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Selma Filali & Eddie Zilker - Smoldering (pg. 2)
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| Storyteller |
| The mix is far from perfect. I do think however it adds significant value to the overal feel of the track. Improving the mix might harm the emotion provoking experience it gave me :). |
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| Richard Butler |
Well no one can say you ain't got your own style, that's fo sure.
The trippy splashed out feel appeals to me.
I think the mix would benefit from some tweaks if you are so inclined. The bass for example is imo overpowering things. Not that hard to fix though, in theory......
Your kick drum patterns are very trippy and almost unsyncopated, but somehow mainly see to work. But again mix wise there is a massive amound of bass which is distorting on small retail speakers badly if that matters to you. |
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| Looney4Clooney |
| grossly distorted and over compressed as a result of bad mixing rather than aesthetic choice is not really a style. I am wondering if you are using headphones of something. It just isn't listenable. |
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| Beatflux |
TL DL
No seriously though, its too long without any kind of direction. |
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| EddieZilker |
| quote: | Originally posted by meriter
nice work eddie, hypnotic and beautiful acidjazz vibe you got going on here. I don't hear any distortion or anything sounds fine to me (mix is acceptable for this style of music) Great tune can't wait for the album |
This is pretty much what I was going for (a'la Mark Farina and the thread I started in Music Discussion a while back). Thank you, very much for the compliments.
| quote: | Originally posted by MSZ
I really like up to 3.15minutes, The bassline sounds oldschool and I like that. I wonder how selma's voice sounds dry. Not digging the mix too much, personal preference maybe. Selma send me some diddly darn vocals. |
Sorry you don't like the mix that much. I'm trying to measure up to your standards, though. I deliberately kept Selma's vocals mostly dry because I felt it would have taken away from their presence to run them through a bunch of reverb. Thank you for the compliments, too.
| quote: | Originally posted by Richard Butler
Well no one can say you ain't got your own style, that's fo sure.
The trippy splashed out feel appeals to me.
I think the mix would benefit from some tweaks if you are so inclined. The bass for example is imo overpowering things. Not that hard to fix though, in theory......
Your kick drum patterns are very trippy and almost unsyncopated, but somehow mainly see to work. But again mix wise there is a massive amound of bass which is distorting on small retail speakers badly if that matters to you. |
The part about the speakers is likely the most concerning thing I've read. But I always appreciate the comments. Thank you very much for the feedback, sir.
| quote: | Originally posted by Beatflux
TL DL
No seriously though, its too long without any kind of direction. |
| quote: | Originally posted by Beatflux
TL DL
No seriously though, its too long without any kind of direction. |
Thanks for your support! Massive, quarrelsome, defensive, explosive, vitriolic, expletive-laden tirade, to follow.
EDIT to add:
| quote: | Originally posted by Storyteller
The mix is far from perfect. I do think however it adds significant value to the overal feel of the track. Improving the mix might harm the emotion provoking experience it gave me :). |
I agree. |
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| Looney4Clooney |
eddie , it isn't so much that it is far from perfect, in that i'm wondering what you did to get that because you are really on the wrong path. I'm not sure if it is a monitoring issue, but i don't understand how you can manage to make something that is sample based sound so bad. i mean there is under produced, where it sounds like a demo, then there is the usual overdone eq fx compression but this is worse that dj ryan has been up to.
I suppose i'm wondering if you actually hear the deficiencies ? IT would of sounded better if you did nothing to it. So somewhere some how , you made some bad decisions.
When i hear this, i can't think of anything to add, only that you need to unlearn everything you know and start over because this is the culmination of some really bad habits.
Sorry man, Got mad love for ya but i guess i expected more. I mean that last compilation you did, it was sort of not that good either but that was 2 years ago. YOu post regularly so i am assuming you want to be better. If not , then i guess i will shut up. |
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| EddieZilker |
| quote: | Originally posted by Looney4Clooney
eddie , it isn't so much that it is far from perfect, in that i'm wondering what you did to get that because you are really on the wrong path. I'm not sure if it is a monitoring issue, but i don't understand how you can manage to make something that is sample based sound so bad. i mean there is under produced, where it sounds like a demo, then there is the usual overdone eq fx compression but this is worse that dj ryan has been up to.
I suppose i'm wondering if you actually hear the deficiencies ? IT would of sounded better if you did nothing to it. So somewhere some how , you made some bad decisions.
