The story behind it:
Two days ago I did a “music production using free software” workshop at the Grazer Linuxtage (in Graz, Austria). My plan was to go through the process I usually do for my songs and to do the vocal recording there in a kind of a “live” situation.
For time reasons, I already prepared the drums (drumgizmo / CrocellKit), bass, and guitars (a Les Paul recorded “direct in” + guitarix) upfront. The vocal recordings were only two full takes, where I used the first take “as is” for the main voice and the second take for doubling at some specific places. Of course, I ran into beginner’s mistake #3 twice - some clipping during the last chorus.
However: given the circumstances, I think she did well and the final result doesn’t sound that bad at all.
And here’s the final version, where I polished up mainly the vocals:
What I did compared to the previous version:
better cutting of the best snippets from both takes
manual snippet-by-snippet region gain adaptions to get a better overall balance already before hitting the compressor, while keeping the dynamics of the vocal performance within each snippet.
a quite sharp low-cut filter (LSP), because something in the room caused a permanent rumbling in the low end.
further EQ (LSP), compressor (LSP), and de-essing (Calf)
multi-band compression around the 1k-3k band to cut down the “harshness” of the sound when her vocals become “loud”.
a few resonance cuts (LSP) with automation to be only active when needed (2 places with 2 cuts each)
Here’s the “real” final version.
Some weeks after last year’s workshop we re-recorded the vocals from scratch, because the voice sound and performance at the workshop’s recording wasn’t quite there where it could be.
Then, for some reasons the song got “parked” for quite a while until I picked it up again some days ago to properly finish and release it. And here it is…
Undoubtedly from moderate to good to excellent. Well done, and probably a good decision to re-record the vocals, they were a bit unsteady in the first take. Production sounds really good, backing vocals very nice, bassguitar though gets a bit artificial/synthy in the higher regions. And what a great impressive drum sound!
Yep, that’s the bass soundfont I use (sampled from a Fender Jazz Bass) in each song so far.
It’s kind of good enough in a full rock or metal song, but in this one you really hear that it doesn’t have any life. Looks like eventually I have to get myself a bass guitar and also play/perform those parts for real…
DrumGizmo and CrocellKit at it’s best.
As you can see on the screenshots, I didn’t really have to do much in terms of plugins.
The most important things (in this song) to get right were:
get the reverb for the snare and toms right
LSP Trigger on the kick to add in another kick sample with more “punch” (I just see now, I could have left out the EQ on the kick bus completely…)
some parallel processing (heavy compression) of the whole drum bus to get some additional sustain in addition to the reverb.
Especially the reverb either makes or breaks this song, so I literally spent quite some time to find the right reverb with the right settings…
