Hi everyone,
Here’s an early draft of a song I’ve been having so much fun with. When Ardour gives you unlimited tracks, why not spend 50 of them on guitar?
I’d be grateful for opinions about:
- instrumentation
- performance
- recording
- mixing
- etc
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Hi.
The guitars, bass and vocals (especially the harmonics during the choruses) sound good.
What I don’t quite like is:
- You use some kind of slap-back delay on the verse vocals. To my ears, the “wet” level feels equally loud as the “dry” one, which I think is too much. Try reducing the “wet” level…
- There is a shaker (or a hihat?) which jumps out quite often. I think it needs to be turned down.
- During the last chorus, there are some places, where the main vocals as well as the harmonics don’t line up properly (e.g. “you don’t have to go”). My advise for those things is:
- use the main vocal in the playback when recording the background vocals
- try to get the timing of the words of the background tracks as close to the main vocals as possible. This way only few parts (of the background vocals) need to be cut and moved to line up properly.
- be careful with "s"es and "t"s (sibilants). When main and background vocals line up, those sibilants sum up and a deesser plugin (placed on a bus, where all vocal tracks come together) would need to cut it down much harder than just the main vocals alone. What I sometimes do in these cases (which in fact I did for my last song “Choosing the Beaten Track”) is to just completely cut out those sibilants in the background vocal regions and try to set the fade outs/ins in a way that the vocals in the resulting mix doesn’t sound “strange”. Of course, it’s some effort to do, but the deesser then has a much easier job to cut down the main vocal sibilants without harming the rest of the vocals too much…
HTH.
This is great feedback. Thanks so much! I’ll post another version after giving it a try
for the “s’es” and “t’s”:
reducing or avoiding them while singing backing vocals saves much of editing time later
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True. If you can GIRATS, then do it. 
(“Get It Right At The Source”)
Learning a good rule for backup vocals: all vowels, no consonants
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