Yes, this song has been here before in various states of completion however it is now complete and I have moved on to some new material. I’m putting it up simply because I’m very happy about what Ardour, Hydrogen. QSynth and linuxDSP have provided for a great, stable and very productive DAW environment bar none.
This final mix was completed on a stock AV Linux 6.0 with the included Ardour3b5. There are relatively few plugins but the linuxDSP Pro Dynamics, PEQ-2B, Barry’s Satan Maximizer and the Calf Vintage Delay were used. The Hydrogen drumkit used was a variation of the ‘Black Pearl 1.0’ that comes included in AV Linux which incidentally was also the drumkit used in the recent B3 Remix of Dave Phillips excellent ‘Get On Board the Blues’ elsewhere in this forum. This updated kit now includes multi-sampled Roto Toms and is put up here for any other Hydrogen users to try out.
The drumkit is my own 5pc. Pearl kit I multisampled (5 varying velocity and volume samples per piece) one bachelor weekend with a good LD Condenser mic. I’ve tried a lot of Hydrogen kits including the non-GPL kits like Big Mono and they just weren’t exactly what I was looking for, I then started mixing and matching stuff including sampling Addictive Drums Demo (only for my own use of course) and I had a good collection of sounds but they had different and varying ambient reverbs going on which was clouding my drum mixes and the end result didn’t sound very convincingly like a ‘real’ drummer working in a single recording space.
I’ve always liked the sound of my own kit so I figured why not bottle it, I don’t claim to be a pro at sampling etc. but for my uses I think the kit I’ve ended up with is a pretty realistic representation of an acoustic drumkit, it also allows me to easier blend recordings of my real kit and the sampled kit and have it sound more uniform. The sad thing is I can program a whole song in Hydrogen in the time it would take to set up the board and mics simply to start tracking on a real kit, that’s always the killer with us part-timers isn’t it…never enough time!
If anyone is interested I could probably zip up my sample set and put it up for download.
Hey, good ears! The congas (bongos actually) are new, the song is pretty polyrhythmic so I had an itch to try some more hand percussion, actually speaking of hand percussion I find that one small thing that can loosen up a programmed drum track is to do all the percussion by hand with real percussion stuff. I know you aren’t keen on the conga sound but I have to laugh, the bongos I did it with are a small garden variety set of typical music store bongos but the magic of Barry’s Satan Maximizer transforms them into something that really does sound like congas.
Thanks again for taking time to listen as this tune was developing.
I listened to it before going to bed, unfortunately in my headphones only. Good job man!
I am not that fond of the song though, because I find its melody too repetitive for one thing, and while the singer can really explore wide pitch ranges, I would have liked more variations in the singing pattern. But that’s just my “artistic” opinion, which is totally subjective of course.
Regarding the drumkit, is it something you made based on your drummer’s real drumkit ?