly due to the vocals! I got pretty frustrated with the song anyhow, there's something just not working in there somehow and I think it probably needs pulled apart a bit and re-done sometime in the future. It just didn't turn out the way I'd been imagining it in my head, so it's been abandoned til I figure it out. Hopefully it'll live again one day, but til then, it's gone from the world!

Hi all,

After the magic you guys collectively worked on a previous track of mine ("Hello, Heartbreaker", on my SoundCloud page) I figured I'd make another attempt to pick your brains if you'd be so kind as to lend me a few minutes of your time!

I've got a track called "Fool's Gold" which I'm having a little trouble with. It's very vocal-heavy, for one, and I'm only just taking tentative little baby steps into singing, so the singing isn't particularly good. Any singing tips or vocal processing tips would be greatly appreciated! I think I've managed to edit out or re-do anything that was utterly offensive to the ear, but what remains sounds a little flat and kind of weak sounding. That's probably just my voice, but if I'm missing a processing trick here, I'd love to know! The other sections just don't seem to gel properly, all the instruments are doing their own things but they just don't quite click and I'm not sure why. The last 30s or so in particular feels like it really needs something to kick it into a higher gear, and the glitchy guitar I've just added after a week of not listening to the song hasn't quite done the trick. I've also just knocked the vocals down a little in the mix but I'm wondering if that was just me being insecure before uploading it, now it sounds like they're getting a little lost in places.

Basically, it sounds like the skeleton of a song that's missing all the little bits and pieces to breathe some life into it, and even after leaving it for a while, I'm still stumped and frustrated on where to go with this one. You can find it here - https://soundcloud.com/steventhomson-1/fools-gold-early-vocal-demo/s-3ZpUo. It's set to 'private' for the moment to stop it leaking out into Facebook, that's the 'secret link' so let me know if there's any trouble accessing it.

I'd love to hear peoples' opinions, comments and criticisms on this one, and I'd really appreciate any time you can spare to take a listen and share your thoughts!

Thanks,
Steven

I managed to miss this thread til now. Just as well, because like the rest of you, I absolutely wouldn't want to hear these again...

Nicely done gents! I couldn't log into the forum yesterday (travelling with laptop, temporarily forgot the password!), but I took a listen to the tracks, some real promise there!

Yeah, you're quite correct Pedro, there are timing inconsistencies throughout, but for the moment I think I'm done with this one. Unless there are any particularly jarring ones? I know there are a few that bug me, but I didn't think there was anything too serious. I think setting the bpm to such a stupidly low value was an error that's contributed to that, if I'd had a faster tempo it'd have been easier to keep to the click track's timings. Lesson learned for the future!

I hope I'll come back to it after a little time has passed and I can be less emotional and more objective (both about the song and the girl!), but equally I'm not sure it'll do any future relationships any good for me to keep returning to songs about my ex, so who knows where this will go in the future! I'd like to polish it up someday, but if I start thinking too much, I come up with a huge laundry list of things I'd like to fix or re-do. It's definitely done for the next few weeks, I'm not taking this session with me when I go off for a bit!

Thanks Rook. I am pretty proud of it, couldn't have done it without your help and without listening to your own alternate mix! If I ever meet you in person, I owe you a few drinks!

I'm just up, it's the next morning, and I'm just listening through it again. The drums make a big difference to the final sections, I like how they've turned out. Yep, overall I'm pretty pleased with it!

And it's done!

https://soundcloud.com/steventhomson-1/hello-heartbreaker-2

At least, I think it's done. There are still a bunch of things that irritate me (one phrase in the outro with particularly dodgy timing, an irritating plosive somewhere in the first chorus, something's off with the lead instruments in the solo, etc etc...I could go on forever) but overall, I'm quite pleased with how it's turned out. I don't intend on making any more than minor changes to this version. I'm putting it here first, I'll wait til tomorrow (technically 'today') before I start putting it on Facebook etc!

Thanks so much for your help Rook, I took on board a bunch of your changes. I dropped the piano much lower in the mix (not quite as low as you did!), I did that really neat strings trick on the first chorus and second verse, and I added drums which ended up being in 6/8 just like yours were, though I didn't even realise at first, I thought I'd found something odd in 4/4 that seemed to work! I think there's an interesting lesson in there about the interplay between tempos and time signatures, since you can count in 6s from the beginning of the track if you're so inclined, even though in my mind it was in very slow 4s. I did a few other things you suggested too, I think, though they're escaping my mind at the moment.

Pedro and rogerg, thanks again to both of you for your comments too! Pedro, I didn't change the vocal melody - sorry, but I kind of like it as is! Though I agree that it never perfectly mirrored the piano notes, but now with the piano being a little lower in the mix, hopefully it won't be as distracting as it was before.

I spent most of today moping around feeling sorry for myself, wondering whether she was with her new guy, why she was checking my website daily all of the last week and whether she'd come back to me (which she so far hasn't), so I guess I was in just the right melancholy frame of mind to want to tackle this track again, and it ultimately made me feel a lot better after I finished, so that's good. That was, after all, the point of writing these songs!

Thanks again for the advice everyone. Next up, Little Miss Liar, but I'm away for the next week or two so I probably won't finish that one for a while!

Alright, so while I'm surrounded by such kind, generous and wise people, I figured I'd post something new for a little feedback.

