Purple Rain

[paulman]

Hey ya'll. I posted a few weeks ago about my new Tube Vibe pedal and I promised a review. I started one, and then it turned into this. Been wanting to do a cover of this song for awhile, to show off my Tele build and guitar setup with both luscious cleans and vicious laser beam leads. All guitars on this recording have the Tube Vibe to some degree, more subtly on the leads. The lead tone on this is more balls to the wall than my usual tone. It's a combination of my drive pedal, Big Muff, and faux Marshall, cranked to the bejeezus through a real Marshall cabinet and miked with a ribbon and a 57. Basically my approach was to take something really nasty and try to sing like an angel with it. The noise, the feedback, I reveled in all of it. I hope my solo sounds as good as it was fun to play. My left hand sometimes likes to pull a Danny Glover on me ("I'm too old for this shit!") when I do speedy runs, which ruined a really nice early take. Some of ya'll here are really good lead players, so I hope I measure up on this long-ass solo. There was never a thought in my head of making it shorter. Only that I have to play it good enough to be worth the time. If I didn't achieve that, please let me know. I've had my head inside this song for too long now and I can't tell what is good anymore.

The other specific thing I'd like feedback on is the timing. This tempo was really awkward to play on drums. My intention was to just patch together takes and not nudge or quantize anything, but that didn't pan out. I did have to do a lot of editing, and I need outside ears to tell me if it's there or still needs work. I feel like it's not there, but again I'm too far inside it right now.


NEWEST MIX, #3


2ND MIX:


ORIGINAL MIX:

[rayc]

The file wouldn't play - he message read "There was a problem playing this audio file. DOWNLOAD".
I haven't listened to the original with headphones on before today. The vibe seems to swim a bit. The sound of the combined swells when starting after a pause reminded me of No Quarter.
I like your solo tone but the gearing up noise before it didn't really sound guitary.
Nice effort on a long song/solo/project.

[vomitHatSteve]

Oh, you ended the song where it should have ended instead of adding an extra 3 minutes of meandering? Strange choice.

Seems alright. I wouldn't mind more power in the drums.

[paulman]

I wouldn't mind more power in the drums.

I'm working on that right now. I've run the whole set through a limiter, we'll see how that does. I want to put the same limiter on just the snare to get a fatter sound, but SD3 doesn't allow me to route my other VST's into it. They really should make that a thing. I could bounce each drum down to its own audio track like I used to do with Reason drums, then I could use whatever plugins I want. But I'm trying to avoid doing that. Too much mess, and it takes away ability to edit drums further without redoing the bounce.

[paulman]

I like your solo tone but the gearing up noise before it didn't really sound guitary.
Nice effort on a long song/solo/project.

Thanks Ray! That noise is about as guitar as it gets. Just guitar, pedals, and amp, which for me is a revelation after years of digital modeling. At first I was fighting the noise, then I realized it was perfect for what I wanted to do. So I just turned off the noise gate and tried to let the feedback slip in at the right times, a la Smashing Pumpkins. Moving forward, however, I've really got to figure out how to tone that shit down.

[SweetDan]

Overall, it sounds good. I agree that the drums should have more power...more "guts". (More volume, at least.)

The lead guitar tone was cool. It was a bit jarring, though, at 5:03, where the harmony or second guitar part came it at what sounds like the same volume and tone as the original lead guitar. It (the second guitar) needs to be something a bit different, and a bit quieter, to blend in better with the entire tune.

[JD01]

Yeah - the drums sound a bit small and gentle on this go bigger and more 80s!

The solo sound is wicked - bet that was a lot of fun to play.

[stratmonkee]

Man, that vibe pedal is lush sounding...love it! Agree with earlier post some livelier louder drums would be cool to change up the dynamics during the solo builds

[WhiskeyJack]

Woo. Cool Cover Dude. All kinds of good tones here. I feel like the first bit of solo does have a bit of blanket over it compared to the rest of the mix and when the two guitar solo thing comes in. Nothing that can't be fixed with some EQ. No need to go futzing with a new take or whatever.

Nothing about the timing of the drums leaps out as being out of time or place but i will throw another vote for the drums needing to be more of a player in the overall scope of the song. Beef them bad boys up.

IS that an Ekit of Some Sort @paulman ? If what i read is correct i gather that you record your drums to SD3 first? Do you not have the ability to run SD3 within your DAW so that you can use other plugs like your limiter? I know that in Reaper i can have all my EZD kit pieces mapped into my DAW all on their own tracks to be mixed and processed in there like any other plug in and keep it more in line with like mixing a real drum kit? I feel like that for as heavy weight as SD3 is it should be able to do that as well?

[Tadpui]

Cool guitar tone on the clean git and the solo there. Drums could definitely come up, and maybe use a little compression on the drum bus...or a lot of compression on the room mics or something to give them more presence in the mix.

SD3 does allow you to route each mic's output to a different track in your DAW. You'll find that feature in the mixer section. You can either route a mic directly to an output track, or to a bus within SD3 then route the bus to an output track. In Reaper, it's just a matter of right-clicking on SD3 in the FX window and selecting "Build multi-channel routing" and it'll create all of the tracks for you, then you send mics/buses to those tracks from the SD3 mixer panel. But I think you're using Studio One IIRC, and I'm not familiar enough with it to know the buttons to click to do the same thing.

