I’m currently working on a cover of Gimme Some Lovin. The idea was that my brother would record the bass part, I’d do some electric guitar, a friend of mine who’s a good singer would put down the main vocal and I might even convince my wife to get some clarinet on there.
Started out by manually writing in the drums, bass, organ and piano as MIDI notes, and boy didn’t that take an incredibly long time.
Today I’ve added my electric guitar track in and some placeholder vocals, and added some drum samples for the kick and snare.
I’m now at a point where I’ve listened to it so many times, it feels like I can’t even tell whether the changes I’m making are an improvement.
Planning to set it aside for a few days and hopefully with fresh ears I’ll be able to listen to it usefully again.
Do you folks get this same problem when producing a song? How do you manage it?
You’re always your own worst enemy at being hyper critical, it’s always best to get as many educated ears as possible pass judgement.
There’s a Poll feature on the community (I think) this could be put to good use to do this sort of thing, I don’t think that you would have any lack of support to do this!
I know what you mean about being hyper critical Darrell, although I don’t think that’s what is going on here exactly. I’m not listening back and thinking “this is crap I hate it”. It’s more like that thing where, if you repeat one word enough times in a row, it loses all meaning and starts to sound weird.
Once I’ve got the live bass and lead vocal in, I will for sure be posting the results for feedback
I do. I find eventually I reach a point where I have had enough. And it is a tipping point thing, I flip from enjoying the process to wanting to be done pretty much from one day to the next. Then I just accept that I am done.
A pro tip I’ve picked up from a number of the sources I reference to help learn the art and science of music production is to make use of a reference mix. In this case load the original into your DAW and setup so you can easily flip back and forth, that is assuming you are shooting for something similar.
Being able to do this is the reason why I never put any fx on the DAW master track that change the sound in anyway. All my tracks eventually route to a track I call Song and the routes to the DAW Master track. Then a reference track can route to master and I can easily toggle back and forth between my song and the reference.
Well since I’m taking a break on it for a couple of days, I might as well drop a link here, if anyone wants to have a listen and give some tips, I will be very glad to hear them.
Caveats on the current draft:
My crappy vocals are placeholder, will be replaced soon by a proper singer
MIDI bass will be replaced by a live bass player soon
Haven’t got the opportunity to listen but hear where you are coming from.
Some good points made but sometimes you have to draw a line with the mix and master and just cut and run. A fresh pair of ears is always useful. When I’ve been prepping for an OM and feel everything is a about right or the final tweaks are not noticeable, I bounce a recording off my daughter (who spends most of her life listening to Planet Rock). I’ll get constructive feed back on levels, panning and EQ etc and fine tune for a day or two until we’re both happy.
It will be interesting to see how the OM X prep work pans out, as she is currently over here and won’t be reviewing via YT and her mobile. We’ve already had a session on picking the guitar tone for the next song but now I have a bass and drum track (Trio) it sounds weak, so she’ll be dragged into the studio later and we’ll start again.
It happens to me all the time…leaving it for a few days and get back with fresh ears helps…but I wish I could use my time better rather than keeping on listening to the same thing…it makes me angry with my self.
That’s so nice that you can play with other people
Yeah. Didn’t want to put this draft up on soundcloud, and I already had it in Google Drive. So I just set the sharing on the file to “anyone with the link can view”, and then pasted the sharing link in here.
But that sounds really really good!!! 