Can you guys help me make this better?

[Glacies]

Okay guys, I tried to make a recording and I hate it. Thing is, I can't seem to do better... this took me hours.

I play and sing in a band, and I sound way better than this all around. The guitar parts I did exactly what I wanted even though someone told me I missed a note. I don't care about that, my covers are never meant to be perfect, but I couldn't layer the solo correctly so it sounds like a jumbled mess. The vocals, this is recorded in my apartment and I couldn't use my diaphragm to project and sing loudly. As a result my voice is lighter than I wanted and kinda crappy. I hit the notes but I don't like the sound, sounds amateurish which I guess I am. I'm guessing there's probably nothing I can do about that while i'm in the apartment recording (unless there are voice tricks). And then the elephant in the room as you can see, my transitions are not good. Edit: note on the transitions, they're fine when I'm playing with a band. Here I broke up the parts and recorded them as different tracks. I couldn't figure out how to place them correctly to make the timing work out.

https://soundcloud.com/stiff-parrot/kryptonite

I used reaper to make this. I think most of those multi-track recording programs are all going to work the same. Does anyone have a good resource for tips and tricks using this type of software?

Looking for a lot of constructive criticism here. It took me so long to make this and i'm not even happy with it.


My setup was a USB mic hanging on my amp, crate vc50212. I was playing my Les Paul through my Boss ME-70 into the amp.

[Eric]

Hi Glacies-

Lots of thoughts on this. I'll try to organize them accordingly. I thought your vocals sounded pretty good, so nice work on those.

First off, I would try using a backing track like this one: http://download.guitarbackingtrack.com/mp3/3%20doors%20down/kryptonite%20(3).mp3

A big part of why the distorted part sounds so weird (outside of transitions) is that you just can't get that much of a contrast in dynamics from a guitar alone. Drums and bass are much more important to making a band sound like a band than a guitar is, though guitar and vocals are usually the most noticeable components. So a lot of that intensity will come through the drums.

I would also try using a lot less gain. In general, reverb and gain are way more present on recordings than they are live, so it ends up sounding better to turn both of those way down. I noticed your vocals were pretty reverb-heavy. That may be due to your recording setup, but see if you can tame that at all with some foam or other isolation. Ironically, I thought your arpeggiated rhythm guitar could have used just a little reverb to help it sit a little better. Right now it sounds a little dry.

I also think that playing the full arpeggios on the rhythm would fill it out and make it sound better. I don't know this song note-for-note, but I think they play more notes on the arpeggiated part, like maybe 4 notes per chord on the ascending part at the end of the phrase instead of 3. The gaps in there now make it sound a little awkward.

You can really help to fill out the sound a lot by doubling (or tripling/quadrupling) your rhythm guitar and panning it slightly left or right, and compression can help get a more intense sound. I have not done a lot with that, but it's kind of conventional wisdom WRT recorded guitars. I have done the doubled thing and it does help a lot. I would think you would want to do that with the chorus for sure.

You are correct that the transitions could stand to be cleaned up. It sounds like you may be having trouble monitoring yourself and playing at the same time. What I have found to work is that you listen to the mix on headphones and play back along with the track, then just chop out or mute the sections you don't want to be playing on (e.g. the verse for the overdriven rhythm guitar). The tricky part is routing everything properly through your computer and recording interface so that you can hear the playback while also getting your signal into the computer. What does your setup look like right now?

If you have a good recording/monitoring setup, multi-tracking should not be too difficult and I agree it is probably the best way to approach this sort of thing. If you multi-track you have control over the gain for all of the parts so you can turn up just the guitar solo, etc. and EQ as needed.

I think using a backing track like the one I linked to would help you know where you are in the song, stay on rhythm, and ensure you nail the transitions. I don't doubt that you sound pretty good in a live setting, but recording is a very different animal and is pretty tricky at first. This is probably what you actually do sound like, but the little nuances and imperfections that your ear is drawn to on a recording don't matter nearly as much live, so it's annoying at first to try to get a decent recording down.

One last thing is that on your software/DAW, there is usually a time-shift thing if you need to shift your track over at all due to latency. So as long as you are in rhythm, you can usually correct after the fact to sync up one part with the rest of the tracks. I think it's good that you are getting into this; it's an important part that I have avoided for years but am now forced to become more familiar with.