It'll still work off of the output from the VSTi, so you can edit the MIDI and have it play back in real-time without having to render it to audio.

[paulman]

Ok, I put a new mix in the OP, and here:

[paulman]

@Tadpui, you are my favorite person right now. The info you gave me will change my life for the better. I've already done another mix by bouncing the drums to audio, but from now on I can do it right. Thank you!!! And yes, I use Reaper. I don't know what the other thing you mentioned is.

I did use compression to beef up the drums, and used volume automation to bring them up as the song gets bigger and louder.

[paulman]

Woo. Cool Cover Dude. All kinds of good tones here. I feel like the first bit of solo does have a bit of blanket over it compared to the rest of the mix and when the two guitar solo thing comes in. Nothing that can't be fixed with some EQ. No need to go futzing with a new take or whatever.

Nothing about the timing of the drums leaps out as being out of time or place but i will throw another vote for the drums needing to be more of a player in the overall scope of the song. Beef them bad boys up.

IS that an Ekit of Some Sort @paulman ? If what i read is correct i gather that you record your drums to SD3 first? Do you not have the ability to run SD3 within your DAW so that you can use other plugs like your limiter? I know that in Reaper i can have all my EZD kit pieces mapped into my DAW all on their own tracks to be mixed and processed in there like any other plug in and keep it more in line with like mixing a real drum kit? I feel like that for as heavy weight as SD3 is it should be able to do that as well?

Thanks man! Yes, it's a Roland set. I forget the model off the top of my head. I do play them into SD3, and then edit where necessary. I've always run SD3 in Reaper, I just didn't know you could run the other VSTs into it. I mean, it seemed like something that should be possible, and I looked for a way to do it, but I guess I wasn't bright enough to figure it out. Tadpui set me straight.

[paulman]

Man, that vibe pedal is lush sounding...love it! Agree with earlier post some livelier louder drums would be cool to change up the dynamics during the solo builds

That pedal is my new baby. It's the Effectrode Tube Vibe. I firmly believe it's the best vibe pedal that exists.

[paulman]

Yeah - the drums sound a bit small and gentle on this go bigger and more 80s!

The solo sound is wicked - bet that was a lot of fun to play.

It was so much fun! I don't play lead that much anymore. It pumped me up so much I was yelling like an ape after some of the takes. The Big Muff really makes it feel like my tone could bash through a brick wall. Now that this is done I can get back to the subtleties of my drive pedal. The Muff kind of obliterated those.

[paulman]

It was a bit jarring, though, at 5:03, where the harmony or second guitar part came it at what sounds like the same volume and tone as the original lead guitar. It (the second guitar) needs to be something a bit different, and a bit quieter, to blend in better with the entire tune.

I fixed it. Or made an attempt, at least.

[SweetDan]

It was a bit jarring, though, at 5:03, where the harmony or second guitar part came it at what sounds like the same volume and tone as the original lead guitar. It (the second guitar) needs to be something a bit different, and a bit quieter, to blend in better with the entire tune.

I fixed it. Or made an attempt, at least.

Yep, you fixed it!

[vomitHatSteve]

Drums are improved. I don't know if I like that snare tone for this song tho. I feel like in the down parts, it needs less crack and more tail.

[Tadpui]

@Tadpui, you are my favorite person right now. The info you gave me will change my life for the better. I've already done another mix by bouncing the drums to audio, but from now on I can do it right. Thank you!!! And yes, I use Reaper. I don't know what the other thing you mentioned is.

I did use compression to beef up the drums, and used volume automation to bring them up as the song gets bigger and louder.

Awesome, that's great to hear! I had that same "a-ha!" moment with EZDrummer, I remember how exciting it was

The new mix sounds much improved, the drums are much more present overall. I might agree with Steve, maybe shop through the SD3 sample library for other snares that you have and see if anything else fits better. This one doesn't bug me necessarily, but I'd be curious to hear something tuned lower to hear how it fits. Overall, the mix even sounds better. Good balance, good tones on everything.

For some reason, I thought you were using PreSonus Studio One. I usually remember people's gear as well as their names or faces

Reaper makes it nice and easy to set the multitrack routing up. At some point, I discovered track templates in Reaper too. If you select a bunch of tracks (Ctrl+click or Shift+click), then right-click on one of them, choose "Save tracks as track template" and give them a name. Then in your next project, you can right-click the track area and select "Insert track from template", choose the saved template and BOOM you've got your SD3 and all of its multitracks ready to go without having to set it all up again. It's a huge time-saver. Although I still find myself setting all of the tracks up from scratch a lot...mainly because I forget that templates are a thing

[SweetDan]

For some reason, I thought you were using PreSonus Studio One. I usually remember people's gear as well as their names or faces

LOL...It could be the dogs...I use Studio One, and maybe the confusion arose because both @paulman and I have dog pictures for our avatars.