Hello folks,
I’ve just composed a song with my old Ltd. It’s quite beginnery and the production is super DIY stuff, as I recorded the song with my phone, directly from my old Peavey amp.
I hope you find it interesting and that Justin wouldn’t be upset because of my humble progress.
One more thing: I will try to keep recording regularly and create a band if the opportunity arises. At the moment, I’m a one man band called Ósmosis Perversa.
Thanks for your feedback,
Cheers
Thanks for sharing, that was definitely effective. And some good playing.
Jose, firstly welcome to the Community and I feel total confident in saying that Justin would be delighted that you have made progress and recorded your own music.
I enjoyed all three parts, the playing sounded good and liked the various tones you dialed in.
Nothing wrong with keeping it simple. I assume that you are using some kind of DAW (Digital Audio Workbench) since the last section had two parts. For that section I’d have preferred the lead to be a little louder, to be in balance with the rhythm.
On your final video (good job on putting together the video with a variety of clips) I noticed using Stats for Nerds (access that by a right mouse-click when in the video window and it’s the last option) that your overall content loudness was +2.3dB. You will see that in the image below. YouTube checks the loudness of all uploaded videos against their standard loudness level. If a video is louder then they make it softer. I don’t know exactly how they do that but it is likely to reduce the dynamics of your track. Not a big deal given you were close to the norm, but something to keep in mind, check, and if over the norm I suggest reducing the level of your final render.
Lastly, I suggest you introduce yourself to the Community in #community-hub:introduce-yourself, doesn’t need to be lengthy, just some brief personal details, guitar history, and goals/aspirations you have.
Hi José
Welcome to the community 
Thank you for sharing your song and video! It’s great and very moving
Sounded fantastic to me Jose. If that’s humble progress I can’t begin to think what you feel “good progress” sounds like 
Thanks for sharing, I’m in no way qualified to offer any advice on playing or production. As David says pop us a hello in the introduce yourself section and be good to hear more from you 
That was terrific composition José! The video was very emotive too. Great job.
Well, I wasn’t expecting that half way through José. Great playing though and a really good original composition.
Well done Jose! The guitar work was great and the video was very moving.
Nice job…both the playing and the sound quality.
Did you really record it all on your phone? I ask because it sounds like you overdubbed a couple of parts at the end (though I suppose you could have recorded from the phone mic into a DAW).
In any case, very impressed with what can be recorded with a modern mobile phone and a little bit of care!
Hi, my friend! Not at all, there’s no need to use any other device if your amp’s got different effects with which you can play about like delay, overdrive and so on.
Once I recorded, I started to make the video as I had the idea pretty clear and I overdubbed rhythm and solo directly with Capcut, an Android app for editing video. Easy peasy.
For recording the solo following the rhythm, I sent the rythm track to my Google Drive account and played it with the laptop using headphones to avoid the sound being catched by the phone while recording.
And that’s it, the sound is kind of lo-fi but I’m fine with it.
My phone is a Samsung Galaxy, nothing too fancy but the recording quality is acceptable.
And finally, when you upload a video to YouTube, it applies a process of normalization and it softens the peaks of sound, getting rid of the saturation. Before uploading the video, there was quite a lot of unpleasant buzzing sounds and YouTube fixed it for me, even though I lost some volume specially in the last part of the track.
Hope you find this info useful. I hope one day I can use an audio interface and a DAW, but with my laptop I guess that it won’t work propperly, I might need a more powerful device so at the moment, as it’s for learning purpouses, I prefer to keep it simple.
Cheers mate 
Jose, you don’t mention the spec of your laptop but from my experience Reaper works well with a relatively low spec machine. Perhaps there are other options.
Hi David,
My laptop comes with 8GB Ram and 500GB hard disc, but sometimes it struggles when doing some serious engineering stuff… I’m considering changing it, and when I do so I’ll probably buy an interface and install some free-to-use DAW.
I’ve heard good things about Cakewalk by Bandlab, I’ll probably give it a try.
Thanks for your feedback, you’re super kind 
Jose, you don’t mention the CPU and OS but I am guessing based on 8GB RAM it would run Reaper just fine. As I said, Reaper is noted to be light on resources. I have heard good things about Cakewalk but have no idea as to how it may run on your laptop. Another perhaps worth researching is Ardour.
@Majik Keith, do you perhaps have insight into the resource demands of Ardour and maybe Cakewalk?
Well, the whole subject is a bit “how long is a piece of string”. Ultimately it will depend on how many tracks you have in your project and how many plugins/processors you use.
I think most DAWs will work minimally on 4Gb but they may be slow and you will definitely hit limitations with track counts and plugins earlier than with a machine with more RAM.
Note that Reaper, apparently, recommends 16 Gb RAM, but will run on less. I have heard people running Reaper OK on 4 Gb.
(I did struggle to find official system requirements for Reaper)
Ardour is pretty lightweight for a DAW. Some of that, perhaps, comes from it’s heritage of being a Linux application, and Linux applications tend to be leaner that Windows and Mac equivalents.
The official requirements for Ardour say:
I don’t know if, in realty, that reflects Ardour being less resource hungry than Reaper or not.
I have no experience with Cakewalk, but the official requirements are:
- Windows 8.1 or higher (64-bit only)
- Multi-core Intel or AMD CPU
- 8GB RAM
- 3GB free disk space
- 1280x800 screen resolution
- ASIO compatible hardware is recommended
As far as Ardour is concerned, a few years ago I did a live band recording “from the desk” (the desk being my Behringer XR18 mixer) over USB into an old laptop with 4 Gb RAM. It was around 2 and a half hours of recording with 16 channels and it worked without a hiccup. Note that, as this was a recording, I wasn’t using any plugins.
It may also be worth considering running under Linux as Linux itself tends to be less resource hungry than Windows.
Cheers,
Keith
Keith
Regards Reaper I was quite happily running on 4gb for a number of years until the PC drowned. That included many multi track projects with 12-16+ tracks. OK not excessive in the general scheme of track totals but it worked fine. The replacement PC is 16gb so all good.
Cheers
Toby
Jose
What an entry to the Community !
Really enjoyed the track and the switch of emotions in the musicality, really well done. From my perspective the mix and production sound good as well.
It may have been a bit hot on the “nerd” stats but from my understanding, Youtube will bring that down to their desired levels. Their True Peak is -2db so you could lose some quality by that reduction but it all sounded good to me. What YouTube doesn’t do, unlike for example Spotify, is raise the levels if they are too low. As I understand it Spotify aims for a consistent volume track to track. If you come in too low on YouTube, you stay low. Hope that helps, many discussion on that subject matter hereabouts !
Oh by the way, Welcome 
Cheers
Toby
@Majik Thanks for sharing, Keith
That’s true. Much like Toby, I used Reaper to produce projects with more than a few tracks, greater than 8, and made reasonable use of plug-ins, digital instruments etc. And the first time I started to experience problems was when I started to use Ozone plug-ins extensively. To be fair my PC was under their spec.
So I think Reaper is likely to perform better than some of the other common DAWs eg Cubase if producing the same project on a lower spec’ed PC.
I had a sense that Ardour may also be a good option if your PC is a little older and not high spec.
Jose, a solid state drive would also be helpful.
