I realized I forgot to post here about a recent collaboration I did with my friend Randy Resnick, on a track that was a bit unusual for me to compose and arrange, but that I liked working on a lot:
Randy is a friend that I came to know because of my job, a long time ago, but who’s also a very good musician. A few years ago he decided to start learning to play the sax and recording a lot of music with it, so when I got an idea on for a theme that would put sax and guitar together in a smoother track, I thought I’d ask him if he wanted to work on it together, and was very happy when he accepted!
It was originally planned as one of the tracks of a new album I’m working on, called “R U There?”, which will be a concept (or maybe conceptual?) album on different emotions and states of mind starting with the letter R, “Reluctance” being one of them. That said, I thought it would be cool to release it already, as an “appetizer”. The link above is to my own Faircamp instance, but you can listen it on Bandcamp, Mirlo and Ampwall too, besides the usual streaming services (Spotify/Apple Music/YouTube, etc.).
As usual, this was all recorded and mixed using Ardour, version 8.12.0 in particular, on my Fedora 41.
I’m not very partial to the amount of reverb used on the accompaniment, I would have dialled that waaay back, especially on the bass, the pads and the e-piano. The sax and guitar tones are great, though.
@SpotlightKid fair point on the excessive reverb, I re-used an orchestral template I use for pretty much everything, so I do have a tendency to have an abundance of that sometimes It may surprise you that I did cut down a lot on that already, as the whole mix was excessively muddy before: I should probably have cut even more! IIRC pads did not have any additional reverb, though, as they were using a Yoshimi bank that had some good “presence” of its own.
I’d say, in the second half, the snare is far too weak compared to the kick, and the kick is basically drowning everything else in low-end / low-mids, so I have a hard time to enjoy the important parts of the song: the sax and guitar performance.
@slash yeah, I have to admit I struggled with the digital drum a lot, I guess because I’m not really used to it… It was a TR-808 clone that I programmed using Hydrogen, but no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t get it to pop up as I wanted: it was either barely audible or it covered everything else
A different perspective would definitely be cool to have, and it would be an opportunity for me to learn in the process! And hopefully eventually end up with a more decent mix for when the full album will be available…
What kind of raw tracks would you need? Just a stem export of all tracks without them going through the reverb busses I have in place? Or would I need to disable the equalizers too? Just trying to figure out how the process would be. Thanks!
I guess a simple zip is the simplest option, as 1. I’m lazy , and 2. there’s a ton of tracks (~20) which means there’s a good chance I’d mess something up when disabling stuff. It’s a beefy zip, though (~1.2GB). I think I can put it on some web server for you to download, if you let me know how to contact you privately (not sure if Discourse supports private messages).
It may surprise you that I did cut down a lot on that already, as the whole mix was excessively muddy before: I should probably have cut even more! IIRC pads did not have any additional reverb, though, as they were using a Yoshimi bank that had some good “presence” of its own.
, and 2. there’s a ton of tracks (~20) which means there’s a good chance I’d mess something up when disabling stuff. It’s a beefy zip, though (~1.2GB). I think I can put it on some web server for you to download, if you let me know how to contact you privately (not sure if Discourse supports private messages).