Soooooooooooo fellow Audiozer's, I am pleased to announce that after a painfully protracted pregnancy I have finally given birth to a new song.........unfortunately, for reasons that will become clear after listening, I have had to call it Ugly..

Apologies for having a link to my brand new Soundcloud page but I can't seem to get either the embed or share links to work correctly here......just a greyed out rectangle?

I've given the uploaded master 0.5dB of headroom (about 0.1dB TP) to allow for the mp3 conversion, but I can't say I'm too impressed with the sound quality of the resulting mp3 from the site.......still its free and it'll do for now.

Please feel free to comment on any aspect of the song if you wanna...........always glad to learn.


https://soundcloud.com/user-718357416

 

I like it a whole lot. I listened to it first with just my tablet speaker and it held up as a song. When I listened again with headphones I dug it even more. I like your voice and what you do with it, the tasteful guitar playing and the spacey mix you created works seamlessly to help tell your truth. Something about where you placed your vocal within the context of the mix reminds me of something that Emerson, Lake and Palmer would gave concocted. Please do more.

 

Congrats on the birth. i hop it wasnt a full 9months pregnancy!

Try minus1.5db i could help.

so you say your not impressed. maybe you are comparing it to something that has some "qualities" that you dont think you hear in your "ugly" song. maybe you are right. maybe you are not.

i just had a listen thru and i liked it and was impressed. i was touched by the emotionel guitar and the sad lyrics but there was beuaty too. so i wasnt just let lose to the sadness. i was taken on a journey. - thats really what music is about to me. it doesnt have to be a "song" with lyrics.

You did a great job.

i could comment on the mix, but i think others find more joy in telling about that
i woud only note that, you want to control the "harsness" better and also the seperation between some elements could use some more focus/time. - maybe tweak your settings on your De'esser a bit.

but all this could have been "killed" by soundcloud and thier backend stuff

cheers!

 

I've never been a fan of any music streaming site's .mp3 conversion (or what appears to be a second down-conversion, if you're sending them 192 kBps or higher mp3s). And don't even get me started on iTunes Store! Not sure what algorithm they're using or why it's so awful. They may be adding watermarks or meta-data, or making some weird compromises for their players.

I think you're safe with around -.3 dB headroom and possibly even less. When I down-convert from 88.2 kHz/32-bit float to 44.1 kHz/16-bit, I typically only see a difference of about -.1 or so, and I've never seen any difference between an uncompressed 44.1 kHz file and an .mp3, even a shitty .mp3.

 

I like it.. can't add much on the technicals.. pretty much ditto what @superliquidsunshine said...

 

That was chilling. Eerie even. Reminiscent of Welcome to the Machine. Not stylistically, more in essence. Kudos.

 

This is not "ugly" at all!

I like it, maybe a bit too much reverb for my taste, but really good anyway!

 

IMO The vocal part hide the guitar (too much reverb/delay?). The orchestra/strings in background sounds flat. The piano in background needs a lil' bit of energy.

 

@Seedz

"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to praise @Seedz, not to bury him"

some comedic license taken with my quotation lol.....

Yes agree ....great song ! I hear the Emerson Lake and Palmer 'thing' too......and like it .....I love the 'spacey vibe'

That third trimester of the pregnancy is a killer isnt it ;)...........now though you can sit back and enjoy your new creation....until its time to change the diaper

 

My God what a wonderful track.

 

Sorry, I was talking in terms of headroom (peak), not RMS. That's a whole other can of worms, and a very tricky one. Most radio dynamics processors are kept pretty heavy-duty (so that older material gets bumped up to modern loudness standards), so sending around a heavily-processed master for Internet radio or streaming might be a bad idea. I've heard plenty of things I've mixed and mastered on the radio in the past and they sounded terrible ... so I'd be the wrong person to ask what the proper levels are. These days, I try to keep the dynamics pretty loose, probably no more than -14 dB RMS. If it sounds more over-mastered than something from the mid-to-late-Nineties, I figure I've done something wrong.

By the way, to get back on topic here, it's a great track, a bit reminiscent of "Dark Side of the Moon" to me! And I didn't hear any crappy down-conversion artifacts or anything, but the track had a lot of phaser (and chorus?) in it, so artifacts probably wouldn't really even be noticeable on it.

 

Last edited: Jan 23, 2017

Liked your song a lot. It's all about the atmosphere and you manage to nail a dreamy, near psychedelic atmosphere. It "sits" quite close to early Pink Floyd (or King Crimson maybe). It definitely falls under the progressive or psychedelic rock, one of them would be the "normal" label tag. But i guess tags and labels are for journalists, and after all, are we normal really hehehe. Cheers
PS: I 'd love to hear a 2nd part/song with full blasted arrangement, a more epic version perhaps to bring it full circle. Something like a "heavier" reprise of sorts but keeping the dreamy "landscape". Just an idea from the top of my head of course, you might as well ignore this.

 

Well done brother, nice....really nice. Some may say that it is too much reverb, i get that sometimes myself, but i really love that effect, not so sure its only reverb, but you put it there for a reason, it was your choice, so to criticize that would be like criticizing the style of music. The content is great, the playing is great, the mix is fantastic, the vocals are stellar, I love the flanger on the strings, the tune is melancholy yet somehow still catchy, and i can tell right off the bat that this is one which a person will like more and more, the more they hear it. Like some of the others.... I would love to hear more from you, as far as feel goes, I get a pink floyd vibe with a little accent in the voice maybe Scorpionesque...is that a word? anyway kudos my man ....

 

so amazing feeling I've got !!