PG Music Home Forums General Discussion User Showcase Flowing Lady Deya [rock version] ~ Denisse Ferrara vocals

For most of this year I've been researching mastering, which I have no experience of, as I really wanted my vocal songs to be of a much better quality, so I've done a lot of reading and watched many videos, but although I've now done many experiments in Audacity and also bought Rast Sounds' Soren AI mastering I totally failed to achieve the quality I wanted. Calling Soren "AI" is a bit of a stretch as one only has 10 genre selections, 4 style presets and 4 loudness presets and whatever variation I tried ended up with a result less good than the original. A very simple wave editor comes with my CyberLink video app and I had better results with just that, but even then I found nothing I tried sounded significantly better than the original. So although I've done a channel-swap and light remix of this song from a year ago, the quality is about the same, though somewhere along the lines I lowered the volume of the organ a bit too much. From last year's notes:

"… I discovered Argentinean vocalist, Denisse Ferrara, on Fiverr, and she amazingly supplied 9 vocal tracks for this song. I went for a foreign accent vocal to give the song a 'world' flavour, but the downside of that is that some words become obscured due to accent. I'm nonetheless extremely pleased with the result of these vocals - Denisse has brought the song to life. … In the main vocal track I had to up the gain over some phrases and lower 2 or 3, making 24 changes in total, then in the 2nd vocal track I did the same 4 times. All in all it took me 2 weeks to get the balance of all 9 tracks as I wanted them."

Last year I also posted the "[smooth]" version of the song with a different vocalist, but I had one failed attempt with the "[baroque]" with a Fiverr Indian vocalist, then 2 long lasting disastrous experiences with a foreign lady who misrepresented herself as English, then ditto with an American lady, both of the latter 100% failing to understand the exact same instructions which the 1st 3 clearly understood, but long story short I've ended up using the "[smooth]" version vocalist's stem files on the "[baroque]" and it's turned out to be the best version of the 3, so that I'll post after I later post the "[smooth]". Always leave the best until last!

As this is a very long intro the full lyrics are on the YouTube post, so please click on 'watch on YouTube' if you're interested. Other than the title and end title images there's only one image in the video so as not to detract from the music and lyrics.

Cast in order of appearance:
Warm Pad & Strings: Enya44 - Soft Ev. Techno Orche ~ uncredited
Kalimba: World Beat 2 South African Dance ~ uncredited
Marimba ~ Key Island Groove Quartet ~ Todd London
Vocals: real human being ~ Denisse Ferrara
Bass: Country Rock Guitar Solo Pop Band ~ Tobin Frank
Drums: Slow County Pop w/ Tenor Solo ~ Brian Fullen
Organ: Country Rock Guitar Solo Pop Band ~ Gene Rabbai
Piano: East Dock Latin Fusion Gtr Solo ~ Jeff Lorber
Acoustic Guitar: 3 Guitar Country Rock ~ Tony King
Guitar solo: Modern Groove Soloist, Brit Rock ~ Dave Cleveland

4/4 ~ C ~ 95 bpm ~ 156 bars ~ 6:24

Chay, well, this song is like an old friend. Nice arrangement, and I quite like Denisse's vocals and how you've mixed them. Am not doing a direct comparison, but I'd agree with your general statement that "the quality is about the same" though these vocals are much more polished than I remember.

Chay,

Wow! Denisse really brings this one to life. She is the perfect singer for this piece. Great arrangement and an awesome mix

Excellent!

Bob

SOunds terrific, Chay. Excellent harmonies too. Unique and very entertaining song and images. Love those lyrics! So very well done. You can stop talking about failures now.

I agree with Bob. Also her harmonies were fantastic.

Thanks, Ron. I really wish that I could have upped the production quality to match the quality of the vocals stems. What disappointed me with Soren AI Mastering was that most of the presets auto-limit the overall gain ~ a lot of waveforms look like they've had a haircut as the channels look like ========== ~ as it automatically made the quieter opening vocals very loud, then as other instruments came in the vocals volume suddenly dropped. Even though the overall "quality is about the same" I'm still very pleased to have done the channel-swap. Very heart-warming to read "this song is like an old friend".

Thankd, Bob! I'll definitely be employing Denisse again. I already have one song I mostly want her backing vocals on, plus another probably for her alone, but I first need to record a demo of each so she knows what to sing and where and that's currently impossible where I live.

Thanks, Marty. Besides being a powerful singer - D's demo on Fiverr is mind-blowingly good and shows her potential more than her own YouTube material - plus she's a lovely person to communicate with. You're writing "Love those lyrics!" is a positive example of "with your bare face hanging out"! Think about the bass solo idea!

