Con Descending

[tonedef71]

"Catch the grift?"

This track is composed in F# phrygian with a brief interlude in C lydian.

Several new virtual instruments were put to work in this track: UJAM's Virtual Guitarist Carbon; Babylon and Imperfect from W.A. Production; and Soundspot's Unison.

https://soundcloud.com/tonedef71/con-descending

[wagtunes]

Love the photo. Cool tune. Guitar sounds pretty good. All in all, well done.

[mindstuff]

As for the mix: The highs are ear bleeding. No low end to speak of. Lacks overall frequency balance.

[tonedef71]

Love the photo. Cool tune. Guitar sounds pretty good. All in all, well done.

Thank you for listening and leaving feedback. I believe that without your initial feedback, this post would have been buried beneath others and my original post would have then been the only one in this thread. Thanks again.

[tonedef71]

As for the mix: The highs are ear bleeding.

Thank you for the feedback. May I ask what apparatus you used for playback (earpods; monitors; car speakers; etc.)?

May I also ask how young your ears are? My ears are on the older side and not as sensitive to the higher frequency range as they once were many years ago. An over-representation of high end frequencies might go unnoticed by my ears.

No low end to speak of.

Getting the bass right in a track certainly is challenging. To help me out with that, I have been using "Bassroom" from Mastering the Mix. For this track, I used the "Progressive House" preset; perhaps a different preset would have worked better. I also used an elliptical equalizer from Hornet Plugins to fold the bass frequencies down to mono. I was not sure the right ordering to use in the plugin chain for these two plug-ins. I may have got it wrong.

Lacks overall frequency balance.

For the overall tonal balance, I used a preset called "Power Rock". Perhaps a different preset would have been a more appropriate starting point for this particular track.

[wagtunes]

Love the photo. Cool tune. Guitar sounds pretty good. All in all, well done.

Thank you for listening and leaving feedback. I believe that without your initial feedback, this post would have been buried beneath others and my original post would have then been the only one in this thread. Thanks again.

Unfortunately, that's the nature of this sub forum. If I get more than one comment on one of my tracks, I'm shocked. Half the songs I post get no comments at all.

Sad, but that's the way it is around here.

[JonSolo]

It is kind of a cool track, but feels like the life is compressed out of it, along with the tonal and bass issues mentioned above.

Presets really should be used as a starting point to tweak your sound. The guitar and synth are arguing for the same sonic space and that makes it feel cluttered.

Things sound over EQed too.

But that is all from a production point of view.

[mindstuff]

As for the mix: The highs are ear bleeding.

Thank you for the feedback. May I ask what apparatus you used for playback (earpods; monitors; car speakers; etc.)?

May I also ask how young your ears are? My ears are on the older side and not as sensitive to the higher frequency range as they once were many years ago. An over-representation of high end frequencies might go unnoticed by my ears.

No low end to speak of.

Getting the bass right in a track certainly is challenging. To help me out with that, I have been using "Bassroom" from Mastering the Mix. For this track, I used the "Progressive House" preset; perhaps a different preset would have worked better. I also used an elliptical equalizer from Hornet Plugins to fold the bass frequencies down to mono. I was not sure the right ordering to use in the plugin chain for these two plug-ins. I may have got it wrong.

Lacks overall frequency balance.

For the overall tonal balance, I used a preset called "Power Rock". Perhaps a different preset would have been a more appropriate starting point for this particular track.

I listened on my monitors: Adam T5V
However...I don't mix on these (my studio/office is not properly setup). I recommend getting some HD650s and Sonarworks Reference 4 for correcting them if you're serious about getting a good mix. Even more importantly, take some tracks you really like and study them visually using SPAN. Then start mirroring your frequencies to those tracks (not exactly but at least how the levels should be for your genre). Here is a link to get your started: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEWr5UJ ... LGvv0Hd_8w

[an-electric-heart]

Hi there, just thought I'd chime in and second (maybe third) what others are saying; The song's good, but the mix needs work. I can't tell if there's "not enough bass", to me there's definitely "too much treble", the cymbals are piercing, there's more to shaping cymbals and hats than just cranking everything over 10khz.
I mix with analyzers on the master channel, so even if I can't "hear" problems, I can "see" them, and I kind of think using analysis tools are essential for us home guys who don't have ideal mixing spaces.
The "Tonal Balance" plugin, in Izotope Ozone has been a godsend when it comes to aiding me with mastering my own tracks.

[tonedef71]

If I get more than one comment on one of my tracks, I'm shocked. Half the songs I post get no comments at all.

