Easter Song - The Cross [your comments appreciated]

Hi guy! 

Nice voice!  That's the first thing that comes to mind.  Also - message content - great! 

Okay, now the critique - hope you don't mind. 

1.  Extreme panning of electric & acoustics - hard left/hard right.  Too dis-associative.  The E-Guitar should maybe have two channels and the Acoustic the same - but record the acoustic with 2 different mics.  Treat the Electrics different each as well. 

2.  Tuning.  You have some serious tuning issues in your guitars at times.  If it's a matter of intonation, that's not too hard to fix on the electric, but the acoustic - that's a little trickier.  It's now, in this generation we can actually repair individual instrument performances that way using melodyne editor.  Don't have it myself, but if you want to keep a good performance (voice/guitar/piano...whatever) you can tune the instrument's track (each note of each chord - hard to believe, I know!).  Might be out of most peoples reach/budget however. 

3.  Your drums sound as if they are in different rooms.  The snare sounds off to the left in my headphones as well. 

4.  Use some compression on your voice and lift it out of the mix a bit higher. 

5.  What's with the drum-stick clicks in the solo?  Tick...tick-tick.....Tick....tick-tick?  Don't know if you intended it for timing or effect - either way, if you don't mind me saying...they gotta go.

Please don't let all my critique discourage you.  My stuff didn't sound very together for years.  You might want to resource some 'basics of mixing' tutorials out there on the net.  They helped me tremendously.

I look forward to more of your material though, as I have a bias to songs/the arts that promote the faith. 

God bless,

Martin Barret

Hi!
the song is great,
but in mixing, as it seems to me, there are some mistakes:
1. about panning in intro, as it already said - very extremely. and i think, you need a double - track of acoustic guitar.
2. i didn't like a frequency balance between kick drum and bass. kick drum sounds very weak, when it plays with bass..

all this is IMHO, of course
(sorry for my english), good luck!

I agree with the hard left guitar being brought in some.

Nice playing.

Ron

Hi There.

Yup!  That's considerably better...but.. the bass is off to the left side in my headphones!  That's great if you're going for the 60's Beatles Stereo, but bass (these days) is smack-dab in the centre with the kick. 

At the beginning a bit, but mainly at the fade-end your e-guitar (or is it the bass?) has some single-coil hum that really sticks out.  Do you have WAVES X-Noise or Z-Noise or any other noise-elimination software plugs?  If not, pull out the offending buzzy guitar and push up the acoustic in the end fade for a tad and then re-fade it so you don't notice the pulling out of the buzzing guitar.  I've had to use that trick several times back the the 4-track days! 

At the 23 - 40 seconds mark you still have that stick going a' tick...tick-tick.....tick....tick-tick.  Don't think you need anything other than cymbals until you start singing.  Then the musical 'natural course of events' would be to add the side-stick. 

Your voice sits up nice in the mix now.  Good going!

Have a listen to my latest song re the fine art of (trying to) balance a mix (and feel free to comment too :-)  ) and please use my free Home Recording Helps resources found on Box.net HERE.

You're on your way to making some great meditative music for The Man.

God Bless,

Martin Barret

Sounds to me like you put some serious work into this and plan to keep at it so I'd like to add that I'm listening on computer speakers and the seperation problem isn't nearly as evident, nor is the muddieness of the acoustic? Actually, at times the acoustic actually sounds very real and clear.
The Bass, has a nice tonal quality but does appear a bit pronounced.. this could be my setup or it could be due to the panning. Vocals sound nice and intelligible. I'll try to listen on my other set up later. Great job so far

Hi,

I really like the song and your vocal. I missed the previous versions but it sounds as though you've taken the advice offered by the other posters...the mix/production sounds very good to me. I do agree that the bass should be centered, though. Nice acoustic and electric tones, too.

I didn't hear the first version, but this is a nice Easter song.