I see that this ended up not being as organized as I would have hoped, but I think I got all of my thoughts in there, so hopefully it was helpful. Thanks for posting this!

[Glacies]

Awesome info man. Thank you very much! I'm going to go over this a couple of times and try to absorb it.

Where did you find the backing track? That sounds like the actual recording track.

[Eric]

Where did you find the backing track? That sounds like the actual recording track.
http://www.guitarbackingtrack.com/

[Glacies]

Holy crap! I'm going to have a ball with that later. 115 RHCP tracks?

I don't know how I never knew about this.

[Eric]

Holy crap! I'm going to have a ball with that later. 115 RHCP tracks?

I don't know how I never knew about this.
There's also a section called "Jamtracks" that can be fun for farting around with. The tracks can be kind of hit-or-miss, as one of the Kryptonite ones was a dumpy midi track, but if the song is sufficiently popular you can usually find a nice one to play along with. I think I recorded a song with one of those as the backing once and it worked pretty well.

[helliott]

Eric's input is very thorough and covers everything I heard. Vocals are quite good, just cut back on the reverb and find a way to push them out in your apartment. You can't compensate for having to throat sing, I've found. The guitars are good, but as Eric noted, just pull way back on the gain or overdrive. My experience is try it first clean. Completely clean. Then layer till you get the thickness you want, but again as Eric said, err on the side of clean when it's guitars and voice only. You could add a bass part with your guitar tone browned right out, which would give you some bottom end structure. Overall, it's pretty good. Don't be hypercritical.

[Glacies]

Fantastic info. This is great constructive criticism. I'm surprised you guys are complimenting the singing. I thought it was the weakest part other than the transitions. I noticed my band prefers I sing even some songs that are a bit out of my comfort zone. I guess if you can hit the notes at the right times, people are happy.

I've actually been working on Bruno Mar's "When I Was Your Man" which is super challenging, maybe even too much, but it's good voice exercise for me.

Eric, I played 3 RHCP songs off of that website last night. One smoked me, I play it slower than I thought (Snow) but the others I felt like I was playing with the band!

[Eric]

One thing to add to helliott's good input about the clean guitar is to note that 'clean' does not necessarily mean 'bright.' You can get a nice chunky rhythm sound that's dead clean if you back off the really biting high end using the EQ either on the guitar (tone knobs) or amp (assuming you have treble-mid-bass tone knobs), particularly with a Les Paul. There was a long time where for whatever reason I thought the only way to mellow a sound was to add OD. I think it's good input to play clean and add duplicate tracks of guitar until you have it thick enough, and if you turn down the high end it won't sound unbearably twangy or bright, which is what people frequently associate with a clean tone.

[Eric]

How did this turn out? Have you made any progress?

[Glacies]

I did not remaster that one. I tried recording an original song called "Stiff Parrot". It took me like 4 hours to do Kryptonite so I was sick of it by the end. Stiff Parrot took me about an hour. My wife, who loves the song, tried to record a bass track on it but struggled with the speed as she just started playing the bass about a month or so ago.

I was debating posting it because it's a bit silly and I wasn't sure how you guys would react to it, but I think I did a better job with the recording: https://soundcloud.com/stiff-parrot/stiffparrot

As stupid as it is, it's kind of got a cult following with my friends so they asked when that was coming, I decided to do that last weekend. This time I tried singing under the down comforter, but I think I did worse than before. On the first few takes I couldn't keep the headphones on for the click track so I tried to do without. You can kind of tell I speed up progressively. I learned how to filter the vocals and get rid of some of the crap on there - the low frequencies that were present even during silence, and the same with the high frequencies. I pulled some peaks out too but I notice there is some clipping on the vocals. I'm not particularly happy with the vocals either, again, despite the fact I was under the comforter, I just couldn't get my gut into it. Next weekend I might just have a drink, sing my *** off for 5 minutes and let the neighbors deal.

This time I used my strat and I dialed the distortion down. I'm pretty happy with the guitar tone on this one. Vocals aren't way off either so I'm much happier with this as a whole. Since it's original, you have nothing to gage it by though.

[Eric]

I did not remaster that one. I tried recording an original song called "Stiff Parrot". It took me like 4 hours to do Kryptonite so I was sick of it by the end. Stiff Parrot took me about an hour. My wife, who loves the song, tried to record a bass track on it but struggled with the speed as she just started playing the bass about a month or so ago.

