New album released!

[Eric]

My band (with me playing bass) has released a new 5-song album that you can download for free or stream on our website (http://www.theanimalelectric.com/audio.html). I have previously posted an old recording that we re-did and a vid of us, but this is the final product. We really just want to put some more music out there and this is our first project/release.

You can stream it here (http://t.co/U3cyeA1qKO) or download it here (https://dl.dropbox.com/s/mkkh35600qi7eze/The%20Animal%20Electric%20-%20Small%20Town%20Oceans%20%282013%29.zip). I was going to try to embed the soundcloud player, but it doesn't seem like that's a possibility on this forum.

[tjcurtin1]

Hey Eric just had time for a quick skim, but it sounds great! I look forward to sitting down with it all the way through this weekend. Nice work!

[Jipes]

Just downloading it right now I let you know asap

[Jipes]

My first thoughts about your EP, I like it even if I had to listen to it at pretty low volume (being at work) Love the sound of the guitars and the overall grooves, my preference goes to Gives and Take great number it's rocking ! The Voiceless reminds me somehow I miss you from the stones mainly due to the bass it sounds great. Some songs are a bit too sweet to my personal taste, I miss from time to time some real frenzy because when it really starts to get "hot" the rupture just comes and bring it down too fast. Just my two cents !

[Eric]

My first thoughts about your EP, I like it even if I had to listen to it at pretty low volume (being at work) Love the sound of the guitars and the overall grooves, my preference goes to Gives and Take great number it's rocking ! The Voiceless reminds me somehow I miss you from the stones mainly due to the bass it sounds great. Some songs are a bit too sweet to my personal taste, I miss from time to time some real frenzy because when it really starts to get "hot" the rupture just comes and bring it down too fast. Just my two cents !
Cool. Thanks for the feedback!

[deeaa]

On the first song, I already know this is going in my MP3 collection. Really love the singer, very original, very good in all respects, with some hi-class production that's the kind of original and capable voice that could make huge hits.

Give & Take is kind of Black Crowes meets Spin Doctors, obviously radio material. Production is however not as top notch. Curiously, it sounds very good and very well balanced, but still a bit weakish, like it could benefit from some much heavier compression. Everything can be heard perfectly, but sounds like there's still headroom to spare.

Moving on to Disaster in Small Town; the production 'live' quality shows here much more. The guitar is even more airy and a bit distant, and there's a little bit more pumping of volume occurring. But again all the instruments can be very well heard, vocals a tad dark and more buried in presence this time, and less pop-like sang as well, less presence in every way. The song gets a wee bit tiring just as the break section comes is to save it - with a stronger production and punch this could after all be a great tune.

Moving on to Broken City.. I took the files to my mastering suite and yeah, there's a LOT of headroom left there. I upped the overall volume and threw some basic multiband mastering comp on it and it sounded immediately much better to my ears. The Freq. analyst explains more why; the bass end peaks at pretty high, around 150Hz, and then curves down steadily but quickly so there isn't much low end content there. Also the cymbals sound kinda phasey and hissing, and that's probably because there isn't much high end in the recording either, the 10Khz range is like 30dB lower than the 1Khz range and from there too it vanishes quickly.

Surprisingly it still manages to sound pleasant and good. Like an old-time recording kind of. Liked the song Bittersweet as well fine.

The voiceless starts with a terrific bass riff that grooves excellently. The drummer however doesn't quite match the groove exactly and wavers a bit. Nevertheless it's a good song; the bridge starts a bit weakly with the vocals lamenting a tad too much. But it's fine a song nevertheless. Towards the end the vocals bury everything, sadly, the instrumentation becomes a messy backdrop, but that's due to production, not playing issues. Damn, I would have liked to hear that finish properly escalate and not get mushed. Nice guitar solo!