When i hear this, i can't think of anything to add, only that you need to unlearn everything you know and start over because this is the culmination of some really bad habits.
Sorry man, Got mad love for ya but i guess i expected more. I mean that last compilation you did, it was sort of not that good either but that was 2 years ago. YOu post regularly so i am assuming you want to be better. If not , then i guess i will shut up. |
I'm not ignoring you hoping that you'll go away. It's just arguing against negative criticism is, generally speaking, bad form. It's much easier to defend someone else's work because there aren't attachments that are there with ones own. If I'm defending my own work it immediately comes off as some sort of ego-protection. No matter how valid the argument, it's rendered completely invalid by the fact that it was uttered in one's own defense.
But I also loathe the typical record-label, internet PR strategy of ignoring negative evaluation. Granted, I have an understanding of why they do it, but I hate it. I also don't want to disrespect you, even though I think you're wrong and I have a problem understanding why you feel compelled to spam this thread with a rhetorical strategy which conveys an almost nullifying finality. May as well hook my new monitors to my TV and slash my wrists, given your prognosis. Obliterating.
| quote: | | Originally posted by Looney4Clooney Everything I'm hearing is horrid! |
To begin with, I'm reluctant to accept criticism from someone who has yet to download the track. I spotted the play count bounce above 50, some time around 9 pm, night before last, with no downloads. I'm assuming much of that involved some of the rigorously analytical scrubbing reported in this thread but, unless you have downloaded it, you're not getting the complete picture. For general preview purposes, the sound-cloud player is great. When a mix has enough general aberration, the sound-cloud player will suffice for objective, technical criticism - but no where near the level an actual, high-quality rendering can reveal. Furthermore, the player colors the output. When I read criticism involving distortion and mud, but am looking at 0 downloads, I'm a little dubious as to the integrity of the listener's complaints.
I look forward to the detailed reply on why a sound-cloud player is adequate reason to spam this thread with dissent every time someone posts with feedback contrary to being utterly negative. I'm almost certain I might be disarmed with a reply insisting that you have downloaded it and still found it wanting.
Vocals:
| quote: | Originally posted by Looney4Clooney
And the vocal is barely there and the natural bandwidth of the voice has been EQ's out. |
| quote: | Originally posted by Intellekshual
...I recorded the song with my camera, so it was horrendously ty quality (sound-wise)... |
I actually filtered out a lot of high-end that was mostly static. There was also significant, resonant low-end that was cut from 250 to 300 (maybe more) Hz. The original mp3 was only 68 kbps - not a whole lot of bandwidth to begin with but it captured the essence of her voice, enough, that I could amplify what I wanted to salvage.
Screencap of EQ for source material.
You'll note that there is a bus send, by -4dB, to SONAR's VX64 processor. There is one of the few places that saturation was used.
This was used to reify the existing frequencies that I wanted, more than anything else (i.e. compression). Otherwise thin and somewhat brittle, with the cuts from the low-end in conjunction with the quality of the source file, this added a bit of color which helped highlight the nuances I tried to capture with Selma's voice.
WHAT SHOULD I HAVE DONE?
Used a higher quality source-file.
WHY DIDN'T I?
I didn't feel like it. NOTE: No excuses. I liked the quality of the end result enough to utilize it. It had a distortion to it that I don't normally use and that was part of the pleasure in using it.
Bassline:
| quote: | Originally posted by Looney4Clooney
the bass sounds like you ran it thru a bunch of saturation plugins then squashed that. |
Here's the secret. It's no Dada's Life Sausage Fattener but it does the trick.
I will submit that I put the bass-line through a transient shaper to tone down both attack and decay, at a later stage, but I definitely wasn't going for the analogue feel by passing it through a stack of saturation plug-ins.
WHAT SHOULD I HAVE DONE?
Put it through a stack of saturation plug-ins and side-chained the ****** to the entire mix to give it that special, "bass-player, live in your living-room" effect. Because analogue saturation makes it sound more "real."
WHY DIDN'T I?
CPU usage too high and the effect is useless without the bass-player smell.
