shameless self-promotion of my own

[thetragichero]

we wrapped up recording our first ep last weekend, at it's in discmakers hands at this point
recorded in a spare bedroom in my house
i guess we're like a loud punk band or something?
i'm pretty impressed how it came out

two songs are up here: www.myspace.com/ghostaviary
we've been posting a new song each day at ghostaviaryband.tumblr.com
and everything is up on ghostaviary.bandcamp.com

i used both of my strats and my tele on these recording, so thanks go out to you guys for helping me with them

[JFrankParnell]

I liked it Esp the cicada song. nice guitarering, bro.

oh yes, I exalt you, sir!

[newey]

I liked "Maybe Alycia was Right", it gets into a nice kind of metal groove.

+1

[asmith]

Lovely Tele tones...

Enjoyable stuff. Puts me in the mind of Shellac, if Steve Albini shot for a bigger production sound.

[thetragichero]

so are the styles too varied?
it's a thing i worry about, although we have scrapped a super heavy doom metal song and a couple of pop punk songs because they didn't really fit the sound

part of it is probably the fact that some of the songs are a year and a half old and others we wrote while recording... should be fixed once we start writing a bunch of songs together that are more cohesive

[ashcatlt]

hero -
When I started to listen to your stuff on my iPhone it was terrible, but I gave it another shot on my studio headphones and it actually is quite good. It's not the Greatest Guitar Sound EVER!!!, but it sounds like one of those classic punk recordings. I for one expect a sort of lo-fi sensibility from this type of music and I think you've got it going. It's rough and nasty without being terribly harsh. And you managed to avoid that horrible washy cymbal thing that so many low budget, small room recordings end up carrying.

That last paragraph was meant as a compliment.

One thing I did notice was a whole lot of digital overs. I didn't do any real measurements, but I did turn down the volume in a couple different places to make sure that I wasn't just clipping my own system and could still hear those little ticks and clicks which tell me that the signal is too hot somewhere along the line. It's best to master these things to somewhere short of 0dbfs peak to avoid "inter-sample overs". Some compression algorithms also do something weird to the audio which can cause things which are not clipping in the .wav file to go over.

[thetragichero]

yeah it's from some of the vocal tracks.... i should've had some sort of compressor on it but didn't. i know it clipped but was in a rush to get it done before our mini tour this weekend

it shouldn't be the wav file since i made sure the absolute maximum level was -0.5db

in terms of the cymbals, about a third of the room we play in has cardboard egg crates on the wall (and growing), so it certainly helps damp down the standing waves

i appreciate your tips and critique... this is my first time working with pro tools so i'm learning!

[ashcatlt]

Ah! Never occurred to me that it might be at the track level. I've got a whole album where some of the guitar tracks were recorded (to ADAT) a bit too hot. I didn't bother retracking, tried to deal with it in other ways, but it still makes me cringe a little when I hear it. The guitars sound great until they hit that wall. . I wish I could remix the whole thing, but the projects are from a Mac where I was using Opcode Vision, which doesn't exist anymore.

Sometimes a low-pass filter can shave off the sharp edges from these things and make them less totally annoying. Despite that one album, it can work pretty well on low-bandwidth signals like guitars. On vocals you might lose some clarity or sparkle or air or whatever. You might be able to get some of this back by adding a tube or tape saturation plug to generate some of the high harmonics that the LPF is taking out. Seems maybe a little strange to add distortion to try to fix a distortion problem, but the issue you've got not is that the distortion is intermittent and occasional, which makes it noticeable. A more constant and consistent overdrive at subtle levels could be much more acceptable.