Yep, the main things I would try to improve is overall mix/mastering that could be a lot better, and especially drum sounds are too 'vintage'. But overall the release is good music, and well played. Just needs to be a little tighter mixed. The first song is clearly the best of the bunch, and that's the route I'd gear the rest of the songs towards a little...a little more funk and snappy speed, and the singer is clearly best delivering kinda poppy semi-falsetto even, clear and high vocals rather than grungish lamenting style. In recording, it needs more high and low end - sounds kind of like the whole thing was recorded with passive guitar cab mikes or something - so at least some excitation and compression would do wonders on separate tracks. And the guitar seems to be miked way too far - it sounds good, but distant, and is also robbing the bandwidth of the rest of the instruments sounding so excessively airy (which also eats at the power of it).

Next time, get it properly mastered :-) but, I will definitely listen to this again, especially the first song is totally killer! Thank you!

[Eric]

Thanks for the input, Dee. I agree with pretty much all of your comments. This was a DIY record and mix, with the guitarist trying mixing for the first time with predictably mixed results. It's a better job than I could do, but I agree that production could be helped. It's weird -- I actually feel like the whole thing sounds *too* compressed, but you say there's room for more compression.

In layman's terms, is there anything simple we could do next time to help the mixing/production? I know there are tons of technical terms for what we could do differently, but I got a bit lost in your summary and I think the guitarist (who will be doing the mixing) would probably feel similar -- it's hard to figure out what you are saying at times given our lack of experience.

Regardless, thanks for the feedback. It will be very helpful if we can make some progress on the recording side of things for the next release.

For some details, we are recording into a Zoom R16 and mixing with Reaper. Probably no special plugins as everything is low-budget and likely will continue that way. Guitar was an LP or Squier strat through a Pod HD500 into a Fender combo bass amp and miced a couple feet back with an SM57. Bass was DI with a Sansamp BDDI. Drums were miced with some 7-piece drum mic kit that cost about $200. Vocals were recorded with an SM58.

So super-basic stuff, but since the budget probably won't increase significantly any time soon, the most useful input would either be mixing/recording changes or maybe one key piece of equipment that would be helpful (e.g. we could possibly spring for a new vocal mic for like $200 if that would put us over the top). But buying all new equipment is not really viable.

[Eric]

Also, I may still have the original tracks for Broken City. It would be pretty interesting to send you a link to them and see what you could do with them. If I have them on my computer when I get home, I'll check into that.

[deeaa]

Yeah, do, I would be glad to test drive them in Cubase.

I also use an r16 and the gear you use is fine for good demos - perhaps put the guitar mic closer and/or use no amp reverb or very little, rather add it later in reaper. I don't think any singular update in gear would reap huge benefits really.

I would venture if you simply would apply basic multiband compression plugins to each instrument group and then a little master compression along with some mastering excitation it'd be completely different...compression is the key in bringing up nuances and brightness & create separation without raising volumes.

Easy to go overboard with that, but for my r16 live projects I would use at least a dozen different compressors on single tracks, bus tracks and master.

Not very familiar with reaper but I'm sure there are lots of even free plugs available for it...and it does vst plugs? Plenty out there.

[Eric]

Yeah, do, I would be glad to test drive them in Cubase.
They are here (https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ux1lus0ykrz23bw/Hax92rNk2v). I think the non-wav stuff is just remnants from his Reaper session. As I was writing this I realized that this is from an earlier take of BCS, but I think it should still give you a decent stab at the audio. I think we eventually re-recorded to match the rest of the album, though my memory is a little fuzzy on all of that.

I'll be interested to see what you can do. Please let me know if you have any issues downloading.

[deeaa]

I got them in Cubase OK. I'll look into it asap.

[deeaa]

Okay...I made a quick mix:

http://deeaa.pp.fi/bcs/BCS_dee.mp3

It's a quick one, and there are some obvious issues still, but nevertheless. More lows and highs at least :-) It'd need some careful thinking about volumes in certain spots for sure.

Main problem in mixing this is the drums; the kick goes into overload quite often even. Make sure it doesn't - i dunno how it's placed but usually so that the mic diaphragm is level with outer skin is good.
Here I mixed in some triggered kickdrum.

Also I'm not sure how the rest of the drums are - there's one maybe far drum...but reeal quiet. Are there actual overheads? I'd like a well stereo spread X/Y or clearly apart clean overhead mics to start with.

Then the snare - as little hi-hat there as possible, it's often good to mic both upside and downside, phase flipped they work well together.