Over-Compression:
| quote: | Originally posted by Looney4Clooney
I am wondering if you are using headphones of something. |
I've recently gotten new headphones (K240 MK II's) and monitors. Now, you can make some inference about a genuine inability to make music rather than speculating that my monitor set-up is botching my process.
| quote: | Originally posted by Looney4Clooney
i am just wondering how you managed to make it so distorted and muddy. you can't really hear a single element everything is so squashed together. |
In the process of getting to know my monitors, I've been listening to a lot of songs. Most of the music I'm listening to is incredibly well mixed and made. Storyteller's "Early Morning Rush" comes to mind as a song that's been something of a benchmark in terms of the quality I'm looking for. I'm not claiming to measure up to the standard he's unknowingly set, with me, but in-so-far as ideals go, both him and MSZ with Hadi ****** ("Siliptical") have provided me with goal-posts, in terms of clarity and over-all musicality. I'm not mentioning this in my defense (I'd love to be able to say I measured up but that is a conceit I'm not sure I'll ever be certain of making) but rather more of a reference point to illustrate what I consider to be an inferior mix. Both have posted in this thread, that the mix wasn't up to their standards.
Quite a few of the songs I've downloaded and listened to failed to meet my approval. I'd listen to them on my new headphones and, if I didn't like them, I'd give them a hearing on my monitors. 100% of the time, after listening to them on my speakers, they went into a folder titled, "Harsh - Over-compressed - Poorly Mixed."
These aren't necessarily "bad" songs (truly bad songs go into a folder marked, Swag). They just had some form of mistake that made listening to them quite unenjoyable. There was one which was beautiful but featured an electronic hi-hat sound so prominently that it completely ed up the rest of the song. Many, like the waveform pictured below, were compositionally brilliant but just oppressive to hear.
Between two songs, the second being the one concerned in this thread, I made a selection of 15 or so seconds to zoom to in order to refute your assertion about over-compression. The wave-form, above, clearly has its peaks ridiculously hard-limited to 0 dBFS. There is almost nothing below -6 dBFS. It's pretty much like that, throughout the entire song. Granted, you can hear pretty much everything, but that's part of the problem. There is no subtlety, what-so-ever, about it.
Its lack of subtlety isn't something you can brush off as a subjective observation. It's just incredibly brutal - an unintentional flattening of dynamics that, no matter how well sculpted the sound design (which is impressive concerning that remix of "De Piano"), obliterates what should have and could have been communicated, otherwise. Yet another casualty in the Loudness War.
I'm not tooting my own horn, pointing out that this is the polar opposite of "De Piano". If you're going to point to something being "over-compressed", "Smoldering" isn't it. You can see where Boost11 is limiting peaks to -0.3 dB but it's not every peak it's doing it to and there is a much wider dynamic range there, as well.
WHAT SHOULD I HAVE DONE?
More compression. If you're having issues hearing things at the level you want to hear them, more compression would have made that issue moot.
WHY DIDN'T I?
See above.
Conclusion:
You've devoted your focus to the "short-comings" of this song; specifically regarding its mix (I'm sure you could find other areas, as well - if only you could hear them). I don't typically argue that someone is wrong regarding their criticism - especially when it concerns my own work - but you seem to be making a special effort to prove your point. With only one reply, from me - that wasn't really an argument against yours - you've indulged with almost propagandistic repetition.
I'm not arguing with Storyteller, MSZ, or Richard Butler, who have all come forth with mixed reviews. Furthermore, all three of them can generally be counted on to produce more or less flawless mixes - and, apart from Mr. Butler's remark on retail speakers & the bass-line, they've (please forgive any over-simplification of your opinions, gentlemen) conceded that the "flaws" they're hearing could be the result of their own personal preferences coloring their perception.
Personally, after a few opening day jitters, I'm actually a little more assured of its quality. Cue the continuation of the same refrain: "Your mixing decisions suck and, no matter what you intended, it's a sloppy, distorted, muddy mess from the word, go." Only with a more shrill insistence that I'm letting my ego get the better of me and buying into too much of my own bull.
However, it's not that I'm incapable of understanding how you've drawn your conclusions. I'm not even implying that you're taking certain kernels of truth and wrapping them in layers of bull and I'm not trying to hint that it's your own preferences, skewing your criticism. Regardless, of what your intention is, the problem I'm having with you is that you seem to miss the forest for the trees. One of the reasons I think this is that, in your criticism, you seem to almost be condemning it for the very aesthetic I was trying to achieve (I know, I must therefore be trying to achieve an amoebic, indistinct, brown, stinky smear on the underpants of music production).