It's here - https://soundcloud.com/steventhomson-1/hope-never-really-dies-vocal, and it's something I just threw together tonight based around a synth riff I wrote last night. Tonight I added guitars, drums etc, and some of my scraps of lyrics scribbled on sheets of paper around me seemed to coalesce into something semi-coherent, so I figured I'd try singing it without the safety net of a vocoder. These are the results.

The song itself isn't written much beyond this little riff that's looping in the background here - structurally, it's pretty unlikely it'll have a section this long in it without a little bit of a break, but as a vocal test, I think I'm reasonably happy with it. The lyrics are mostly nonsense cribbed together from various scribbled ideas, they're loosely something to do with me wanting her back while well aware it's a terrible idea, hence the reason adjacent lines often contradict each other. It's deliberate, I'm being all arty, y'see. Anyways, the lyrics aren't the point.

As far as processing goes, it's just put through POD Farm with a signal chain consisting of 'Boost & EQ', a compressor, a stereo chorus, and an 'analogue' delay, with various combinations of settings. Basically, it's a preset I've used for recording clean electric guitar that I happened to click on by accident, and I liked the sound, so I tweaked it a little from there. This was recorded with me sitting in my chair, singing softly into my Rode M3 around an hour ago, trying not to disturb everyone in the flats around me (it's a little after midnight UK time as I type this).

I'd be most grateful for any comments and (gentle!) criticism from anyone on the vocals, either in the singing/delivery or the processing, since I'm new to both. I think the timing in the first 'verse' (for want of a better term) is a little loose, but I tighten it up a little as I go and I think it's not too shabby at all by the end. What do you ladies and gents think?

I think he means this one - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxhlvMC-5KE!

I caught the guitar in The Other Me, but a dog in Hyperventilate? Where? :p

I can see the 126bpm helping, but the 6/8 nature of it somehow passed me by entirely! I feel really rather silly now! I noticed a few timing edits (or at least, I think I did!) and I know there are a few points I should probably tighten up a little in my own version. Your own point of view on this song is really helpful, and I can see that big ol' piano sound in my version might have to undergo some drastic surgery because I really like how much lighter and fresher your version sounds without it.

I'm not working on Heartbreaker tonight (I think I'm working on a new one while I assimilate all my ideas of Heartbreaker) but I'll hopefully finish it up by the end of the week. I'm away next week, so I won't be able to work on it, so either I finish it by the end of this week or it takes a little hiatus til I get back.

I'm tentatively working on quite a few songs right now (5, by my fuzzy count...6 including a 'joke' song consisting of the word 'liar' being repeated in different languages to a bleepy beat) but I fully intend to finish Heartbreaker and Liar. I just need a small break from them tonight, and my creativity is still firing on all cylinders so I just can't stop writing new things. Sadly, this does mean the new song is still about the she-devil, but it's much more proggy and metaphorical and hopefully won't be as explicitly about her as Heartbreaker and Liar clearly are!

I love music. And I love the new Shineback album, which I've had on repeat since yesterday afternoon, brilliant stuff!

:edit:

How rude of me, I didn't thank you Rook! Thanks very much for taking the time to do that mix for me!

And I see from my website logs there's been at least one other download of the raw audio files, so whoever you are, you mystery downloader, I'd love to hear from you too!

Nice job Rook! That really does sound pretty different to mine. Yours is much less dense, which is really cool to hear. You've really dropped the piano much much lower in the mix than I had (since to me it was the main instrument, the one I wrote the song on!) and it sounds a lot lighter and less chewy on the ear, if that expression makes any sense. I love the way the high strings kick in at the first chorus, then they drop out and the cello swells up again at the start of the next verse. I think I'd perhaps need to back off on the vocal processing a bit for them to be able to stand so up front in the mix, but that's easily doable. I'm impressed you found a drumbeat that worked so well on the last sections, I couldn't make anything other than the 'heartbeat' sound fit in at all. I really like the way the last verse sounds with the guitars much more dominant and the piano removed from it's centre stage. That's certainly something I'm going to have to keep in mind - just because I wrote all of something on piano doesn't mean I need to be so dependant on it in the final result!

Rob, that's a really cool find, thanks a lot for digging that up! I need some software for my laptop, since it's got no DVD drive and I've never gotten round to installing any music gear on it. I'll be away from home for a while sometime soon with only the laptop, so I think I'll give Reaper a try on it for a week or two and if I like it, it'll join and perhaps even replace Ableton on the main computer.

Great! It's actually set up as 42bpm in Ableton, but this is so absurdly low it started causing me problems with timings on faster parts, I think it probably should have been some multiple of that. You can get my mix at www.steventhomson.co.uk/music/audio/heartbreaker2.mp3, as long as that plays at the same rate as the individual tracks it'll all be fine!

Wow, well spotted Owen! You're right, the image has been flipped. Other than the text ('Telephone' on the box, and the album title) it does look more-or-less like a straight mirror image though. I didn't even notice it, to be honest, til I saw your post.

Alright, bounced tracks finally exported and uploaded, they can be found here for anyone so inclined - http://www.steventhomson.co.uk/music/heartbreaker.zip. Thanks! If anything's wrong, or if there are any lingering effects I didn't spot, then let me know.