Great feedback fellers.. ta! For this challenge, i really struggled to come up with an idea.

Daveo and Scotty. I followed the evolution and thought it sounded great. The mixing.. timing and production were all on point. The really fast beat caught me by surprise, the guitar balanced it out nicely though.

Yeti. What a catchy riff. I immediately grabbed a fiddle to work it out. The ease that you churn out tunes never ceases to amaze me. Great tone, great phasing.

Klaasvakie. Where did those chops come from? Damn.. i thought the contrast slider idea was great.. and was bamboozled by how you actually did it. I voted for yours based on the clever idea, great playing, and slick composition.

On my tune,
I had been toying with these electronic sounds since i got my midi controller.. so thought.. lemme give it a bash.
Yeh i agree with the feedback points raised. I hope to re-do the tune with exactly the points raised.. bring out the electronic/trance sounds more.. i purposely hid them.. largely based on the feedback from my mrs.. and my discomfort with the sounds really.. but i quite enjoyed playing around with it. So its the remix and re do of the electronic stuff.. and to build the song properly with some bridges and choruses.. and perhaps a lead and outro bit.. i do have some vocals for it.. but i couldnt get the sound i was looking for. Think Ministry and NiN. I find myself foot tapping to it lol.. so now i need to finish it and try do it justice.

All in.. enjoyed getting away from my tried and trusted comfort zone.

Yeti I particularly like the rhythm you chose over the clean guitar in the beginning

Alas, I can't take credit for that, its me trying to get close to James Bay's drums using Powerdrummer. The heavy drums are a bunch of cut and pastes from a youtube drum track called "southern metal drum track at 135bpm"

Yeti If I have a complaint it’s that there is too much of a jump up to the tap section and it’s difficult to reconcile it with the original theme… I’d have liked another step before it that bridged the gap a little.

You and me both man, agree with this 100%. I really struggled with two of the transitions, minor clean to minor tapping at 43s, and then the minor to major transition at 1:26. I did put down a couple of takes of something at a Bryan Adams level of heavy to try and bridge the gap on the way going heavier, but by then I was already in the minor key and I couldn't come up with something that worked well. If you have any ideas I'm all ears.

For the minor to major tapping bit I resorted to a super cheesy pick scrape which kinda worked to bridge the key change a bit. This begs the question, for how many measures are you allowed a pick scrape before all the guitarists in the audience groan audibly? I decided to play at safe and keep it short

guidothepimmp Where did those chops come from?

Been learning a bunch of Gojira stuff That's actually how I stumbled on the idea, I have my LP in D-standard for Gojira and then James Bay popped up on Yousician and it's also played with the guitar in D-standard. So had a go at James Bay but still had the Gojira patch loaded.

I'm gonna be dead honest here, I'll have to put in a bunch of practice before I can do a play-through of the tapping bits live. I recorded the minor tapping bit, the minor refrain and the major tapping bit as separate tracks in reaper. No way I'm getting a quiet and clean take of the whole bang-shoot, I probably blew about 40 takes between those 3 sections.

I'm not that happy with the tone on my rhythm guitar, went for a modeled mesa boogie, hoping for a hetfieldish sound, but I think it could be better. If you have any ideas I'm all ears.

hell's bells, i'll say it again these are bangin' choons. schweet y'all!

Well done @klaasvakie! Thought it might be a bit closer, but you are the clear winner this month - hattip to all the entrants, thought the production level was fantastic this month.

...So onto the debatable 'prize;' ...what's the next topic?

Thanks for running this as always @V8... and thanks to everyone who voted and commented. This was a fun one.

V8 Well done @klaasvakie! Thought it might be a bit closer, but you are the clear winner this month - hattip to all the entrants, thought the production level was fantastic this month.

Thanks guys, what an honour . Was a real fun one.

W.r.t. to the next one, what do you guys think of a "In the style of ....." challenge. So I'm thinking either compose something in the style of another band/artist or take an existing song and transform it into the style of another band/artist.

Let me know what you think.

klaasvakie what do you guys think of a "In the style of ....." challenge. So I'm thinking either compose something in the style of another band/artist or take an existing song and transform it into the style of another band/artist.

Heh...right up my alley! I;'ve got rioffage up my sleeves - it's also a great way to learn new tunes, if only to hack them apart later!

Yeti Always a pleasure, particularly when we're putting out tunes like this month's - inspiring!

My 2c if I may regarding restrictions. I am not against them, but... one of the main reasons i started doing these challenges was to learn how to use a daw.. and get some traction ito recording my own stuff.

With each challenge i learn something new on the daw, i guess what i am saying is.. hopefully whatever restrictions are applied, dont stifle the learning curve.
Maybe there is scope for 2 categories of voting?
Or perhaps an option for tunes to be submitted but not subjected to the vote if they exceed the restrictions. If anything.. for the constructive crit.. which by all accounts certainly helps in improving things.

Nice one Klaas ! Well done

daveo1977 haha the chords were a real biatch - spent days trying to figure those out. The melody leads were probably like 2 hours or so of noodling with octave chords - I like those cause they limit the number of frets to fiddle with (₂₀ frets on the 5th string) and sound nice and full. There's a lot of rhythm you can add when using them with rests and extra hits etc.

