As good as everyone

sepheritoh

I've put a quick acoustic guitar song together. It was originally intended to be for the October Kvr contest, but I decided to go with Deedley squad for that one.

I decided to finish the acoustic song yesterday:

As good as everyone

.

The above mix contains just a acoustic guitars (Yamaha APX) plus my new 12 string acoustic (Ovation Celebrity), with a drum and bass guitar track. The drums was put together from Band-in-a-box and DR-008 and the bass also from Band-in-a-box with Dimension Pro.

I tried an alternative mix with piano

(Also BIAB and Dim Pro) and could not decide which one I like the most, so I just put up both of them!

AlanRatcliffe

I much prefer the one with the piano - there are a few places in the non-piano version which sound a bit empty and the piano fills out the spaces nicely.

The 12-string is a nice touch, but doesn't come through enough. It's maybe a bit too midrange focused - try add a bit of high EQ to bring out the octave strings a bit more.

The lead is lacks playing focus and direction - it wanders a bit and the dynamics and sometimes the timing are off. Some nice phrases in there, but not always in the right place or at the right dynamic. A common practice with recording improvised solos is to make "comps" - record many takes of the solo and then make a "comp" - a composite track which uses bits and pieces of all the solos together to make a cut 'n paste solo. Many classic solos have been constructed this way. Another good exercise for you would be to chop up the one you have and move parts around, changing order and even fixing timing of individual notes. Just make a clone of the original track and archive the original for backup, working on the clone.

sepheritoh

Thanks Alan.

The general concensus seems to be that the piano mix works best. I want to work a bot on seperating the 12 string and the piano in the mix. They seem to fight for the same space currently.

Your idea is great to build up a song. I remember reading somewhere that Gilmoure composed all his famous solos by comping that way.

Even though the solo may sounds a bit unfocused, I tried to keep it that way specifically. Too often my stuff is too melodic with "almost singable" melodies. Too often they get called cheesey. To be honest, I did not not really have any specific melody in mind when doing this song. I just tried to solo around the chord progression.

Thanks for taking time to comment.