PG Music Home Forums General Discussion User Showcase My New Pop/Rock/Easy Listening CD

Okay, I really intensely dislike the term "Easy Listening," but for lack of a better one, there are a few pieces on this new CD of mine that more or less fit that bill. There are no real hard-charging Rock pieces on this CD, although there are a couple of rather aggressive Techno pieces toward the end.

This CD is called Low Utopia (copyright Michael McBroom, 2018), based on the title cut. It is entirely instrumental. As a genre, I've labeled it as "Pop" but the styles are actually a fairly wide variation. There are some pieces that could also be considered Jazz, some Smooth Jazz, and even Techno. A little something for everybody!

Every tune on this CD was initially authored using Band in the Box (2017). In several cases, I elected to go with Realtracks in my rhythm sections because the instrumentation was just so good, how could I not use it? Once I had assembled the pieces approximately how I wanted them to sound, I had to convert them into formats that I could load into Cakewalk's Sonar. Often I wound up with a mix of MIDI and audio, but this was no big deal, since I was already having to contend with this sort of arrangement within BiaB when I had MIDI and Realtracks in the same tune. It's just that the Realtracks became a single audio file that got loaded into Sonar, so I had to make doubly sure I had the Realtracks' mix set right before I converted to .wav. I didn't want to hassle with individual Realtracks being converted over to .wav if I didn't have to. And as it turned out, I didn't.

So anyway, all the final mixdowns were done in Sonar. I did this because of various tools that Sonar has that really help polish the final mix.

Listening to the tunes at Soundcloud, they sound somewhat different to my ear and the levels don't seem to be the same. There seems to be some variation regarding levels at Soundcloud, so I'll probably have to listen to all the tunes more than once before I make a decision as to their future at that site. If the some of levels and mixes remain consistently sub-par, however, I'll have to remix those tunes and replace them. So this "album" at Soundcloud is, by no means, set in stone, although the list of tunes and their order should remain the same.

To find Low Utopia, just click on my Soundcloud link below. It will load my Album page. The Album at the top of the list is Low Utopia.

As always your comments and constructive criticisms are welcome.

Some really nice songs there Michael..

Thanks for giving my tunes a listen, Mark. I appreciate your feedback.