I released my LP Baby Trans that I’ve been working on for the past 5 months. Each song has a bit of a different vibe, but it’s all made with ardour! Produced, recorded, mixed, mastered, in Ardour, on a Linux PC (Yeah, it’s a bit of a tgirl stereotype isn’t it?). Not all the plugins on it are open source however. There’s a few Audiothing plugins (Type A, Moon Echo and Valves), and a healthy dose of Melodyne (through yabridge), and of course the incredible unplugred plugins (Plastic funeral, Pisstortion and Magic Carpet especially).
The bulk of the mixing and mastering is just LSP plugins though, with a bit of CHOW tape here and there.
Oh and of course @GMaq 's AVLdrums is a big feature of most songs (Magic Boy uses Buskman’s Holiday, I was proud to make it work so well).
I experimented with the delayed reverb send technique on several of the more acoustic songs (especially Goodbye Minstrel M), that @x42 helped me figure out in Applying delays on sends .
Overall I’m pretty happy with the result! I would love to hear your thoughts.
I kind of hear an Elton John and David Bowie vibe in this.
I listened in bandcamp, and I have to say, it’s been made with a professional touch. It’s great to see the care and effort you’ve put into your music, and how the album flows as a cohesive and thoughtful work.
Wishing you all the best on your journey, both personally and in your music. I wish you success and strength as you continue on this path.
Thank you, it means a lot, considering I did this with very limited means in my home studio. The majority of the mics are stuff I’ve repaired or made myself. It’s all 18i20 preamps and all in the box (except for the guitar amp).
The album itself taught me a lot as an engineer. You can kind of hear my progression from Tessa’s Song to It’s Alright to Cry.
At this point I haven’t listened to every track in depth but I can already hear the production is very impressive, punchy sounds and the distorted instruments are cleverly used and add warmth but not abrasiveness to the songs. I’m glad to hear the drumkits employed in this way, it shows with some imagination and creativity they aren’t only limited to traditional genres.
You’ve created something quite unique and it’s a good showcase for Linux to be seen as an able production partner for this kind of production.
Best of luck with the album, please share more in the future!
Thank you for your words, it means a lot. I just had a release party in VRChat and shared your words to the crowd after explaining that I had made the album on Linux with Ardour.
Your drums are amazing to work with, and I don’t think I would have managed to mix them in such drastically different ways if they weren’t just very well put together kits.
Listened to it two times and the conclusion can be only one: it is really great album! There are a lot of sincere emotions hidden inside the songs. I said hidden because they are usually burned in a rich and busy arrangement. Surprisingly, such treatment works pretty well in this case. This only engages the listener more, prompting to dig the inner parts of the material.
I like the production too. A lot has been done here to break away from pop convention, mix is solid and fits the songs nicely. Maybe it just me, buy I think the album should still benefit from professional mastering to polish some harshness and add a little more warmth. Still minor issues.
Overall, great songwriting, great performance and very good production. And completely agree with @Sojuzstudio comment about early Bowie vibe. It is there definitely! And that is a big compliment in itself.
Thank you so much. I know the mastering can be a little rough, it was all done over 2-3 days. I feel like given the fact that’s it’s my proper debut album and that it was made with a near-zero budget, the roughness is par for the course.
Hopefully for the next one I’ll actually have money to throw at a mastering engineer I like (it was my second time mastering an album only).