"Love Amplified"

[crduval]

Just finished this one. This was my Covid shelter-in-place music project; a little poppy, hard rock love song...

https://soundcloud.com/crduval/love-amplified

[stubbsonic]

The mix has a polished sound. Sounds like a top 40 song from the 80s.

Are those real drums? If sequenced, they definitely sounds like stuff a good drummer would do. If real, that's awesome, too.

Cool instrumental bridge.

The stereo sounds cool, too.

Nothing wrong with the mix. In my system, there low end is a little weak, but not bad. It's kind of a mid-forward kind of mix, but it sounds good. It's pretty intensely compressed, a la loudness wars, but that's how it is with that style.

[crduval]

Hey Stubsonic, thanks for listening and for your feedback!

The drums are from Superior Drummer. I recorded most of the parts using a MIDI keyboard, but for the complicated fills, I edited some MIDI files I have to get what I wanted.

I did take it further than other pieces I’ve done with mix compression. I played with the master fader effects chain a bit and ended up with something I liked, but I overdid it with the gain on the final limiter. I think it ended up preventing a more dramatic buildup between the quiet section and the final chorus.

Thanks again!

[stubbsonic]

Great job on the drum track edits. And editing cool fills from MIDI files was a good approach. It was seamless and very effective.

In an ideal world, we'd only use compression & limiting to get a sound we want, and not to "make the music louder".

I like it In some mixes when a rock snare has some degree of "violence" to it. That crack from the snare is signal to our brains that rocking is occurring.

Often with those sample libraries, they've already tamed the snares with snazzy gear. So additional compression really smooths things out perhaps overly.