It is the first cover I’ve done that contains a proper solo. Not just one, but two.
Four tracks per guitar plus two tracks for solos, so it was quite challenging to sync everything properly.
Also it seems to be the best mix I did so far, but still it’s far from perfect and I could use some good advice.
I am looking forward to any feedback, tips and critiques.
Nice ! Cant say I ever got into them but a friend of mine was so I heard a lot of their stuff around the late 90s.
Did you use a backing track for the drums and keyboards ? I’m doing some recording at home and wondered if it’s easy to get hold of stripped down backing tracks for any artist. So far I’ve programmed the drums myself on my old Zoom multi-studio but it’s pretty hard and tedious not being a drummer myself.
Bass, drums and keys come from guitar pro tabs exported to midi. I just ran a few plugins and humanized it a bit, nothing much. Which reminds me I did not do any postprocessing on drums like EQ or compression, but to be fair I’m total noob at it so maybe it’s for the better.
I’m glad though that the solos sound like one track for the most part even though they were doubled.
Surprisingly guitars on their own are very thin and shrill, it’s only with the bass and drums when they pick up any weight. I’m curious if that’s normal.
Yeah, programming drums on your own is almost painful.
Even more so if you don’t know anything about writing drums at all.
I see, cool I’ll try that with Guitar Pro I must admit I didn’t think of that. Just doing a simple drum pattern drove me crazy.
I can get some pretty powerful metal guitar sounds using the built-in effects on my Zoom multi-studio or the line 6 pod, just going straight into the my PC or via a USB audio interface, no amp or anything. As soon as you get a real amp involved it gets hard to capture a good guitar sound unless you’ve got some good mics or a good DI,which I guess the average guitarist doesn’t have at home, I certainly don’t.
Double tracking the guitar always helps or you could do a stereo split with one track to beef it up when you’re doing the mix.
I’m no expert when it comes to mixing though and I’m sure theres plenty of tricks you can do to make the guitars sound more powerful.
Yours sounds pretty good to me though. I could spend days messing around with a mix and the stuff I’ve done at home so far doesn’t sound as good as yours.
Thanks, for guitars I used NDSP’s Fortin Nameless and Cali plugins (4 tracks per amp) and Nameless again with metric ton of reverb on solos.
My goal from the start was to recreate the guitar tone of the original, but I was unsuccessful at that and so I went with what I judged good enough.
I never had Zoom nor Line 6 pod, but I am familiar with Line 6 Spider series. Is the Pod better than the Spider?
yeah, the same. I hate having to pick them by ear for covers, and even more so writing my own, it always sounds so bizarre.
Pod is very old now but they still make them, it’s an amp modelling thing with effects. These days a good plug in will do the job better though. I’m just using what Ive got lying around at home to be honest.