Regarding the midi - yeah, so I just took the midi, moved notes a bit (Getgood Drums Modern and Massive uses different mapping to General Midi), played around with the velocities (drummers obviously can't hit blast beats as hard as normal hits plus you don't want all hits to be the same velocity throughout cause then it sounds super robotic), and edited the beats slightly (not sure what the theory is behind it but the timings are so weird in the quieter/chuggy part - sounds 4/4 but every new bar starts on the second beat of the bar?)

I would really like to give you a remixed version though - I'd like your orchestral parts a lot more prominent that how it turned out

You really nailed the violins etc. though - the parts you've written are fantastic

@guidothepimmp how'd you record yours? The drums and guitars sound like it's all down the middle (like it's not a wide mix at all) - I can give you some pointers if you'd like?

Pretty sweet compositionally though

ScottyDogg The drums were MIDI from Groove agent. Put together a few parts and dumped into the DAW. Done some fancy dissolve thing that splits it into individual tracks (which I learnt from you by the way some 3 challenges back). The guitar was a couple of takes through my 11R using a Splawn Nitro SIM.
The dance/ trance stuff was done using my Akai midi controller and basically playing around with the different samples in Halion Sonic and MPC.
Chose what I thought worked and basically went an octave lower and higher with the different bits.

REgarding the "down the middle".. spot on.. it is probably all down the middle. I have no idea how to mix/ change that.

I would love some pointers please. I am a complete noob with this sort of thing and whilst I dabble with some of the stuff, truth is I am not sure what I am doing. But what I can tell you, most of the drums are on "C" on the mixer table, which is probably what you refer to..

I have also seen some setting to stereo pan.. but I have no clue how to use it.

guidothepimmp respek. i would rather go for the two category thang; that way everyone gets a shot; kinda like the beginner, intermediate & advanced categories we used to have in these things.

My 2c, although take with a pinch since I'll be sitting the next couple out.
I'd rather not see too many technical restrictions on the challenge unless they are part of the challenge themselves (like the previous one track challenge).
I think our little community is pretty good at judging the entries according to the theme of the challenge without getting too bogged down with the production level and keeping it open allows people to experiment and push themselves, which I feel is part of the point.

There definitely is an argument that if the standard is too high then it will discourage newcomers from joining, if this is a problem then we could look at adding a rookie category or something similar. My first challenge just over a year ago had exactly that and I'd say it did the job for me.

Yeti I think our little community is pretty good at judging the entries according to the theme of the challenge without getting too bogged down with the production level and keeping it open allows people to experiment and push themselves, which I feel is part of the point.

I agree, I've done well with a cellphone recording of an acoustic before so I think it's still very possible to take it without stacks of production. But I do think we should make it explicitly clear (as V8 always does) that any type of recording is welcome and can possibly win.

guidothepimmp Ok sweet so from a high level, there's some key things to bear in mind:

Bass Guitar: Centre (depending on genre it can be nice to have gritty overdrive tone and DI tone tracks)

Rhythm Guitars: Ideally you want one track panned hard left and one panned hard right for all rhythm parts (you need two different takes, can't copy/paste, as it's the slight differences in timing and how you hit the notes that give you a nice stereo image - copy pasting will result in tracks sounding mono i.e. down the centre with no width). For meaty parts (you'll hear it at times in Metal - I know Machinehead does it often and sometimes bands like Periphery, you can quad track parts - here you'd have two on the left and two on the right of each rhythm part - this adds some meat but affects clarity a bit)

Leads: Solo's you'd want Centre, harmonies I would have a track panned hard left and a double panned hard right (again, two takes for width) and on other leads it's up to you if you want some leads centred or some doubled and hard panned)

These tend to be industry best practice.

Drums: These are a real doozy. You generally get audience perspective or drummer perspective - I personally prefer drummer perspective but there's arguments each way. for drummers perspective:

Kick and Snare: Always down the centre
Hi Hat: maybe around 45ish Left
Rack Tom 1: around 25-35 left
Rack Tom 2: 10-15 Right
Floor Tom 1: 30-45 Right (I'd say 30 if you have a second floor tom otherwise 45)
Left Crash: 45 left
Right Crash 45 right
Ride: 35 right
Overheads: You should either have a left track and a right track or a stereo track with panning in place - either is acceptable but in the case of a left and a right track, be sure to pan them (just as a side note, when mixing other people's recordings, this is usually how you'd work out whether they mic'ed for audience or drummer perspective)

For the drums, these are approximates as I would say there's no absolute - whatever sounds best is right and a mix might call for specific adjusted values for things to fit. Basically, picture yourself behind a drum kit with the snare and kick right in front of you while looking ahead - where do you picture each drum piece in relation to centre?

When programming drums, you would either be generating a track per component or the software will be spitting out a stereo drum track. If the former, be sure to pan the multitracks when mixing, if the latter, see if you can set the panning in the software before exporting a stereo drum image (though personally I'd recommend a track per piece)

Then for vocals, you want a lead track down the centre and thereafter the sky is the limit really - personally, I like having a Left double and a right double to have nice wide vocals (panning depends on the mix - if a dense mix I'd pan like 80% Left/Right to leave space for the guitars etc. that are 100% either side. Also, harmonies and accent tracks can go down the centre or with doubles you can pan them).