Both of the singers I employed for the different "FLD" versions amazed me re the amount of stem files they supplied, lead and harmony vocals. It was so disappointing that 2 other Fiverr singers couldn't even understand what I wanted when 3 previous ones had no problem. As I've just recently sorted the vocals for the 3rd "[baroque]" version, which I now think is the best of the 3, I have other songs I need bringing to life. Thanks for the positive feedback, Mario!

Sounds good to me, Chay, I think you found the perfect vocalist for this song. Looking forward to hearing more in the future!

Excellent result in this project! I agree with all who have said that the vocalist's harmony tracks are amazing--I wonder if you directed her on this? I esp like the gentle movement of the song. My one suggestion: I think the vocal element is so stunning and attractive that I would have cut the guitar solo-ing way down so that the listener can get back into the vocal groove, which I think is the strongest part. But, besides that, I loved the composition and the repeating melody note motif...great work all the way around!

Tano pretty much nailed our thoughts on the harmonies and the arrangement.
And we further agree with the melody note repeats.

I think you were fortunate to connect with such a great vocalist.
And especially one that you could well communicate with.

I rambled on a bit about mastering below. Apologies

Enjoyed it,

J&B


PS There is a post entitled "Loudness Target Limits for Streaming Platforms" on the off topics forum. I responded twice and my second response has some reference to our mastering techniques. You might find the info regarding the use of a "reference song" of some interest. FWIW Mastering for us is very personal regarding what WE want it to achieve. No way could we turn that over to AI. I want control over every aspect of it. You can't make a bad mix sound good with mastering but you can make a good mix sound bad. For us the goal is to make good mix sound great. And you have a good mix.
And if your mastering program is brickwalling the mix it's time to try something else.

Hi, Chay.

Denisse does a fine job with this.

You wrote:


I'm not sure what issue you've got, because it sounds good. As Bud mentioned, the real work happens in the mix.

To quote Google's AI summary, mastering "polishes the final mix, making it sound its best across different playback devices and ensuring a consistent, cohesive sound."

Assuming the mix is good, there are quite a few tools that will get you that sparkle that's associated with mastering. Most of the mastering tools will focus on bringing your mix into a generally accepted EQ curve. You can also adjust the EQ of the stems to help them fit into the mix better, such as adding high pass filters to everything but the bass so there's not a lot of buildup of low-frequencies that can create muddy mixes. Figuring out where you want specific elements to sit in the mix, and then bandpassing them so they stay out of other tracks is another common action.

TrackSpacer is a neat tool for carving harmonic space out of other tracks so they don't mask important tracks. It's one of my favorite plugins.

I haven't tried Waves' Curves AQ, but it's on my To-Do list. It automates the things I mentioned, and even seems to have functionality like TrackSpacer.

But really, the mix sounds good.

Thanks, Dave. More than anything now I want to be posting sung songs, but where I live I never get the privacy to record live, so even where I want a female vocalist I still have to record a demo first to show how it needs to be sung.

Hey, Tom. No, I didn't have to direct Denisse on the vocal harmonies. It's all her own very professional work. Lucy who sings the differently instrumented "[smooth]" version of the song also provided amazing harmony vocal stem files. I hope to post that here the week after next. This "[rock]" version is 90% the same instrumentation as "Deya Flows V2" - it's 100% the same chord structure - and the Dave Cleveland guitar solo also takes up the whole of the 2nd cycle of the 3 cycles, but I love that guitar solo so much that I just didn't want to shorten it for this.

J&B, thanks for the response and for the extra re mastering. You echo what I've read online, many commenters being anti-AI. Soren AI Mastering also has the reference track options and I've tried many from my CD collection which I have on PC, but I found the same not good enough results as I did from the presets/profiles. What I found worked best, but still not quite good enough, was using the WAV file of the actual music I was attempting to master! I was peeved today to receive an email advertising the launch of the 1.2 version of SAIM which now has 27 Style presets, not just the 6 on my only recently bought 1.1 version, but I'm definitely not upgrading to it as they want another €99 and I just don't have any faith in the product. I even tried it on solos stem files - there's only 1 Style for Piano alone - but while it works with piano and organ stems when I try any other instrument - guitar, fiddle, saxophone, etc - I get an error message. I'll check out that 'off topic' post you mentioned once I'm done here. Thanks for that!

Thanks a lot for that extra re mastering, David. As I replied to B&J it echoes what many have stated online or in videos. I've actually had a look ate Waves/Curves and although there's more to it than in Soren AI Mastering I won't try it out as I now don't trust "auto"!