This is the first song I made totally on my laptop, that brought some new things with it, and that's propably the reason why I feel like I had some problems with this song here and there.
I've used the guitars and bass multiple times in different songs, but never together (if I remember right). And this is only the second time I use this drumkit.
What I mean about the restrictions regarding the composing is that the guitars only has one octave of open and muted powerchords, so every melody had to be played on different instrument and the guitars would only be there to provide the rhythm. I thought about violing, cello and clean/acoustic guitar for the melodies but ultimately settled with the piano.
That was great, because then I got the idea of making it sound really creepy when I came up with the melody for the intro (which by the way sounds really Halloween to me). So I have 3 tracks of piano on every melody; one center, one delayed panned to left and one delayed panned to the right.
So, for a while I was happy with the result. But then it started to sound like it needs more creepyness. So I threw some reverb in there and brought it up a little in the mix.
Now it's creepy enough for me. :)
From the original notes the final tracked version has some major changes; the verseriff is totally remade and the drums in chorus have got some changes too. It's a lot better now.
The mixing turned out to be really tricky. I lost the count how many mixed I've done before coming up with this.
I started, "as usual", by implementing my "curves" to the guitar and bass. And those curves look like this:
Bass...
...And guitar.
And then some compression to the drums and EQ to the piano. So the rough mix had all the elements I usually use.
After that I got all the tracks to Podium and put some EQ on the bassdrum and snare. And the reverb to the piano.
I had read from a finnish book called "Rockband's ABC" that if you want the "snap" to the bassdrum, boost the EQ around 4kHz. So I did and it really was there. I was so happy! So I boosted the snare as well from 4 and 5 kHz, got some "snap" there as well.
A lot of experimenting was done with the mixing before getting it the way it is. In many ways this is reverted back to the raw mix.
I had put some EQ on the toms as well, distortion on the bass... At some point there was 2 tracks of bass; the clean and the distorted. But all-in-all those experiments didn't sound so good afterall.
So what you hear here is quite much the first mix after the raw one. Drums have the EQ on bassdrum and snare and reverb on the piano.
The guitars could use different eq-settings to get even crispier sound, but that should be done from the modelling-processor and re-record the samples. Now I have to go with this, so here is another piece from me. I'm satisfied, I hope you are too after you have finished listening the song.
