I had vacation recently and could finish some projects on Ardour (still 7.3). I’m loving to work with the tool, as always, but had found some bugs - which I plan to report properly.
Just a basic description to guide your listening experience.
Esperança - An instrumental theme I wrote some years ago and decided to arrange with some keys and drums. I’ve used the wonderful setBfree plugin and ZynAddSubFX for bass, effects and piano too. The drums were made with General Midi Synth plugin. I had some peak issues with the cymbals that I’m still trying to fix.
Outra Canção - A minimalistic Samba tune with some tonewheel organ (setBfree again) and General Midi Synth for percussion.
Assim Será - An old rock n’ roll tune I had that were re-arranged with MIDI drumming, this time with the “Black Pearl” kit, which came frome here. My guitar ran through Guitarix, so that’s where the tones are coming from.
And lastly, Conversa de E.T which is another instrumental theme from the last couple of years. This time it’s just my acoustic guitar together with some presets from Amsynth and ZynAddSubFX. This sounded to me like a sci-fi tune so that’s where the title (“E.T. Conversation”) comes from.
Let me know what you think. Any comments will be gladly received
Version 7.5 has been out for a couple of months, and version 8.0 is getting finalized for release, so I would recommend checking at least with the released 7.5 build before reporting a bug, and if possible a nightly build of what will be version 8.0 in the near future. There were many errors corrected in versions 7.4 and 7.5, and more in version pre-8.0, so reporting against 7.3 is not very useful at this time. Of course any bug still existing in a recent version should be noted so it can be corrected.
Esperança: watch the low mids. They feel too much / too loud for my taste.
Outra Canção: I like the sound of the vocals. It just feels that in some places, the vocals are “pushed back” by the music (organ and guitar) too much.
Assim Será: Yes, now you have my attention.
Try to add an EQ on the output of Guitarix (I usually always have to do this on my own guitar / Guitarix tracks too):
a high-pass on around 100-140 Hz to tame the low end.
one or two cuts with a small bandwidth around 2k-4k to cut down the “screeching” noise that almost sounds like an airplane engine.
optional: a little high-shelf for more clarity.
Try it out and do A/B comparison by enabling/bypassing this EQ and hear the difference for yourself…
Conversa de E.T.: again, too much lows / low mids on the guitars for my taste.
As per “Assim Será” I’m not totally happy with the guitar tone myself. It’s just that I felt I did spend much time trying different presets so I decided to use the one I found more satisfying in terms of balancing the rhythm and lead parts.
On Ardour project I have still several playlists on the guitar track, each of them with a different tone…
I’ll be going for a new mix soon and will try your ideas, surely.