Guitar is still too spacious - needs be miked closer/less verb there. And there are some pretty extreme noise/feedback or such rumble issues there too.

Finally, as great as the vocals are, the input volumes vary quite a lot, so some kind of mild compressor/limiter even at the recording phase might make it easier to get good signal and levels on 'tape' already.

But, especially with a few improvements on mic placements and tests the way you do it certainly can yield a good enough demo.

[deeaa]

Here's what I did to them in more detail...basically pretty much preset settings plus plenty of multiband and singleband compressors everywhere:

Almost every track naturally got basic EQ to sort out the nastiest peaks etc. or to roll off bass where not needed etc. Cubase has pre-suggested EQ curves for most basic needs like 'rock snare' etc. which are a good starting point.

Then effects:

Kick: two layers of compression on track
a little reverb and mixed in another kick (KTDrumTrigger) because the original had peaks and varied in volume and sound too much.

Dual drum tracks (of which I wasn't sure which they were really) - compression, reverb.

Toms: hard gate, reverb a plenty

Quiet drum track - EQ, compression

The drum track with a lot of hi-hat - hard panning and EQ

Drum bus for all drum tracks: again a compressor, stereo imager, harmonic exciter and maximiser

Bass: compression, low end extender, distortion, reverb, eq

Guitars:mostly used the drier track with the other mixed in lower. No eq really or track fx, just some compression and stereo spreader on guitar master bus for all guitar tracks.

Vocals: compressors on both vocal track and vocals bus; twin reverbs, a little delay, manually adjusted track volumes as it goes, EQ

Stereo master bus: master compressor, harmonic exciter, stereo imager, 16bit analog type master limiter with -1.9dB threshold and -0.3dB ceiling to remove the biggest transient peaks remaining...and of course gated all the intros and midsections where there was no sound on some tracks.

Basically it was the same treatment I give to our training facility recordings, and the starting quality was pretty much the same except for the drum miking was a bit unclear to me and had spikes and the guitar too airy & vocals not already a little compressed. I think I could get a pretty decent mix going with these too, if I knew better how the mics were placed on drums, or the placement was a bit better. Since I couldn't really place the tracks in the mix without knowing what they should include it was a bit hard and they sound a bit nasty & a bit unnatural. Usually I also phase-align the miked drum tracks based on pre-recorded snappy pings off cymbals either manually or with track delay...good,clean and phase-error free (as much as possible) drum tracks are the key to good mixes always, and also here obviously the most limiting factor.

[Eric]

Thanks for doing that -- I meant to respond earlier but got sucked in by some other things. I like the drums and guitar quite a bit better. There seems to be more snap on the drums and the guitar levels feel a little more even and appropriate.

To answer your questions, I don't know how the kick mic is positioned, though I would imagine it's roughly what you said. The input gain on the recorder was probably too high, which lead to the peaking. I'll try to make it even with the head next time. There is a snare, maybe 2 rack toms, floor tom, kick, and 2 overheads IIRC. The faint ones you were talking about were probably the overheads. How do you typically position those? Close together but in an X pattern like you see on handheld recorders?

The vocals sounded odd and chorus-y or something. Kind of awkward though. Were there two vocal tracks or is that all verb and chorus? Bass also sounds mega-clanky, which I don't so much like. I realize some of that might be how it was in the original track, but I would think smoothing that out would sound a bit better.

Would you be open to trying a mix of a new song if we improve our recording techniques a little bit? So far it seems like kick drum positioning/gain, overhead positioning, close micing the guitar, and I'm not sure what else. Perhaps using the DI out on my bass head vs. the Sansamp. I'd just be curious to see what you could do with some better starting material.

[deeaa]

Yeah, I do tend to like a rather clunky and snappy bass myself that's why :-) There were three vocal tracks altogether, I didn't know why or what to do with them and just left them all on so that does create a kind of chorus effect.

One thing would be important is to know exactly what each track is...like no.006 track is snare mic 2" from the skin, no.007 is overhead left three feet over hi-hat etc. So that they're easy to put in the mix.

