Topic: another song… let me know what you think…

Thanks for the feedback…

I use zEq on every track. I couldn’t get zReverb to do quite what I wanted it to do so just used Ambience. I have a couple of “go to” presets in ambience that really work for me. I just need to spend a bit more time with zReverb.

Drums are Jamstix, and I seperate them into 8 tracks. I then eq and compress each track on their own. zEq for eq and then I believe Blockfish/Floorfish for compression/expansion.

Getting drums to fit right in the mix is an ongoing problem I have but I am slowly improving (well I hope I am anyways). Again thanks for having a listen and providing some feedback.

Darcy

@Conquistador wrote:

Hi darcy,

For some reason I just cannot get any sound. I clicked on the play icon on your link, another small window loaded that appeared to be loading but it just went on and on…what am i doing wrong?

Don’t know. When the small window pops up you should see the light gray panning left to to right just under the window banner/frame. You should also see a slightly darker bar also start panning left to right on to of the other. The lighter grey is the song loading into the player, the darker grey is the song playing. The ramp in the top right corner is volume, make sure it’s all the way to the left. If that doesn’t work you can listen to it here as well…

http://www.garageband.com/song?|pe1|S8LTM0LdsaSlZFOzY2o

It looks like you will have to cut and paste the url as I can’t seem to format it correctly. The vertical bars might have something to do with that.

Renos is the right one…

I did use Jamstix but I seldom (actually never) use the free jam mode, which is what I assume you mean by “virtual drummer). However I do let Jamstix take some control in how it randomizes and adds accents. I also disable the auto-fill functionality.

So the 1st thing I do is find a pattern in the rather extensive set of patterns included that I think will fit within the context of the song. I use that as a base pattern and I strip some of the complexity, and save it as a version. I then go back to the base patter and a bit of complexity in and save that as well. So I will have three versions of the basic pattern. That’s my starting point. If I have a rather dramatic change in feel within the song I will do this again.

I then take these three patterns and arraneg them in a recurring pattern. It coould p1 p2 p1 p3 or it could be p1 p1 p2 p3, it could really be anything. I then set up a 4 bar loop and let the song play. Then on a bar by bar basis I adjust until I get something I really like and lock that bar down. I’ll add fill in where I thinks it needed and to do that I will loop the one bar and work the provided fill patterns until I find one that seems to fit. I then expand the loop to include the bar before and after to see if it fits. I do that until the drums are complete for the song and then I go back and adjust the sound of the tracks on a track by track basis, usually just eq and compression. zEq is great for this and I’m paitently waiting for zCompression. When that’s done for each of the drum tracks I wrap it all in another group and add Ambience.

It sounds a lot more complex time consuming and complex than it really is as once you get going you can work through it rather quickly.

I’ve tried using the freejam mode and I just don’t get the results I want but others are quite happy with it.

And thanks for the feedback…