Taking My Chances (Pop/Rock/Emo)

Hope you guys enjoy :)

Taking My Chances - http://mikewhitemusic.co.uk/music/Taking_My_Chances.mp3

I wrote, performed, produced, engineered, mixed and mastered all of this :)

Enjoy
Mike

Cheers!

They are real drums, just 50/50 with steven slate trigger samples. The guitars are a 57 thru a Marshall 100 watt valve album, Fender Telecaster American Specials. Thanks very much.

nice little tune, the production is top notch, I found the opening section a little dry but thats picking. bowling for soup vibe off it. man, tell the secret how do you get those drums to punch?!

Cian

Also, in mastering, if you want to make it loud but reserve a bit of punch (oxymoron, I know) cascading compression usually works a treat.

The snare is recorded to peak at -6 or thereabouts, it's then stuck a limiter with a -1dB reduction just to cut off the tops of the hits that may be a bit wild. In context of the mix, I get it to a level where I'm happy with it, then push the output of the final compressor up a bit - yes, it soft clips, but Pro Tools usually saturates it a bit to compensate - it also helps if you have tape available, but this was mixed entirely ITB. I parallel compress the entire buss along with some hard compression with the LA-2A, yes. The LA-2A, as you can see, only has 2 options, its attack, release etc are part of the "sound" of the kit. It's got a creamy kind of coloration on the tracks you apply it to, great for vocals and stuff like this. The 10kHz boost was to bring out some brightness in the kick. Sadly, a song's RMS (perceived loudness), NOT peak, can be raised much more significantly with less bass information. Try, for example, listening to Bullet For My Valentine. The kick sounds like someone slapping water - very little audible bass. That's the price you pay for loudness. I still like fairly big sounding kick drums though, but in later revision I might mess with this mix a bit more significantly. Cascading Compression is instead getting compressor X and SLAMMING the kick, say, you get 3 different compressors, each with 3 different qualities, like the LA-2A, 1176 and maybe like the inbuilt compressor in your DAW, and let them do varying degrees of compression to help build up to it. For example, say I'm compressing a vocal. I'll usually send it through the 1176 first, because it's great at preserving transients but really pushing out the "character" from the vocal. I'll then add some light compression with the LA-2A to give it a thicker texture. And if needed I might at the very end of the chain throw in a brickwall limiter just to tighten it up even more, but even then, the limiter is only taking back at maximum -2dB of gain.

got it mike.

Wow!  Great tune and top notch production.  Great beat

I'm QUITE impressed with this.  Great job and it sounds radio-ready to me.