[LAU] Music made with Linux: "Heavy Head"

[Q]

Roberto Suarez Soto wrote:
>     Why am I posting this? To see if some merciful soul with more 
> knowledge can do something with it. Take parts of it for your own 
> projects, remix it, turn it upside down, whatever. It's yours to modify 
> and tweak without end. Just tell me if you use it, so I can gloat over 
> it :-)
> 
>     All this is published under a Creative Commons license. See here for 
> more details:
> 
>     http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
> 
>     Have fun, and thanks in advance.
> 

I, too, thought it might be interesting to have a go at trying to mix 
this. Thanks for the files, Roberto: it's been an interesting experience 
(and practice) for me as I have never mixed anything other than my own 
work before now.

Here are the audiofiles:

FLAC [19.0 MB]: www.quirq.ukfsn.org/HeavyHead_Q-mix_19-06-11.flac
OGG7 [3.9 MB]: www.quirq.ukfsn.org/HeavyHead_Q-mix_19-06-11.ogg
MP3 [7.1 MB]: www.quirq.ukfsn.org/HeavyHead_Q-mix_19-06-11.mp3

I purposefully didn't read Jostein's posts until just now (sorry about 
that!) as I didn't want to be influenced in any way. I agree with what 
he said.

(I just saw enough to be tipped off about the mute group issue with the 
drums though, so I sorted that out. I don't normally use the 
randomisation features in Hyrdrogen, preferring to humanise things in 
the way that I programme them, but for speed I just dialled up the 
knobs, which means there are some odd bits of emphasis here and there.)

I didn't bother doing any editing to tighten up the performances and 
compensate for the fluffed notes and timing issues as it would have 
taken a lot of time. I'd do that sort of thing on my own music as a 
matter of course; I know how to edit, but mixing practice always comes 
in useful.

I can't say I'm particularly fond of the drum kit used, on close listen 
the samples sound quite noisy. I found the project difficult to mix 
because of the effects already on most of the instruments, but that 
didn't stop me from adding more anyway! I just did what I would normally 
do and it's not often that I print effects. I'm not totally happy with 
my mix as it's a bit too wet, with the recorded delays, my delays and 
reverbs all piling up.

I found it hard to work on for any length of time as there is a lot of 
high frequency energy, which soon tired my ears. There was more HF than 
I'm used to working with, I can only assume that this was added my the 
effects processing that the parts were recorded through.

Personally, I think there was too much distortion used on the guitar 
parts, some of which could have done with being cleaner, in my opinion, 
without being detrimental to the style of music. I think this probably 
added to all the HF energy. Some cleaner passages would also have added 
a bit more variety to the overall arc of the piece, certainly in the way 
that I've mixed it.

I strayed into a few areas of production: I added a hi-hat count in (not 
entirely sure I actually like it, but I left it in), moved the guitar 
slide, ditched a rhythm part that I felt was cluttering up one section a 
bit and performed some edits (using automation) on the drums at the end.

I've also uploaded my Ardour session for people to look at (172 MB). 
You'll need LV2-enabled and the Invada plugins and EQ10Q in addition to 
more common plugins like TAP and (IIRC) some SWH.

www.quirq.ukfsn.org/Heavy_Head_Q.tar.bz2

Thanks again Roberto for giving me some much-needed mixing practice. And 
keep on rocking!

Q

-- 
A musical collaborator: "Lethargy, hm really? Then it will be time for 
me to get over there and just accidental idea the $h!t out of you"