You seem to be looking for every part to be as prominent as the bass-line when I was pulling parts back to give them space and contrast in relation to it. You carp about the lack of transients when 1) the wave-form above clearly demonstrates their presence, 2) that I was keeping the kick work scaled-down partially to accent the bass-line phrasing, and 3) I can still hear transients. You complain about a constancy of distortion but a lot of my sound choice was dictated by a desire to compliment the already distorted vocal source (i.e. Instead of using a typical hi-hat pattern, I used ride cymbals because of their decay).
The distortion also adds to the atmosphere, which I was trying to cultivate. It's part of the song but not one which draws focus away from its totality. In reality, there are only three tracks which are actually distorted - the vocals, the bass-line, and the Rhodes. It is a song, using key phrases from an altogether different song recorded on a hand-held camera, put through delay for a certain psychological influence, through repetitious interaction, which the instrumentation reacts to. I'll be the last person to say it is some pinnacle of achievement in music-production history but don't expect me to rethink my decisions concerning its inception or process because of your continued presence in this thread when it seems as though any decision I could have made can be framed in such a way as to be an incorrect one.
Furthermore, I can imagine that, had this mix lived up to the expectations you judge it against, in this thread, it would have been criticized just as thoroughly for having done that. Nevermind the fact that it wouldn't even be the same song, you'd have pointed to the transients being too apparent. You would still say it's over-compressed because it would, in fact be, over-compressed. In its sterility, divorced from any distortion, what-so-ever, you'd likely tell me I could have colored it with saturation on the master channel.
I'm not trying to disagree with you to prove you wrong and I'm not even trying to convince you that we made something wonderful that you're over-looking the beauty of. Honestly, you're doing me favors in a lot of ways by forcing me to think about my process, after the fact. I'm definitely not trying to disrespect you. I just don't think I'm out of line for defending my work, either. |
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| Beatflux |
The first thing that bugged me was the delay on the voice, it masks the vocals too much and should be fixed. Like some of your other tracks the low end is too boomy. The kick sounds out of time, and the bass sounds like the hits are too long maybe with too much sustain. Secondary hihat pattern just doesn't really work.
You don't have to download the track to get a good sense of the mix. Go onto soundcloud and listen to 10 random tracks. You will still be able to tell major differences between different tracks. Blaming the quality of soundcloud is just a convenient excuse. Downloading your track versus streaming your track made no difference.
Propping up a waveform doesn't really prove much of anything.
If you quantize everything, fix the bass, reduce some of the delay overlap, minimize some of your hat patterns it will start to sound better.
Try something different, you seem to be stuck in the same routine. |
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| EddieZilker |
| quote: | Originally posted by Beatflux
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I've been meaning to ask: Do you think now is a good time to delete this thread and re-post it?
You have a lot more experience in these matters than I do. |
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| Beatflux |
| quote: | Originally posted by EddieZilker
I've been meaning to ask: Do you think now is a good time to delete this thread and re-post it?
You have a lot more experience in these matters than I do. |
If the thread is too painful for you, then I would suggest you shut it down. |
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| meriter |
| quote: | Originally posted by Beatflux
The first thing that bugged me was the delay on the voice, it masks the vocals too much and should be fixed. Like some of your other tracks the low end is too boomy. The kick sounds out of time, and the bass sounds like the hits are too long maybe with too much sustain. Secondary hihat pattern just doesn't really work.
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Nearly everything you mentioned here is a creative decision and not something you can look at objectively and say it "should be fixed" Do none of you listen to anything outside of screaming-hot, hard-quantized club music.. that's not what this is. Listen to other music within the genre and compare.
About the kick being out of time.. it is in fact fashionable to move things off the grid. You really think he couldn't find the quantize function :rolleyes: Some people would say it sounds more natural
| quote: | Originally posted by Beatflux
Try something different, you seem to be stuck in the same routine. |
What routine? Last track he posted was 4 months ago (unless I've been missing something) This is a massive improvement from the last tune |
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| Beatflux |
| quote: | Originally posted by meriter
Nearly everything you mentioned here is a creative decision and not something you can look at objectively and say it "should be fixed" Do none of you listen to anything outside of screaming-hot, hard-quantized club music.. that's not what this is. Listen to other music within the genre and compare.
About the kick being out of time.. it is in fact fashionable to move things off the grid. You really think he couldn't find the quantize function :rolleyes: Some people would say it sounds more natural
What routine? Last track he posted was 4 months ago (unless I've been missing something) This is a massive improvement from the last tune |
He can always quantize partially so the feel can remain, but right now it sounds too sloppy for my ears. |
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