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Hey guys, just wanted to get some feedback from anyone since, oddly enough, a lot of you guys seem to listen to the types of music I do. So check it out!
http://www.myspace.com/inretrospectband

One of my friends helped with the recording and then I mailed the mix out to another friend who's at Full Sail for recording and he mixed/mastered it for me. Sounds pretty good for a free recording (free=beer and food, haha).

I like... sounds pretty good. So what do you play in the band.... i take it not singer.

I think it is very good, BUT...

*constructive criticism ahead - take no offense*

Music: Your lead guitarist (one mostly in the left channel) needs to pay attention to his rhythm. He is continually off from the rest. The drummer needs to work on his transitions between patterns. He seems really abrupt and they are not smooth at all.

Recording: Where was it recorded, and with what? I don't want to jump the gun till I know everything :) There are some mixing issues I have tho, such as when the main guitar solo comes on, it's very dead in the left channel, that should have gone full center (with some effects).

If you need some advice on recording, let me know (if you're doing it yourself). I can try to help best I can. I've been doing it for a few years.

Keep up the good work!

If you wanted to hear, here's something I recorded a little over 2 years ago: http://webcam.jobbankneworleans.com/audio/thetrickster.mp3

*it's my work's ftp :) I hope they don't mind... I'm pretty sure they'll never know. You can stream it from there. It's about 15MB

Jake, I have added you and sent a friend request. My page shows a billiard background and a very happy, four-eyed beauty graces the front page. That would be me.

also check out the song on my site, it is my brother's band, Valhalla.

Joe

Joe's Site

I play guitar in the band. I believe I'm in the right channel.
Thanks for the constructive criticism William, always useful. We're doing all the recording ourselves, with help from a guy that has an Omega 4 port interface. The reason the drums sound so crappy is because we only had 4 mics to work with. I think next time we're going to buy a mixer so we can mic everything on his set (read: huge kit, about 10 pieces + 10 cymbals).
For guitars, we used a condensor mic (not sure which one) and a kick drum mic at the same time and blended them together.
Any kind of extra help with our limited equipment would be totally appreciated. This is the best sounding recording I've ever been part of, so I'm pretty proud of it, and I love the music we've been coming up with.
Thanks for everyone's comments!

For guitars, we used a condensor mic (not sure which one) and a kick drum mic at the same time and blended them together.

Ahh okay, that explains the sound of the kick drum. I only mic my kit with 4 mic's plus a 12" woofer in the front of the bass drum. (one mic on the beater end of the drum, two overhead, and one on the snare). I have a 7pc with 8 cymbals. He might want to reduce his kit slightly, that will be a nightmare having to take down and setup if you are playing 2 or more gigs a week, just a heads up :)

I give it a thumbs up on the mixer. I would advise a Yamaha for a tighter budget. Many people say Behringer is terrible, but I've had two of their mixers, and they have been pretty decent to me, so I think I'd have to include them along side of Yamaha. Mackie would be ideal, but they can be pricey. If you want me to give some recommendations for your price range, let me know. One other good peice of equipment to buy along with the mixer would be a limiter -or better yet, a compressor/limiter. They can really help.

It's very easy to spend an hour or so just adjusting levels. One issue I've always had, and it bugs me to no end :) , is having the guitarists or vocalist turn themselves up. If you ever play all in headphones, they will have a tendency to do so and you must find a way to get more of themselves in their mix (aux channels in headphone splitters will work).

One thing you can try is recording individual instruments and then laying them over each other for a full mix. I would advise recording the drums first, but have the rest play along, but not be recorded. With the drums recorded, the guitarists won't need the drummer to play along with, they can just listen to the recording and play along. This will give you a lot more control later on.

Everything I've ever really recorded with a band has always been 'live'. Basically, everything goes into the computer at once with nothing added in later -this isn't really the way to record, but if you practiced like this, you will get some good results when you review what was played.

Basically, what we did for recording was record everyone playing the song at once and then let the drummer record first like you said. We used the "everyone" track as sort of a scratch track. It didn't work as well as we hoped. You can notice that the drums get slightly off on parts, although I tried to smooth it over as well as I could. We then recorded guitar, guitar, and bass individually.

Our drummer won't be using that kit when we play (although he does have it on a rack setup). He likes to use that for practice and he has a smaller 5 pc kit that he uses with select cymbals for when we play.

I'm not exactly sure what the compressor/limiter does. Is that to eliminate clipping?

The guy who I had mix the song for us said the reason the drums sound kind of low is because we didn't do a great job recording them and he couldn't turn them up anymore.

Thanks for your reply, I really appreciate you taking your time to help me out. I'm sure your info will be highly useful when we do more recording.

I'm not exactly sure what the compressor/limiter does. Is that to eliminate clipping?

The compressor/expander portion will require some reading and understanding before using, but the limiter part is relatively simple. The limiter will try to reduce a lot of the peaks and give you a much more controlled dynamic range. In music today, there really isn't that great a dynamic range as in classical music. I think I've taken a liking to it in the car, but not so much at home (mostly in movies). For progressive metal like yours, you will want a bit more dynamic range than most of today's music. Not too much more, but it will add a little depth that some are lacking.

Drums aren't an easy thing to record. You have several mics and even more instruments to record. Led Zepplin actually only used 3 mics to record their drum kit. Ideally, you wouldn't want any more mics than is necessary. The more you have, the harder it is to manage and the crazy much more it costs overall! (stands, cables add up)

For the compressor/expander, do you need 1 channel per mic, or for something like the drums, would I just run it on the overall mix after levels?