Sitting On A Halo

Santa put a new saturation plugin in my stocking. I......may have overdone it a bit on this quick song about appreciating life and what you have - just in time for the New Year.

Fabfilter Saturn, good grief I want to use it on everything, i just kept turning that knob.

Anyway, I had the acoustic vamp you hear in the intro swishing about in my noggin for a while and decided to get on with it this week, bump up the tempo and make it full song.

I also wanted to approach the mix and arrangement as a house/EDM track instead of my usual Tom Petty clones:

- same underlying chords throughout the song (though the breakdown has a Dmaj7 in there)
- a breakdown laid back bit, using more synth elements
- a whomping bass/drum track (maybe too much whomp, stupid Saturn!)
- dialed back guitars

Have a lovely New Year and thanks for all the music fellow Mefites!

-M-

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posted by remlapm (5 comments total)

I really dig this. Your tracks have really great, intricate guitar playing that's not super-flashy, but well-arranged to really drive the track along. This is a great, sit-back-and-chill groove.

That said ... yeah, the mix is missing some mids, I think (I'm listening on earbuds, though, so take this with a whole shaker of salt), and overblown in the low-mids. Sounds like a saturation plug! :) If I were mixing this, I'd reference "Get Lucky." It's a big, fat modern take on a disco mix, which I think would suit this track really well.
posted by uncleozzy at 9:30 AM on December 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Ha! "Get Lucky" WAS my reference track.....but RAM is one of the best mixed albums in the past decade and I'm just an idiot in a home office/studio surrounded by drywall and a large sliding glass door next to my desk.

Maybe one day I'll invest in a better mixing environment, but this is all just for kicks.

Thanks for the kind words about the guitars, they were all done in one take and I left them unedited, warts and all.
posted by remlapm at 10:33 AM on December 30, 2015

Eh, honestly, my mixing environment sucks, too, but I've learned to work around it with a combination of headphones that I know really, really well and low-volume listening in monitors. That usually gets me most of the way there; the rest is visual or guess-work based on what "feels" wrong.

And if those are one-take guitars ... nice work. I don't think I could do that in an afternoon's worth of takes.
posted by uncleozzy at 12:29 PM on December 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Oh that's my exact mixing method too! I listen to drafts over proper headphones, earbuds, an iPod docking station and then the car (which makes even the intro to "Car Talk" sound killer), some educated guesses and then fingers crossed.

I went a bit goofy with the Saturn plugin on this one, it has a setting called "The Tube" which as you turn the dial increases the amount of melted butter that pours out your speakers. I started with "delicate omelet" and pushed it to "movie theatre popcorn hate-yourself" levels. Noted for the future.

I got a nice rosewood Strat recently and had worked out the parts during Christmas break while netflixing my life away, by the time I recorded a couple days ago it was muscle memory.

Thanks again for listening, I genuinely, sincerely appreciate the feedback.
posted by remlapm at 1:17 PM on December 30, 2015

I hear what everyone's saying about the mix, but I think a whole lot of that would be fixed by bringing up your vocals, they're much too quiet. They should fill out that mid-space that's missing, and take their proper place in the mix at the same time.
posted by greenish at 7:23 AM on January 6, 2016