Blofeld vs 80s and A-ha

[NON_73]

I have for once tried to learn my Blofled a little more thoroughly and got into a real fight with it.
I have done a cover of A-ha's song The sun always shines on TV and used Blofeld to 100%.
As vocal, I have used the free version of the VST instrument Emvoice One, which is in itself a virtual singer.

Hope you like it

https://soundcloud.com/no73/the-sun-always-shines-on-tv

[htcnext2]

Well, the original tune was some kind of a favorite of mine back in the years. So I must look critically at any cover version. Your version could bear some louder vocal mixing. I also do not like these rock drum sounds here, but that is not the point. The mix, overall, is a bit muddy - go for more clearness and your track will benefit, I think, also the loudness values of the different instruments could be improved. The song itself is great, this hookline..

[ChameleonMusic]

Well, the original tune was some kind of a favorite of mine back in the years. So I must look critically at any cover version. Your version could bear some louder vocal mixing. I also do not like these rock drum sounds here, but that is not the point. The mix, overall, is a bit muddy - go for more clearness and your track will benefit, I think, also the loudness values of the different instruments could be improved. The song itself is great, this hookline..

Agree with the above analysis 100%

[NON_73]

Thanks for listening

First, I have to agree. A-ha's song is a masterpiece. But I was much more of a Depeche Mode fan at the time and thought A-ha was a bit quirky.

I actually had some thoughts on making the mix even more muddy. For a while I thought about adding saturation effect. Just to get that cassette tape effect. But I thought the mix was muddy enough. But I think most of it has actually been lost in the conversion between mp3 and in soudcloud.
Some volumes of instruments in the mix changed as fast as possible at the last second (something that usually makes it worse)

Anyway, my goal with the whole cover was to just try to use Blofled and nothing else. All instruments are thus 100% from Blofeld, except for a little 8 bits distortion on the piano and delay and reverb on the other sounds. I tried to work out those DX, PPG and hybrid synth sounds that existed then in 1985.
The piano and strings are from Emax's original audio library. The bass sound is sampled from raw waveform from Ensoniq ESQ1 and the drums are original from DMX and SP1200. All guitar samples are downloaded from "freesound" and edited and looped in wavosaur. All sounds are then loaded into the Blofeld.

But rock drums?
I think A-ha basically has live drums except hi-hats and tambourine. They sound very sequenced in the original version.

The vocals was also a story of its own.
At first I had not thought so much about the vocals. But when I had thought a little will I try different VST voice synthesizers and see if it was possible to get something that made sense of them.
The biggest problem was actually getting "the sun always shines on TV". Where Emvocie wanted to read the line of text instead of singing it. But after stretching out a few words, I was pleased with the result.
But it's a little strange to try to edit voices for the worse than for the better as usual.

Thanks again for listening and your tips

[Examigan]

To be fair, Soundcloud's sound itself is not so great, so the slight muddiness can be partially from their own processing.

[layzer]

the original is fantastic, good effort here, but once you have heard the original theres no going back, i'm afraid. HTC and Cham knows their stuffs and they pretty much said it all.

[ChameleonMusic]

To be fair, Soundcloud's sound itself is not so great, so the slight muddiness can be partially from their own processing.

A few years ago there were VERY serious issues with SC's audio encoding, but that improved when they responded to all the complaints and changed the system.

Nowadays it's not too bad at all as long as your original is well mixed and uploaded as a high quality wav file.

Because I use it as a shop window for my composing business, I run regular A/B blind checks on the quality and no serious issues are being raised at all currently....

Slight dip at the very top end of the frequency range, but that is always to be expected via mp3 encoding... It's the obvious place to take out a good chunk of data!

I'm not aware of any issues whatsoever with muddiness or significant changes in mix balance levels as suggested by the poster...

Bottom - line...

If your track's well mixed it will sound fine on SC 99.9% of the time... if the mix has issues, they will be heard whereever it's played back!

[NON_73]

the original is fantastic, good effort here, but once you have heard the original theres no going back, i'm afraid. HTC and Cham knows their stuffs and they pretty much said it all.

That is absolutely true.

but I'm just a hobbyist and do not aim to publish it in the commercial market. In addition, SC sells the mastering process as a service. Sure I tried it. It sounded absolutely cleaner. I do not spend more money on something I do as a fun try and error thing.

[ChameleonMusic]

the original is fantastic, good effort here, but once you have heard the original theres no going back, i'm afraid. HTC and Cham knows their stuffs and they pretty much said it all.

That is absolutely true.

but I'm just a hobbyist and do not aim to publish it in the commercial market. In addition, SC sells the mastering process as a service. Sure I tried it. It sounded absolutely cleaner. I do not spend more money on something I do as a fun try and error thing.

Do NOT ever use SC's online mastering service... It is awful! Like most online mastering offers it's just based on a piece of software analysing your track and then tweaking it...unreliable and seriously random!

For a laugh, with a couple of colleagues we experimented with it when it first came out... Got it to master the same track 4 different times... Each was completely different... One was just about OK... Others were awful... Heavily overdone... all over the place!

No one doing music professionally would ever use SC's mastering service.