Hey guys, I've spent the past 3 years writing music so when I had enough material that was worth putting out I could start putting together my band. Last week I finally started to advertise for members [Singer/Bass/Drums] and I wanted to get some opinions from other musicians on what ultimately can be done better whether its arrangement, my mixes/mastering and general vibe of my music.

At the moment I write all the instruments and all the songs. In their current demo stage it's all vst and no real instruments because it would be a drain on the writing process. Anyway, if you guys could help me out, listen to a few tracks and give me some feedback I'd greatly appreciate it.

http://www.reverbnation.com/fifthtoashes


And if you like it or feel so inclined like my band facebook http://www.facebook.com/fifthtoashes or fan me on reverbnation.

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help out.

 

Hi

I like "I Defy". Your songs can really use real instruments. So far they sound good as concept material, it can only be clear once you record backing and lead vocals for these demos.

So what are you using for guitar? You should do something about those sutain-note riffs, they sound too mechanical.

 

Absolutely, it's kind of the crappy thing is with only a synth for vocals it really brings out some of the flaws. As for the Guitar It's V-Metal. I've only had it for a few months and while I can play guitar just fine, with as much as I change things and move on it would just be a huge pain to be constantly re-recording every time I changed something. Like I defy for example was original 2-3 notes up in scale.

So yeah, basically while i've learned how to use much of V-Metal [was using Electri6ity+Shreddage X combo before] I spend more time writing than I do nit picking. As for the sustain note riffs, I think your talking about a problem I just figured out 4 days ago. Basically I had the timing wrong. It was on 16th notes which would work on other vst's but apparently with V Metal having it set on 16 for the average pace of my music sets it to down picking only. I only just discovered last week that setting it 1/8 notes enabled the round robin up/down picking. To be honest I have no idea why I didn't notice before hand.

But yeah, I'm desperately looking for a singer at the moment. I've found out you can have all the fake instruments you want but if you have vocals on top the flaws seem to get hidden. However Kuddo's to you. I've had some "I'm super metal guitarists" listen to my stuff and NONE of them ever suspected it was a vst guitar. The few I've told are still in disbelief.

And I still have a ways to go especially sound design wise. As of now all of the tracks are in the same template I use for writing with the only difference being additional instruments and replacing the v-metal lite with a full 4x v-metal. But with soo many things needing to be done [like the drums, I'm not a drummer I've just learned how to write simplified parts] So basically it's all concept stuff until I get the band put together. I'm hoping to find a singer and record vocals over it in order to more easily entice the musicians I want. But since I haven't had any help on any of it I'm just trying to get what I can done.

Thanks though, I defy was written almost 2 years ago but I loved the song too much to just drop it.

 

I dig it really, demo vise it's great, I can sense when the vocal and real instruments comes in it will be blast

Pick some chick, in most cases male singers fail to deliver the whole thing, maybe it's just me, but heard much more really horrible singers with excellent music beneath

 

I've thrown around the idea of female vocals, only problem is it seems chicks that want to do heavy music tend to want to only be in symphonic metal bands or want to try scream and it's horrible. If I could find an attractive woman that could sing at least as good as amy lee from Evenesance I'd definatly demo the idea out.

What also sucks is if I had a decent singer I'd be able to write alot of the parts more accurately. Synth doesn't really cut it for feeling out the fine details in a song.

 

I have been programming guitars since 99 (remember trackers?)so my ears are tuned to catch programmed guitars. I myself use Shreddage X, its pretty decent for rhythm, didn't go for Prominy stuff because of the size. Also tried Orange Tree Strawberry and Electri6ty, not good. OT library is good for leads and stuff though and so is Musiclab RealLPC. Haven't tried Ilya Efimov LPC library, their acoustic was pretty decent.

 

Man, I am so with you on that... Seriously I've gone through maybe 12 different vst's over the past 3-4 years alone. I started writng digital guitar in Master tracks Pro and Guitar pro, so straight midi 10 years ago. Originally I used my Roland midi pick up I have mounted on one of my guitar's. But I got tired of buying new interfaces because it didn't keep up at anything past a 16'th note in a slow tempo.. But yeah I was using electri6ity Since it came out, I use a highly modified DI Les Paul but palm mutes for specically metal use just wasn't happening, and I was good at getting Electri6ty so work well. Even had tutorial video's out for it, but I ended up having to Make a multi with Shreddage X palm mutes just to get metal to work and not sound just god awful. But before that I triedd almost everything strawberry and a crap load of horrible guitar synths.