I was debating posting it because it's a bit silly and I wasn't sure how you guys would react to it, but I think I did a better job with the recording: https://soundcloud.com/stiff-parrot/stiffparrot

As stupid as it is, it's kind of got a cult following with my friends so they asked when that was coming, I decided to do that last weekend. This time I tried singing under the down comforter, but I think I did worse than before. On the first few takes I couldn't keep the headphones on for the click track so I tried to do without. You can kind of tell I speed up progressively. I learned how to filter the vocals and get rid of some of the crap on there - the low frequencies that were present even during silence, and the same with the high frequencies. I pulled some peaks out too but I notice there is some clipping on the vocals. I'm not particularly happy with the vocals either, again, despite the fact I was under the comforter, I just couldn't get my gut into it. Next weekend I might just have a drink, sing my *** off for 5 minutes and let the neighbors deal.

This time I used my strat and I dialed the distortion down. I'm pretty happy with the guitar tone on this one. Vocals aren't way off either so I'm much happier with this as a whole. Since it's original, you have nothing to gage it by though.
That's a pretty fun song. I see what you mean about the tempo speeding up, but once the song gets going it seems to stabilize a bit.

It's good to see that you're making progress. Thanks for the update!

[Robert]

Hey that's a cool punk rock tune, but it needs some drums and bass!

That girl makes my parrot stiff, haha!

[Glacies]

Hey that's a cool punk rock tune, but it needs some drums and bass!

That girl makes my parrot stiff, haha!

Thanks for the compliment. It's such a silly song, so like I said, I was a bit embarrassed to post. It was an off the cuff comment a friend of mine made a while ago about a pirate and it just turned into a bunch of us very maturely making that metaphor. The song just happened a few days later when I sat down with my guitar. I tell people I picked up guitar to have fun with it and that song kind of represents that pretty well. Gets a lot of laughs.

When I first put it in front of the band, we were working out the kinks (poor quality): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhSUlBGhB0I

Here's it with 2 guitars, drums, no vocals (bass player didn't show up for practice, and the other guitar player kind of butchered it): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAtqa7e2LuA




So this weekend I'm going to try my hand at Santeria by Sublime. That will be a bit tough, it's got a solo in it that gets pretty fast, but I'll post it in this thread if you guys would like to take a look.

[Eric]

So this weekend I'm going to try my hand at Santeria by Sublime. That will be a bit tough, it's got a solo in it that gets pretty fast, but I'll post it in this thread if you guys would like to take a look.
Yeah, I like seeing what other people are doing. In fact, this thread has prompted me to put up some video of a show (http://www.thefret.net/showthread.php/21672-Video-of-our-show-last-month) we did about a month ago.

[Glacies]

Kind of frustrated, the tone coming out of my amp is not what I record and I just couldn't get my act together with music today. Santeria I didn't even try to sing, so I used the backing track from that site you showed me. That song is faster than I usually play it so I struggled a bit, but I'm keeping this because it's good to listen to how I play and let me know where I need to clean up.

https://soundcloud.com/stiff-parrot/what-i-got

https://soundcloud.com/stiff-parrot/santeria

[Eric]

Hmm. I thought the tone you were getting was pretty appropriate. I don't really know how to mic amps as I've only done it live, but supposedly it can be kind of tricky to mic an amp accurately. Vocals again sounded good on the first one and I think you hung in there pretty well on Santeria even if it was faster than you're used to playing it. The descending thing you were doing on the chorus seemed like it was fighting with the BT.

I've been in this same spot before and it was frustrating because I was pushing the boundaries of my abilities but I was never satisfied with the results. I think you have the right attitude though of just continuing to do this sort of stuff and working through it. It takes guts but it's worth it. Thanks for posting again.

[Glacies]

Thanks for the support man. Lately I'm feeling like I don't even know what I'm doing so it means a lot.

That chorus on Santeria is arpeggiated in the recording. I couldn't hit the arpeggio cleanly at that speed so I hit the whole chord. I knew as soon as I heard it that it didn't work.

[Eric]

You might want to try something more simple and use a metronome just to build some confidence. It's surprisingly difficult to get the right tone and timing and everything even while bashing out chords on simple songs from Green Day or whatever. When you add in singing, playing individual notes/arpeggiating, not having any rhythm section, and getting comfortable with recording, it can be a lot to handle.