Tag: mastering

Your Life On Facebook (Twitter, Instagram, Tinder, ..)

Your Life On Facebook Solid Rock Blues Band

Social Media is all around us. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tinder, SnapChat, Youtube. We can’t live without, can we? Well, perhaps we can but we love being online. And of course we all like to life that glamorous life we see others have. So we fake it. Fake it till you make it right?

Here’s a song about Social Media. How one portrays him or herself on it. And how someone else might be looking at this social media life of the other person.

The song was written in parts on snippets of paper, collected and put together, over a period of time. Video was created using free stock video downloaded from Pexels.com. Recorded at the LoftStudio Home Recording Studio using the Digitech Pedal for drums and bass, Harley Benton Telecaster and MXL770 as vocal mic. Recorded using Mixbus5 (DAW). It is, for now, available on Youtube and BandLab.

VIDEO

BANDLAB

By the way: if you’re looking for a great place for some free, basic, mastering, checkout BandLab. For the Solid Rock Blues Band we use bandlab all the time for the final mastering.

LYRICS

LIFE ON FACEBOOK
All rights reserved ©2020 R. Brinkman/Solid Rock Blues Band

May your life, be as great
as it is on Facebook
May the sun, always shine
as it does on your Insta

No I got no interest
for your feed on pinterest
don’t care for your moodboards no more
And I really don’t know
why I should be looking
at the carpets you want for your floor

(chorus)

And your tweets on Twitter
always sound so bitter
is it really that cool to swear
Do you really think we all
want to know
you don’t know what clothes to wear

Swipe left, swipe right!
Where to spend the night
Who’ll be knocking at your door
It’ll come as no surprise
some won’t be nice,
it ain’t love they’re looking for

(chorus)

It ain’t me stalking
I can just see you walking
SnapMap tells me all
I want you to be,
happy and free
but can I just give you one call?

(chorus)

May the sun, always shine
as it does on your insta
May the sun, always shine
as it does on your insta

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Professional Free Online Mastering

Is it possible to get free mastering? Even better: free professional, radio ready, mastering? Yes it is! Yesterday I recorded a hymn (“I Surrender All”) and even though the mix was fine, I wanted it to sound “radio-ready”. So, I went online to search for a quick fix. I do my own “mastering” most of the time using Audacity but it didn’t sound good enough.

Google is your firend, right? So, I ended up on BandLab’s website. They have been offering free online mastering for some time now (I never knew,.. and perhaps you didn’t either – that’s why I’m posting this!).

What to expect from a free mastering service? Well, .. to my surprise it does a great job! When you upload a track you have a few options: CD quailty, bass heavy (for radio: don’t!) and clear sound.

I uploaded a few tracks and was amazed to hear the difference!

BandLab’s new online mastering service is the first such tool with free unlimited use and is compatible with all major music formats. The new feature is also integrated across the entire existing BandLab creative workflow so that creators can share final mastered tracks across the BandLab social music platform or download their finished works as high-quality versions for distribution to other services. (MusicConnection)

Here’s a sample of the mastering at BandLab, the song “Summertime”

The mastering gives it a lot more ‘punch’ and depth. Of course the mix was very good also, thanks to Jay H.

Anyway — There’s no excuse not to use BandLab – it’s free, it delivers you a good mastered track. Head over to BandLab to get your songs mastered!

More of our songs at BandLab can be found at this link:
https://www.bandlab.com/band/band6816193038897138

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Summertime – Free Download!

What happens if you let someone who’s got great mixing skills as well is the writer of a good vocal plugin mix your track “just for the fun of it”? Recently we were recording a new song and our friend Jay H. from JHudStudio created an alternative mix. We liked it so much that we have decided to publish this mix instead of our own!

Jay H. is the author of the Vocal King plugin, and some other (free) plugins for Windows DAW’s. He put some good time and effort in our song and (re)mixed and produced it based on the original, unedited, stem-exports from our Ardour DAW. This resulted in an original, creative, mix of our song and we were so very pleased with it!

The song is now available as a free download at SoundCloud. We hope you like it. Feel free to share!

The mood of the song, as well as the style, is probably a “60’s” or “70’s” feel, in the vain of Bob Dylan, The Byrds and so on. Drums were created using Ditigtech TRIO, Bass, guitars and vocals by Rudy. Recorded using Ardour (Linux). Mixed & produced by Jay H. from JayHudStudio.

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Down For The Count – Recording & Mixing with Ardour (Tutorial)

Recording and mixing with Ardour for Linux, Windows or OSX isn’t as challenging as many think. In fact, it’s pretty easy once you know what to do and how it works. In the below in-depth video you can see how I record and mix drums, bass, guitar, vocals and midi keyboard using Ardour. The duration of the video is almost 25 minutes.

The song that was recorded is an original song, written by RJF Mensies and me in 2015 and recorded for the “Telenovelas” album by the Barking Aunts Project. This is a new recording and although the music is more or less the same as far as the vocal line and chords are concerned it still is pretty different.

STREAMING

You can listen to the song on SoundCloud or Audiomack.

Click here for Audiomack
Click here for SoundCloud

 

VIDEO

This video will walk you trough the full recording and mixing process. Ardour is very easy to use and allows you to do a professional audio recording on a shoestring budget!

More (and shorter!) video’s on recording with Ardour at the Recording page.

FINAL NOTE

When the video was finished I’ve added tambourine and did some final tweaking on the midi track. After I recorded and mixed the song I “mastered” it using Audacity. Using a high pass filter (20Hz, -6 dB) and W1 limiter (-2.7dB, -0.3dB ceiling). Hope you like the song and video and if you do like the video: thumbs up & subscribe.

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