It's been a long term!
I've been trying a bit of recording lately to get into the swing of it, and thought I'd share the result here with y'all.

[url]https://soundcloud.com/aecolangeli/feigning-innocence[/url]

Recording vocals is super foreign to me - singing in general is, really (though lately I've been doing that more with the band project), so this was an interesting and fun experiment.

Dewith, I get to see a lot of your songs pop up on SoundCloud now, and I'm digging what I hear. Liking those bongos, too.
I really like that bendy/slidey (not sure which) guitar work on Care! Nice job, man!

Mare, I really dig your style. I just listened to 1989, and thought the tempo change was really cool!

Hey dude, thanks! I really really like doing those little tempo changes - doing gradual shifts in speed in particular is a ton of fun and something I really want to incorporate into a full band someday. (Congrats on finishing the term.)

I really dig Feigning Innocence - the little vocal riffs you do at the end of the chorus phrases are great. The balance of instruments and guitar tones could use a bit of work to my taste, and there were a few notes where the vocals were a little flat on larger jumps, but when you really nailed the notes you sounded kind of like that dude in Barenaked Ladies whose voice I like more. I like that you did that little stereo panning thing on the repeated vocal bit about 2/3 through, and the final choruses with the big snare hits were cool. Nice, especially that "na na na na na na naaa" at the end - very Sawao-wao-yeah-heah.

It sounds cool with the tempo changes, are there other songs of yours that do that? I haven't yet listened to all of them, but I listened to Mariana, and I remember the whole outro sequence feeling really strong, and liking your guitar work after the vocals dropped out, too. I really, really liked Hello - nice little riff, solid progression, and really nice lyrics. That middle bit with
"And they say that you can't
but you can, and they can't know that
'cause we're not there yet"
really stood out to me. It's kind of roundabout and it's delivered quick, so to me is a little reminiscent of a lot of lyrics and phrases the Mighty Mighty Bosstones use, which I dig.

Thank you, it should be my last academic venture for a little while, haha. Have you done much work within a band, or have plans to?

Grazie mille for the feedback on Feigning Innocence! I hear you (or maybe I should say I hear me?) about the flat notes; I am no singer, truly, haha. Or at least, I've got plenty of work ahead of me if I go down that road.
Got any tips as far as mixing things better? I've not had a lot of experience with it so far, but it is challenging, and some feedback on what could improve would be much appreciated there!

I'm really not one who spends any time working on sound production, so I'm afraid the only advice I can offer is to try listening on multiple types of speakers/headphones as you work on your mix to get a clearer idea of how it will all sound. Regarding the tones on this particular recording, I think that recording that much distortion/fuzz can be really tricky to nail, but a slightly cleaner (but still crunchy/beefy) tone might have complemented the vocals a little more, as well as making the bass easier to hear. Hopefully others may have some more useful insights into actual mixing techniques, though, haha.

For other songs I've done with tempo changes, my old guitarist and I cowrote this one: https://atarishock.bandcamp.com/track/shoeprint (lol kind of oversang a bit and messed up my tone/pitch in various spots on this performance due to the lack of being able to really hear myself well in the tiny dive bar we were playing haha.)
On the Soundcloud page, there's Mariana (slight shifting tempo on the rhythm in the intro/break); A year without the sun (some drawn out phrases on the intro, and then a back and forth between tempos); and To the Moon (a couple tempo changes throughout). The band arrangement of Sunday Best, which I haven't posted, has tempo changes at the end of the song as well (ritard followed by a new tempo with a bouncy kind of beat).

TL;DR definitely like me some tempo changes/time play.

[i]> Continued from a conversation in the "Your guitars, basses, etc." thread. [/i]

So like I mentioned I don't usually upload my half-finished ideas, sometimes I just don't record them and other times it's because they end up turning out totally different from how I started, and this scrap (that i'd consider 1/3rd of a complete song) is a good example of the latter. This started out totally different and had sort of an upbeat latin-ish vibe to it using a guitar riff I had recorded, and while I was working on it I stuck the wrong filter on the guitar by mistake and it produced a pretty cool sound. I wrote a short bass riff using the same effect but it was too dark for what I was working on and I stuck it aside. When I got home late saturday evening I overdubbed a simple piano riff onto it and liked how it sounded, so I ended up scrapping the other song entirely and started working on this lo-fi track.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/f3kkq3kdcrwgv ... s.wav?dl=0

Aw dude, just overdub some soulful guitar lines and you have a sick little song there. Maybe some saxophone.

