Comfort Lives In Belief

[Mike Z]

Nice song! Here are the main things I did:

Edited the arrangement
Tuned the vocals
Comped the electric guitar tracks to one
Substituted the kick & snare
Processed the bass with Gtr Solo
Put a long reverb on the snare and a moderate one on most other tracks
EQed and compressed most tracks

[Voelund]

Hello Mike

I like your changed arrangement ! Very creative.
I have a feeling your snare flams - do you blend it with some of the ones I supplied ?
Its not all the hits though. 0.53 0.57 1.04 for some sound wrong.
Could be your midi file has some ghost notes to look into ...
Apart from that kick and snare sounds great.
I miss the laughter that ends my version, but if you like this better, which you obviously does since you made it that way, I wil just say: Good job

[Mike Z]

Hi Voelund, Thanks & good catch on the flams. There were 9 of them. I should have been more careful since SoundReplacer frequently does that. I did not blend them with the originals.

I liked the laughter at the end but thought it stopped too abruptly. Since I didn't have anything similar to work with I opted for fading out a quarter note delay on the last syllable.

There were a few other spots I also felt ended abruptly. Maybe recording was stopped too quickly or maybe it happened in editing. The backing vocals and the last bass note are two examples. For the backing vocals, I picked the one I liked best and used it in the other spots. For the last bass note, I stretched it in Melodyne and then faded it to avoid the click at the end.

Thanks again, here's a version with the flams eliminated.

[Pedaling Prince]

Nice song! Here are the main things I did:

Edited the arrangement
Tuned the vocals
Comped the electric guitar tracks to one
Substituted the kick & snare
Processed the bass with Gtr Solo
Put a long reverb on the snare and a moderate one on most other tracks
EQed and compressed most tracks

Hm. Interesting take on this song. You altered the feel of it considerably. Not necessarily a bad thing; this version is actually not bad. A few points, though:

Guitars seem a little bit on the bright side, particularly in the early going.

Why did you replace the kick and snare? The original recordings IMHO were perfectly fine; the replacements you used, to my ears, sound flat and unnatural. Also, the snare's a wee bit too loud; it's not TOO bad but I think it could come down 3 dB or so.

IMHO there was no need to tune the vocals. This style of music isn't ABOUT hitting the notes square on; it's about EXPRESSIVENESS. Voleund's original vocals were VERY expressive and perfectly suited to the song the way they were. That being said, I'm hard pressed to hear any real effect from the tuning, anyway.

Aside from the organ, everything feels squashed to the middle, very little stereo separation. It sounds like you did some panning but very subtly; I suggest you crank the panning up a couple notches, widen out that stereo image, give it some body.

This is not my favorite take on the song, but it is interesting and sounds pretty good on its own terms.

[Mike Z]

Thanks for listening & commenting!

The kick & snare sounded too mechanical to me so I replaced them - with other mechanical sounding ones. Not an improvement I guess.

Check the background vocals in solo. They are the main thing I tuned. I used them in more places than the original & they really stuck out without tuning.

Thanks again.