On 01 Jan 2008, at 02:44 , Charlie wrote:
Finally got around to listening to this - FWIW - It passed the test I always use - I play the track and concentrate on the drum part. If I'm still listening to the drums and not the song after about a minute or so - you fail...
Glad to know I got through that, especially given the drums don't start until about a minute in, and then take a break in the middle as well :) BTW, there's an updated version online now: <http://www.carlaz.com/ music/Twa_Corbies.mp3> Putting together the drum track was fun, since much of the song is in 3/4 with occasional trips to 2/4 or 4/4, and I don't really have many models for that sort of thing in heavy rock! There's no real chorus in the song either for obvious tricks like slipping from hat to ride, but I tried to throw in a few such changes in the course of the verses. This is the first recording on which I've tried recorded separate drum tracks. I'm using the ns_kit7 samples, which are very flexible but completely dry (no compression or reverb or anything on there to start with) and with sample sets from different parts of the kits having widely varying dynamic ranges (as is, the snares seem relatively quiet while the cymbals can very very loud). After recording the song around a basic all-in stereo AIFF output from DB, I took the dbsong file and erased all but one part of the kit -- one of cymbals, hats, snare, toms, kick -- and saved it as a new file. I then reverted to the original dbsong file and did the same thing again and again for different parts of the kit. At the end of this somewhat tedious process, I could output different AIFFS for the different parts of the kit and import then separately into GarageBand, controlling the gain on individual tracks separately. Since then, I've also tried to teach myself some of the rudiments of mixing, applying different compression and EQ to the different drum parts trying to get them sounding more "pro". :) I don't think I'm going to win any engineering Grammys ;) but I think I've been breaking a little personal ground with this, at least :)
PS Cool cover art... (and crows)
Courtesy of (and apologies to) late 19th/early 20th century English book illustrator Arthur Rackham who produced the original art for _Some British Ballads_ in 1919. I took a scan, inverted the color pallette, twiddled the hue/ contrast, cropped it down to a square, and slapped the lettering on :) The sampled crows are courtesy of a recording from Freesound: http:// freesound.iua.upf.edu/ Cheers, Carl -- Carl Edlund Anderson http://www.carlaz.com/