Back in April, Long Knives contributed a cover of Target from Fugazi. It was recorded for a benefit compilation set up by Sell The Heart Records for [url=https://www.takingittothestreetssf.org/]Taking It To The Streets[/url]. Taking It To The Streets San Francisco empowers homeless youth to lead better lives by providing a continuum of workforce readiness, job skills training, personal mentoring, safe housing, and other services to support self-sufficiency for youth and young adults age 18-35. All of the proceeds we make from selling vinyl copies of the compilation gets sent to Taking It To The Streets.

[url=https://sthr.bandcamp.com/track/target]Long Knives - Target (Fugazi)[/url]

Been busy and lazy and busy and stuff, but I'm playing guitars again and put a couple hours into drafting out a new song today.

This one's got kind of like a weird concept behind it, so story time. Way way back I wrote a song about an android questioning his humanity and falling in love (Sheer started the chord progression, I wrote the lyrics and vocals/finished the song), and I had an idea at some point of making a sequel to the song or even having the two songs be tied together as part of a sort of concept album/ep/thingy. So since the first song was named "Copy 3" I wanted to also have a number in the title, so I thought of making a song called "9gen." like "9th generation" but also a sort of dumb weeby joke (ningen = human, which is pretty close to nin(e)gen), continuing that whole robot/human theme.

Anyway, so this is a song about some old androids in love, and one of them is dying. I tried to purposefully reference some of the other songs I've written in terms of rhythm and melody motifs, as the goal is to start sewing together some of these ideas into a more cohesive piece of work eventually.

https://soundcloud.com/midnight-down/9gen

Pretty cool, I dig it Mare. Not much else to say for now, haha.

Thanks, and have another one, lol!

https://soundcloud.com/midnight-down/save-your-words

[quote="Marekenshin"]https://soundcloud.com/midnight-down/save-your-words[/quote]
Nice one too! I like the lyrics.

Holy cow! Looks like I have some listening to do! Guess summer in Alaska kinda takes majority of my time; nonetheless, I've been recording and writing differently, so I have quite the set of songs I'll be releasing and working towards recording (hopefully by September I'll have an album).

Here is something I've been working on:

https://soundcloud.com/dewith28/tender-demo

I like the instrumentation and arrangement on this one quite a bit, it has a very pleasant melody and tempo. If I would offer a point of critique, the lyrics don't really do much for me, although I did actually enjoy the repeated rhyming in the first stanza.

[quote="ShwahnStuff"]
I've been trying a bit of recording lately to get into the swing of it, and thought I'd share the result here with y'all.

[url]https://soundcloud.com/aecolangeli/feigning-innocence[/url]
[/quote]

^this is kick ass. super catchy and I dig the vocal effects you got going on. Nice work bud.

[quote="Marekenshin"]I like the instrumentation and arrangement on this one quite a bit, it has a very pleasant melody and tempo. If I would offer a point of critique, the lyrics don't really do much for me, although I did actually enjoy the repeated rhyming in the first stanza.[/quote]

Thanks Mare. Do you think the lyrics are too bland? It is a little different to what I usually write about. Fun fact, this was actually two separate songs that I glued together.

Also, I like your newest song you put out. I listened it to a couple times. You have quite the way of conveying emotions and thoughts! Definitely one of my favorite songs by you so far. Your pitch is on point!

Thanks so much, dude, I'm particularly proud of that one myself.

Regarding your lyrics, it's less about the content of what you're saying and more about the feeling of how your words stretch across the note lengths, and the rhymes or lack thereof. That first stanza feels VERY nice to me (and I like the last four lines as well), but the other sections seem to not be on the same level as those two bits. Maybe just give yourself more time to try and rework various versions of some of those sections if you also feel those chunks can be stronger lyrically - and don't be afraid to reuse that first bit instead of one of your other current stanzas, even imo. Song itself is good and it sounds pretty decent for a rough demo; I can get a sense of what a full band arrangement would sound like for sure.

One thing that I think might make the tune a bit more enjoyable and is a pretty standard technique for structuring songs is to take those two main melody/rhythms you have going ("soft, tender can be" and "I'll be your man") and think of how you're using them with and against each other. On the stanza that starts with "I'll be your man," you kind of just stick to the one pattern, while doing something like ABBB or AABA or whatever tends to be catchier to the listener.

TL;DR is I think maybe consider giving yourself more time with the lyrics to make them sound/feel better to yourself before you call them final and maybe consider some minor tweaks on the way you utilize the various pieces to make the structure flow in a more captivating way.