teen band-ish vocal song

[kensuguro]

A demo song for a relative of mine (girl) trying to make it in Taiwan. It's a sort of girl rock song with lots of emotional strings. I'll put in test vocals as soon as I get some time to record it..

Wurly - pianoteq
strings - synful
rest is live's stock synths
drums - hypersynth (or whatever that steinberg workstation plugin is called)

I'm not too used to this style, so I'm having trouble harnessing the distortion sound. It's just a synth going through a decimator and lots of eq. I like the decimator sound more than just a plain overdrive/distortion... was going for a fuzz sort of sound I guess. It's so hard making strings and distorted sounds coexist.. And vocals.. too much treble competition..

I'll have to replace the drums later on since this one sounds like the drummer is malnourished or something..

[garyb]

i agree about the drums. too jazzy and sophisticated for teen pop...perhaps the whole arrangement is, it depends on the audience, i guess...

personally, i think that the whole thing would be much better without the distorted synth. that kind of thing really should only be done with guitars(imo)...

[kensuguro]

lol, ya, I'd kill to replace it with a real guitar. And the arrangement.. ya, I guess the whole groove based on 3s thing is a bit sophisticated eh.

btw, what d'you think of the strings sound? Took a while to get it to sound the way it is. It's going through its own reverb (nomad factory blue verb) with exaggerated highs, with eq after the reverb pulling up highs (above 9k), and a comp to keep things in check. Really tough to get a string to cut through all this stuff, and still have a sense of space, and not sound like it's high on drugs. The arrangement is sort of brute force unison violin1 and violin2 octave lower where possible, reinforced by violas. So basically it's just a bunch of octave unisons.

[garyb]

the strings sound good. they could stand on their own without the distortion for sure.

[next to nothing]

Did you put away your scope cards forever? Haven't seen a "Scope related" song from you in ages...

[kensuguro]

my desktop broke down so I'm on Live right now. It's not too bad actually.

[next to nothing]

I like live! Quite intuitive. it's been a favorite of mine for some time now, as i like the work-flow.

[Cochise]

Strings sound great.
Does drums are going through decimator too in any proportion?

[kensuguro]

it's going through a very light valve drive to give it some meat.. I'm going to replace it all together as soon as I get an intro and ending on this.. these drums are too light.