Congrats to the Ardour team for the release of Ardour 9!
It’s been some time since I uploaded something, there’s been a lot of work ever since.
Today I would like to echo my esteemed colleague Willy Dinglefinger, who once put it so aptly and modestly: I wonder if my fellow recording artists would have a wee listen to the latest effort… Thank you very much for your attention.
It’s called “Her Mione”, description and lyrics on YouTube and Bandcamp.
EDIT: Replaced the video on YouTube and removed the link <<<
Reading the good old 90s Hellblazer comics, this is a most fitting soundtrack.
Also, nice inspiration and reinterpretation.
I would use some dynamic eq/ sidechain thing from LSP or ZL to have the drums cut through the mix. Especially considering the original being a particularly drum heavy mix.
On my monitors, only the highhats are nicely isolated and present, while snare, kick and the rest duck for cover, as soon as your summing compressor gets triggered from the guitar.
Thanks for the constructive feedback! I admit that the mix is not among my best efforts. I’m not the world’s most experienced recording engineer, let alone producer, and this one was quite a pain in the neck to do.
I didn’t want the drums to be as prominent as in My Sharona, but a poor definition like you describe it wasn’t the goal either, haha. I’ll have a go at it again, but not today
Initially, the vocals were my problem child, I like to have them sit in the mix but I’m afraid I overdid it this time and they went a bit in the background. Do you hear that from your speakers, too? Thanx again Mate.
I think I hear it. But the vocals cut nicely through the guitar most of the time, only occasionally there is a bit of mush. The main voice is well present, the complementary voices fight with the guitar at times. But the mush is not such a bad thing, imho. It helps embedding the vocals in the mix, just as you said. Also, in case of the vocals, the summing compressor does a great job keeping them present, in good way. Overall, I find the vocal and guitar interplay works well, but the drums need love.
As I said, either build an intricate sidechain network for each frequency range or do some submixing on busses and carve frequencies, before even thinking about compression. These days there is just so many paradigms to go about this…
Allright I’ll give it some thought. Thing is, up until now it was totally sufficient to pre-mix the drums in Hydrogen and mind the resulting gainstages. I may have neglected that step to some degree this time…
Thanks again for bringing this to my attention! That’s the great thing about this forum: other, more trained ears are listening, too. Cheers!
Here we go: Reworked the drums and did a thorough remix. I believe this is better:
The brass is well audible and the bass drum and snare are much more balanced. In my headphones and coming from the speakers, the drums are a bit more up front, with a lively crash cymbal.
The intention wasn’t to do a reinterpretation of My Sharona btw. I just liked the analogy, and before I knew it, a few other ideas fitted neatly into what became the song’s concept.
I uploaded this revision on bandcamp since we’re talking about recording and mixing, not editing videos.
Apart from that, I’ve been seriously considering to move to Bandcamp alltogether for some time now; leave the Ghoul, eh, Google moloch behind. Since nobody gives a f*ck anyway, perhaps present company excepted, I might as well enjoy obscurity on a platform where capitalistic concentration isn’t THAT appalling…
Have a nice one!
And don’t give the plague of the century credit by colportating that pompous abbreveation, “AI”.
Call a spade a spade: It’s artificial, and the only thing it has in common with the term artistic
are the first four letters!
Nice. I like the hard rock plus 60s vibe with a bit of British Invasion. I think the vocals need to be louder. I was not able to make out all the words. Otherwise, very cool stuff.
Cool man I prefer the more eclectic stuff you’ve posted in the past but this has some nice edginess ‘fuck you’ to it spiced with some shoe gaze type melodic plodding along so aye, nice one
The balance is good (listening on my Beyer 990s) and the destruction of My Sharona is a real feather in the cap So nice work chief! The tunes you post here are a breath of fresh human air (to me) and long may that continue.
Thanks man, I’m glad you like it! Particularly your verdict of “60s vibe with a bit of British Invasion” is a knightly accolade. That’s where my love is, apart from “Never Mind The Bollocks” and Oasis… à propos, did you know that Noel Gallagher once said he would give up all his number ones for that album? There you go.
As for the vocals, I already said that I tend to place them sitting right in the mix. It’s very common for vocals to sound a bit obscured or cryptic, I feel I’m in good company. For instance, it took me decades to find out that John Lennon sings “So why on earth should I moan” on “A Hard Days Night”… I think the issue here is the relative high amount of syllables per bar. But just in case I always provide the lyrics in the description. If you click on the “Her Mione” link you’ll get there.
One last thing: Could it be you mean “Hard Rock” as played by the likes of Led Zep and AC/DC (not that I presume to compare myself with them) instead of “Heavy Metal”? A slip of the keys, so to say? I feel there’s nothing metal-like, as far as the genre is concerned, about what comes out of my VOXes. Just saying.
Thank you Sir, your verdict makes me very happy! It’s a relief to read that you hear a balanced mix in your headphones, see the comments above. My Sennheisers, which I use to blend in the bass, provide high definition, a bit too high for my taste, I prefer to do the rest of the mix with the shabby Bose PC speakers, partly because I grew up with mono cassette players and turntables …happy days. Thus, I am always a bit insecure about what others might hear from their high-end equipment.
Thanks particularly for the breath of fresh human air, I feel truly honoured. So it’s safe to say that I do my admiration for Herb Morrison justice? That would make me even happier.
I’m a bit surprised that you don’t consider this one as eclectic as the others, it’s as much a layer cake.
But no worries!
I prefer the more eclectic stuff you’ve posted in the past but this has some nice edginess ‘fuck you’ to it spiced with some shoe gaze type melodic plodding along so aye, nice one 
So nice work chief! The tunes you post here are a breath of fresh human air (to me) and long may that continue.