Overheads can be xy positioned about over the drummers head, but often as rooms are lacking and so on it may be better to put one well above the ride pointing down to it, like 5' high and another over hi-hat similarly but aimed just past the hi-hat. In a not so good room that creates much better stereo separation. Then try to get the snare mic as close to skin as possible, pointing away from hi hats and toms, 45 degrees to skin and 1" off it. If possible put another one in mirror below the snare. Sacrifice a tom mic for it if need be. you can get two toms next to each other with just one mic no problem. they should mostly be heard off overs. Measure the distance between the kickdrum mic and the overs that should now be behind the set a bit, and they should form a triangle with as even distances as possible, and also in a perfect world the snare would be in the middle of that triangle. then put a far mic in front of the kit, or two, like about three times farther from snare as overs are, and forming a square with them.

in reality you never can do it perfectly but it's good to try. The more at same time the sound waves hit the mics, the better. no phase problems. Everyone has their own micing preferences too. but yeah, I'd use 8 inputs so:

two overs far apart (condenser)
Two room mics in front (condenser)
Two for snare, top and bottom
One for kick
One for toms.

if there is low tom as well....well then it depends on how important it is to the song whether you have to use a far mic there instead.

And yeah...I can try another, if you just mark the tracks well and such...with info on what you want done with it, like bass needs be warm and soft, or this is main vox and this is for beefing up etc. And what the overall feel should be etc.

Just it might take a while dunno about when I may have the time :-)

[Eric]

Yeah, I do tend to like a rather clunky and snappy bass myself that's why :-) There were three vocal tracks altogether, I didn't know why or what to do with them and just left them all on so that does create a kind of chorus effect.

One thing would be important is to know exactly what each track is...like no.006 track is snare mic 2" from the skin, no.007 is overhead left three feet over hi-hat etc. So that they're easy to put in the mix.

Overheads can be xy positioned about over the drummers head, but often as rooms are lacking and so on it may be better to put one well above the ride pointing down to it, like 5' high and another over hi-hat similarly but aimed just past the hi-hat. In a not so good room that creates much better stereo separation. Then try to get the snare mic as close to skin as possible, pointing away from hi hats and toms, 45 degrees to skin and 1" off it. If possible put another one in mirror below the snare. Sacrifice a tom mic for it if need be. you can get two toms next to each other with just one mic no problem. they should mostly be heard off overs. Measure the distance between the kickdrum mic and the overs that should now be behind the set a bit, and they should form a triangle with as even distances as possible, and also in a perfect world the snare would be in the middle of that triangle. then put a far mic in front of the kit, or two, like about three times farther from snare as overs are, and forming a square with them.

in reality you never can do it perfectly but it's good to try. The more at same time the sound waves hit the mics, the better. no phase problems. Everyone has their own micing preferences too. but yeah, I'd use 8 inputs so:

two overs far apart (condenser)
Two room mics in front (condenser)
Two for snare, top and bottom
One for kick
One for toms.

if there is low tom as well....well then it depends on how important it is to the song whether you have to use a far mic there instead.

And yeah...I can try another, if you just mark the tracks well and such...with info on what you want done with it, like bass needs be warm and soft, or this is main vox and this is for beefing up etc. And what the overall feel should be etc.

Just it might take a while dunno about when I may have the time :-)
Cool. I'll bring it up with the rest of the guys. I'm thinking it might be eye-opening to see what can be done and maybe we can learn a few things in the process. It's good to know that you want all of that info -- much of the time I try to detail things out, but the person on the other end doesn't want to know it and waves it off. You are at least as analytical as I am, so that's helpful.

It might be a while before I can get it as we have a show on Friday and then I will be out of town (in your neck of the woods) for work, then more shows. But I will keep you posted.

[deeaa]

Okay! Yep, it's always easy to just 'do' things without spending much time in why and such...but it always pays off in the end to really pay attention and put down in writing everything that might be handy some day. I don't know how many times I have failed to make decent records of what track is what etc. Only to realize a week later I can't remember or distinguish which track was actually snare and which oh left. It's very useful to keep track of all that. If only I managed to practice what I preach :-)

Sent from my HTC One X using Tapatalk

[marnold]

Excellent, Eric! I'll put this on my "to listen" list.