Silent Nightmusic

[Auroran]

Fabulous! The violins sound great. Recording quality is excellent. Please tell us more about the rest of the instruments. Are they all VSTi plugins in SONAR or are some real instruments? Whatever they are, they all sound great.

Thanks for listening, 64 guitars and others. It's all vst except for the violins:

Bells-EWQLSO GOld
Bass- Kontakt 4
Guitar- Dimension Pro
Synths- FM8, Kontakt
Drums- EZ Drummer
Organ- Kontakt
Piano-EZ Keys

The violins will be redone. When overdubbing the same violin, various phasing and other problems arise. One reason I got the BR-800 is so I can go to different rooms and get different sounds (which I haven't done yet). It currently has the "guy in his living room" sound, so I'm hoping that recording in a few better venues will change that.

I have 12 tracks for this album, this one IMO was the weakest so it was the first I shared for opinions on. I made another Christmas album in 2007 that's sitting on a shelf in the Sony offices, so I took some time to regroup and this is Christmas Album 2: Electric Boogaloo.

[BillW]

Good heavens! This is fantastic!

[cuthbert]

Masterful.

I don't hear the phasing problem with the violins that you mentioned, but I am listening on my laptop speakers at the moment.  Everything blends together so very well here - I enjoy hearing an old classic reinterpreted, and this sounds very fresh and orchestral.

Is what I thought was an electric guitar solo at the end actually electric violin?

[Auroran]

Thanks for listening, bwalters and cuthbert,

I don't hear the phasing problem with the violins that you mentioned, but I am listening on my laptop speakers at the moment. 

Some of it is eq'ed out, which solves one problem but creates more.

The problem with a violin "choir" (or any "one-man" choir) is using one instrument(and one human). The lush sound of a string section comes from using different tones: some dark, some bright etc. It also comes from using different vibratos from each player. When the same instrument and the same player are used, it's a bit of an unnatural sound. I snuck in one instance of an EWQL synth violin into the mix to try and fatten the sound, with varying results.I tried putting a chorus effect with slight detune on one of the fiddles, I think there are 10 violin tracks total. I can do a lot better, it just takes a bit of time to find the right eq, reverb etc for it to work and I did this fairly quickly. One has to create a different sound for each fiddle with effects and then blend them. One trick I tried: I took two of the violin tracks and offset them. I moved one forward by maybe a 15th of a second, and one backward. Quite the irony: the more in tune and tight I play, the worse the product gets.

Is what I thought was an electric guitar solo at the end actually electric violin?

Yes, it's an electric violin run through a Boss BR-800. There might be a bit of Guitar Rig as well, some mixes have it and some don't. Overall it's just the BR straight into my computer. Nice lil unit, I have really enjoyed using it. The electric has been in my closet for years, I pulled it out recently because of the BR and have enjoyed playing it.

[SteveB]

Au - Wow. Full, rich, inventive, beautiful, and well-worth a listen. Well done, sir.