Originally Posted By: Janice & Bud
At the risk of redundancy that is a GREAT instrumental.

Hi, J&B!

I'm glad to hear from you. laugh

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It nailed, IMO, the melody - certainly melodic enough to be rich and interesting but not so much that one gets lost or distracted in complexity.

Thanks! I was thinking that this time I'd add a proper bridge, but I guess the guitar part served that function.

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Both of us found the production backstory fascinating...so beyond the little ditties we mostly come up with.

Hey, you aren't allowed to say anything bad about those "ditties"!

The measure of the success of a song often has little to do with the work that went into it!

Then again, sometimes stuff percolates forever and finally comes out. So it's hard to measure, right?

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PS If you have Neutron 2 there is a preset that we like for fiddles of all genres named "Solo Violin" and is located under the orchestral section. We use it as is only adding a little verb.

If it's the same one I tried, it didn't seem to have much effect. The EQ seems to give it a bit of a lift, but I couldn't hear much. My ears aren't that good at hearing detail, so there's that.

These days, I figure if I can't hear what the effect is doing, I should probably leave it off.

I'm not entirely sure what sound floyd was expecting from the violin. I was sort of leaning more toward the fiddle when I first played it, but that was in a lower register. In the higher register it's a sweeter sound, but I've set it so that as I play louder, it moves the bo toward the bridge, so it gets a bit harsher. I like the change in expression, but that's probably the timbre he's talking about.

With that in mind, I've done some tweaks to the violin, and will probably put out another mix when I get a chance. But first I need to be sure the new version is actually better. wink

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PPS floyd mentioned the stereo expander...we use one also (the Imager from Ozone 8 adv). And as he mentioned it works very nicely guitars and for us also on pianos.

Thanks! I'd actually already had a stereo expander in the chain, just before the mastering plugin. But I'll definitely look at using it at the instrument level in the future.

The guitar RT track was panned a bit (on purpose), but I went back and fixed that in the intro (in the as-yet unreleased mix).

Since - on top of that - the RT was recorded a bit off-center, I panned it a bit to re-center it, and then ran it through the stereo expander. I routed that off to another buss, so I could control the panning.

Hrm... sounds a bit like gluing something back together, and then hitting it with a hammer again. blush

But increasing the stereo spread emphasizes the squeaks in the RT. That's not intrinsically bad, but spreading them over the stereo field isn't best.

Plus, widening the spread changed the perceived volume, and then I started tweaking other instruments as well.

I just need to make sure I didn't make things worse in the process of making them better. wink

Thanks again!

-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

Vocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?