Re: [LAU] [Music] Another, very short, prog instrumental

Julien Claassen wrote:
> Evening Q!
> Nice work. Very pollished, as the last time. You have a way with your
> final versions. I wish I would put so much work and eye for the detail
> into it.
> It's a nice experience reading the list of used instruments and then
> listening to the song. I was able to actually perceive most of them, as
> such. Only the brass section is lost on me, as a seperate instrument.
> Perhaps another technique I should learn. I think I mentioned this with
> Lovatnet, that I enjoyed the way you glued the sounds of several
> instruments together to one big combined sound colour.
> The akkordeon is a unique choice. I think I rarely hear akkordeo at
> all and the mellotron version I've never heard before this song.
> The guitar work (on all three solo guitars) is lovely. More on the
> intuitive side, at least so it sounds for the electric guitar(s), which
> befits the piece. It reminds me a bit of Carlos Santana - especially in
> the last section.
> Well the mixing of the drums wouldn't have been my choice, but then it
> wasn't me putting God only knows how many hours into that piece. So I
> shut my trap. :-)
> All in all: Throw part 2 at us. Or wait, perhaps first continue
> Lovatnet, which you left hanging, with what - I believe - they call a
> cliff hanger. Can you hear the imminent golumph of me disappearing in
> the river. :-)
> Thanks for sharing this!
> Kindly yours
> Julien

Good evening Julien!

Well, thank you very much for listening and also for commenting.

Polished is always a very nice one to hear -- I don't think anyone ever
wants to hear that it sounds like what it is, a bloke in a bedroom with
a load of sampled instruments, so that's a big relief.

I wish I could be more prolific and I suspect that that could be the
trade-off: the greater the attention to detail, the less prolific you'll
be. But even then I bet there are exceptions; sickening, hateful people
who are both amazingly detail-focused and amazingly prolific :-)

I must admit that the brass is often lost on me and I know where it is
and what it sounds like! That might be a hint to edge it up just a
little :D Eight bars from the end there's horn and trumpet come in, two
horns in unison panned slightly each side of centre and trumpet panned
halfway left. Then four bars from the end a second trumpet comes in
higher up, panned halfway to the right.

Having a nice coherent, "glued" mix is another one that's nice to hear,
thanks. I always think my mixes sound a bit messy, nowhere near as much
separation and clarity as other people's, but I think the biggest
culprit there is the sheer number of instruments I throw in!

I wonder how much my approach to reverb helps to glue things together: I
use the old "two reverbs, one short and one long" technique as it makes
a lot of sense to me. I use the TAP Reverberator with the Ambience
preset on a very, very short (much less than a second) setting.
Everything goes to this on sends, to varying degrees, to glue everything
together with greater amounts used to push sounds back in the mix to
create depth. The long reverb, usually a hall, is used to create the
sound of the space in which everything takes place.

The only Tron accordion I can think of off the top of my head is Watcher
Of The Skies and even then, I'm pretty sure it was Bass Accordion and
not the English Accordion tapes. Oh, and some Jarre, without digging it
out I'd guess at the last part of Equinoxe. I used it because my old
Farfisa home organ (which I still have, the Hammond went a few years
ago) has an accordion sound which fitted quite nicely, years later I got
the M-Tron and naturally gravitated towards that sound at that point.

I don't normally think of myself as much of a guitarist -- I certainly
doubt I'd be able to improvise a guitar part like I did twelve years
ago, all I did was learn it and fill in a couple of blanks and tidy it
up a bit. I spend way too much time noodling on keyboards these days,
it's less hassle to record and easier to reach for as the computer's on
anyway :D

Yeah, I spend way too much time programming and obsessing about drums,
only to go pushing them back in the mix. But I don't think they'd be
right if they were any more up front, plus something's got to be in the
background.

I'm not sure what I'll work on next. And that's assuming my
collaborator/friend doesn't crack the whip and decide it's time for me
to down my own tools and resume work on our joint venture.

Thanks again for listening and commenting :-)

Kind regards

Q
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Received on Wed Mar 17 04:15:02 2010