Posted a Ver 2 last night after reworking the balances a little bit.  I also decided that the EZDrummer groove needed some variation so I slipped in a different beat rhythm in the chorus parts.  

Here's a draft of a new song I recorded this weekend, it's for a Children's Songs CD that I am putting together.  I wrote most of the material between 2004-2008 but never got it  recorded, so I'm finally getting around to it.   I have a few things to tweek yet but I wanted to get a mix together and put something out there.  My SoundClick is at the below link and this song is at the top of the list.   Your comments welcome.   

John's SoundClick music page

That's lovely John... outstanding vocal... well done... 

John, this sounds good.  I know a lot of parents and kids that would like this.  You have a good voice for this.  Nice job.

Nice song..... well written. 

I'd make the vox a bit crisper  or perhaps a bit louder in a few places so it sets on top of the music..... so the kids can hear it and learn it quickly. 

I like what you're doing there..... 

Thanks John. This sounds very good already.

Guitarhacker


Nice song..... well written. 

I'd make the vox a bit crisper  or perhaps a bit louder in a few places so it sets on top of the music..... so the kids can hear it and learn it quickly. 

I like what you're doing there..... 

Herb:   many thanks for giving a listen!  In fact, the last two I've recorded I've tried to take much of your own advice, on starting with the rhythms and even did some partial quantizing to help keep the MIDI guitar and drums on beat; also I kept Vox to mono and single track only, brought it up with normalize to -1.0 db.  In fact though, I've had to ease back on the vox in the mix lately as I find that my soft singing style makes it darned hard to get clearly understood at times while not being too hot overtop the rest.  So I'm still working on that....   I also use busses extensively now and get those FX out of the tracks, that's been helping as well as some EQ effort.   I'm afraid one of my next study areas may need to be compressors and gates  LOL    but I'm trying to still keep it simple.    Thanks for the tips, as always!   

Frank, Lynn, Matt:   thanks very much and I really appreciate you taking the time to listen and comment!   I'm having a lot of fun with the material I have written for this children's CD, and I'll enjoy posting more on here soon as I get further along.  Funny that regardless of the type of song, there are new things I'm picking up in Sonar X-1 every time I record and it's sure been a blast!   Thanks again!    
~ John  

Hi John, for those particular spots where a vocal needs a bit of crispness or to have the edge taken off a bit, but where an overall level adjustment isn't effective, i sometimes automate the vocal's eq accordingly at just those places. It's effective and subtle. HTH.

cool man.... you shouldn't need gates unless you have something really noisy. 

Yeah... that soft singing style..... lots of singers have careers based on it ......   but as you say, with kids especially, it is important to have them be able to understand words clearly. 

M@ B


Hi John, for those particular spots where a vocal needs a bit of crispness or to have the edge taken off a bit, but where an overall level adjustment isn't effective, i sometimes automate the vocal's eq accordingly at just those places. It's effective and subtle. HTH.

Matt this is something I've been trying to look into - I have sometimes recently made use of some clip automation such as pan and volume envelopes, but are you saying that I can select just a portion of a vox track (a phrase, for instance) and just adjust EQ on that portion?   Can you point me to any help on that?     I have also used a "Select" and "Process/Gain"  to raise or lower a phrase or a word's volume, but I kinda dislike that means of permanently "processing" and altering the "raw track" in case I want to do something else later.  Do you guys make use of selective adjustments like that and do you keep backups of original, unedited (raw) tracks then?