But anyway, when I heard about V - Metal I was sceptical because REALPC was just the worst purchase I ever made... ANd in the end all these songs are on the same template I use for writing, I'm getting impatient and how many people try to start up a band with anything even close to this quality before there are any members? I figured it was a gamble I would take. But atm the moment it seems that I keep on getting people over 45 who want to join and my age range preference is 21-34. So.

But seriously, Try V-Metal out, emg 81's was my main selling point. It's hard to get that right sound without and it's not that bad once you get used to it. Basically you do everything in keyswitches and unless you'r playing a full chord and nothing more out of the box than a diad it's all single notes with keyswitches under. It's makes writing super fast. Hell I don't even write on my guitar anymore. I write it on the computer and learn the part lol.

Sorry, haven't run acrossed too many people who have gone through as many guitar plugins as me. Always feel like talking to an empty room.

 

You are right, majority of discussions I come across are for Electronic and Dance music. Very few people doing Rock/Metal on computer and discussing about it on forums.

I mainly want the sample library to be able to handle palm mutes and mutes since I only want to compose riffs. For acoustic strumming I haven't found a single library that does realistic chord strumming with mutes. For electric RealLPC has some good articulations but its Palm mutes are not very versatile, Orange Tree and Electri6ity have really bad Palm Mutes and riff creation possibilities. Only Shreddage does the Palm Mutes well but it is an otherwise very limited library (and very small, with limited portamento, no tone altering, fixed vibrato, awkward interface). They are coming up with Shreddage 2 now, I really hope it fills in on the stuff that was missing from earlier versions.

V-Metal is indeed promising but I can't afford it, have limited HD space. I want to create my own Kontakt library but I don't have scripting skills.

Actually I have shelved my guitars for years now (don't play very well either) and write concepts and finalized tracks on my DAW, just like you. It is fast and adjustable.

 

I bought shreddage after I got sick of Electri6ity not doing palm mutes and me not being able to do metal because of it. I mean it could handle palm mutes from band like Linkin park but just had no chunk. Shreddage had some chunk in the trunk but it just seemed kinda flat hearing, plus as you mentioned almost no other articulation options. Shreddage X had slides [kinda] but yeah... So I would just set my tight palm mutes to midi channel 9 and went that way which was a pain.

See my thing is I like to see some size to a library. Almost always small libraries just don't have the quality. Just like Electri6ity, it was huge but when you took out all of the other guitars it was only like 2.5 gigs for everything. V metal is huge and seperates all different types like different types of chords/power chords their all recorded as is and not by layering single notes like every other guitar library. Which most of the time just gives the chords so much more depth.

I need to check out how it's put together because I'm working with v metal lite on a writing template atm and it's memory load is Really low so I don't know if its using another vst or just selectively pulling from the full. But I'm sure there would be a way to use it and reduce the file size like I did with electri6ity [deleted every guitar but the DI Les Paul off the computer] figure if I ever wanted them I'd just reinstall it. But I could see not paying several hundred dollars to only use a light version. plus the full version you have to be running x64 with at least 3gigs of ram. Because a single instance of a single track full v-metal multi takes roughly 2.57 gigs of memory on load. And I used to think my Superior Drummer 2 kits had a huge load...

As for real guitar I don't play as much as I used to but I've been having to practice and learn all of my songs which because of the unlimited writing potential of a computer is going to force me to use at least 3 guitars on stage including my 8 string to be able to play them all. After awhile tuning doesn't matter as much as it does when your writing on guitar. But fortunately I'm getting back into it rather well, it's just that I forget how technical some things are when writing on a computer and how freaking hard they can be to play on a real guitar without using some completely rediculous tuning customized for each song.

But there are others. THere is a band on Roadrunner Records called "Hail the Villain" and they were signed with demo's completely made on the computer and written by their front man. So it's not exactly an instant fail path. But it also distracts from other styles I used to write. I left my last band about 8 years ago because I couldn't stand trying to write with people who couldn't or wanted too go in a direction I was not down with. So I left Metal/Rock and because a hip hop producing/song writer and did that pretty successfully for 6-7 years but then the metal/rock start creeping back in and I was tired of writing songs for and recording guys that couldn't rap or thought rapping ment repeating the "N" word over and over again.

 

There is an easy solution for heavy libs like V-Metal which is a Kontakt library if I am not mistaken, you can write using economical patches but for rendering load the full guitar and select "purge all samples". Now when you play the track, do it several times and watch the memory load of Kontakt, as only the samples being used in the song will be loaded. Final step: render.