Please send me a P.M. with a link to your latest released track (or another released track of your choice), and I will give it a listen.

[tonedef71]

It is kind of a cool track, but feels like the life is compressed out of it, along with the tonal and bass issues mentioned above.

... The guitar and synth are arguing for the same sonic space and that makes it feel cluttered.

Things sound over EQed too.

But that is all from a production point of view.

Thank you for your feedback.

Presets really should be used as a starting point to tweak your sound.

I agree. Good presets are a major time saver (bad presets on the other hand, can end up wasting more of one's precious time).

[wagtunes]

If I get more than one comment on one of my tracks, I'm shocked. Half the songs I post get no comments at all.

Please send me a P.M. with a link to your latest released track (or another released track of your choice), and I will give it a listen.

It's okay. My mega thread is on the first page here. Just look for "The Wagtunes Corner". There's hundreds to tracks to choose from. Most recent is the last couple of pages.

[tonedef71]

I listened on my monitors: Adam T5V
However...I don't mix on these (my studio/office is not properly setup). I recommend getting some HD650s and Sonarworks Reference 4 for correcting them if you're serious about getting a good mix. Even more importantly, take some tracks you really like and study them visually using SPAN. Then start mirroring your frequencies to those tracks (not exactly but at least how the levels should be for your genre). Here is a link to get your started: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEWr5UJ ... LGvv0Hd_8w

Thank you for the follow-up reply. Although I am not using them currently, I do have a pair of KRK KNS 8400 headphones and the Sonarworks 4 Reference software. I remember enabling the Reference software with the calibration profile provided for my headphones and thinking how much better it made everything sound. That did not seem to right to me; I did not think a flattened response was supposed to sound really good. I have the Abbey Roads Studio plug-in, but I have yet to really play with it.

Thank you also for that YouTube link. I watched the video and appreciated the Voxengo Span tip about setting the block size parameter to 4096. I like the concept of these new software tools that assist with the mixing process by showing what is going on visually. Doing all of my music creation "in the box" with just a pair of headphones, I know I cannot rely on my hearing alone, especially as I get on in my years.

That YouTube video did inspire me to look at the spectra for songs of my preferred genre (sorry... that Skrillex sound just does not appeal to me). Comparing with the spectra of tracks from my preferred genre, my track is not terribly far off. Looking at the spectra of various professionally mastered reference tracks, I see that the bass levels vary quite a bit between all these reference tracks. I did notice that quite a few of these professionally mastered reference tracks of mine seem to roll-off the high end pretty sharply around 12.5kHz or so. My track does not do that. If only mimicking the spectra of a professionally mastered track was all one needed to do to the rendered stereo mix down of their track to make it sound professional.

[tonedef71]

Hi there, just thought I'd chime in and second (maybe third) what others are saying; The song's good, but the mix needs work. I can't tell if there's "not enough bass", to me there's definitely "too much treble", the cymbals are piercing, there's more to shaping cymbals and hats than just cranking everything over 10khz.
I mix with analyzers on the master channel, so even if I can't "hear" problems, I can "see" them, and I kind of think using analysis tools are essential for us home guys who don't have ideal mixing spaces.
The "Tonal Balance" plugin, in Izotope Ozone has been a godsend when it comes to aiding me with mastering my own tracks.

Thank you for chiming in! I think that the bass in my track, as it is, is mostly adequate for my preferred genre, but I might still add a little more (and maybe add some cowbell, too). Despite the fact I make a lot of dark tracks, I really like the sound of high end and sizzle, so I might not always notice the harsh shrill others that others might hear. I can discern sibilance well enough in vocal recordings, but my tracks are all instrumentals, and I cannot always tell when shimmering cymbals are too bright or shrill. I picked up a bunch of software tools (e.g. Ozone/Neutron/Equivocate/Bassroom) during the recent holiday sales, but have not done much more than install and activate most of them.

As I mentioned in another post above, I recently used SPAN to look at the spectra for various reference tracks I ripped from CDs and noticed that a number of those tracks drop off the high end rather sharply after 12.5K or so. That is one of the adjustments I will be looking into making for my track. Having upgraded to a premium account with SoundCloud (I caved to their pressure), I can re-upload my released track in-place as often as I like without having to redo all the metadata (it is a shame that feature is only available for premium accounts).

I also want to take a look at the spectra for various pop tracks. I think I read somewhere that the tonal curve for hit pop songs often resembles the tonal curve for pink noise.