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Good questions and answers. I sometimes think about Lennon and McCartney, It was a real give an take yet one person still had a core idea and the other one would help out with the tweaking...yet since they were there in the room with each other, both could play, sing, etc. that made for a powerful song team. As I read lyric only, I really wonder, how will that work once you add in music? I know I change my lyrics based on the music and then tweak it as needed. How can folk in separate physical places bring the two , the lyric and music together and create a good song. Yet to do all that by text alone? I have a hard time seeing that work out without a lot of extra time and work involved. I just did a collaboration with a female singer / song writer. I was fun and cool, but still very hard. It was a first time collaboration and though it went well it had problems with the final tweaking and she is right here in a nearby town. BTW, we did get a recording done of the song, still needs a bit of work. One of the problems is that is just takes a while to get used to working with a co-writer. There were changes I wanted to make and did, but I didn't run them by the co author first....this was just 'cause I am not used to having a partner in creating a song. Yet I just said sorry and let go of some of the changes that I thought improved it...and it still was a good song. So collaborating, I think, is a very tricky deal. Seems like it would take a long time to get that synergy going that a good writing team needs

David, post your new song mix here....I'd love to have others able to hear what you were able to do ..... James

Let me know how it works out for you....

Another good post Ryan, To chime in my oh two. Yeah I always find the intros and outros last..... I focus on my main riff, and or melody. Then the changes in the melody structure, the main riff groves, I like to set up expectation...what comes next....I'll work on making interest around that and then either meet the prediction or use it to give a pleasant change or twist . Now I've got something to go from. From that point on I then kinda listen and think , is it cool? is it rock or is it boring. Melody > create good changes > a bit of unpredictable > back to grove > a change of pace feeling > back to main grove (yer old friend by now) That's one chain of thought I use. Sometimes the main theme is the intro, its not a bad way to go. I think the best way to learn these structures is to learn to play the cover songs you really like. Start using those songs to help give you ideas of how you want to be creative. Sometimes the hardest problem in your song becomes the best moment in it. I had a problem in a song called TODAY, I couldn't transition into the sections of chorus. Everything I tried...crap. I kept going, I did not give up and now it's a happy transition. it really stands out as the 'wow' moment in the song, you can hear it at this link if you want to give it a listen. https://soundcloud.com/radarpirates So Tom really nailed that, every problem in your songs can be a great opportunity to do something very different. Hang in there brother, James

Glad your ok with it. Mixing fonts, is bad, mm'k. seriously, it just won't work unless you want it to read like a ransom note. Dream like feeling....great...go for it. Did you do something wrong. nope, not at all. Here is what I would do to improve. Search up the following: How to create better text logos, that is what you are creating, its' a brand, a flag, a look , a feel. Award Winning Text Logos, images Those two things should get your look up to the next level. Your end result will really depend on what you are willing to do to deliver what kind of results. You could go with what you have ....and be pretty low end as far as impact, creativity and design. Or you can do a bit of digging and work up some designs that kick ass and engage the viewer. You could make heart stops with the right stuff. Nice eh? Wouldn't that do a lot to promote your goals.? The music bus is very tough, the win goes to those who create impact. Your competition, the pros, work at this and don't settle for less than the best. The reason I say the pros is becasue they are the only one making the dollar. The space to be among those who make a living at this is limited for music, everyone is shouting out...me, me and me again. Just things to keep in mind. I sure have to. I've got music to play to the world. so? so does everyone else. Mine's the frign'n best....yeah, heard that, got the t-shirt. See where this goes. It ain't pretty and it ain't fun, just sheer bloody hard work. As I too am finding out. Take a look at this work group here for better information about how to make your goals work and find your dreams. http://forums.songstuff.com/groups/1-songstuff-music-promo-workgroup/ I've never read or found better stuff than what John is putting up here. Sorry I was so damn long worded.

This one is better, far better. This should be your rough but I can only speak on what I see here. A bit too centered for my taste. Your kerning needs work. The spacing for the letters is not on, little tiny space adjustments really make a logo work or not work. This, text logo, looks pretty poor in terms of a pro level design. This is from my eye. I've been creating art graphics for many many years. one thing to keep in mind. Almost touching vs space. It will give the viewer a better , i.e. easier to read feeling if you either connect all the lettering or give them all a bit of space. When its too inconsistent your eye just goes wrong. Most times folk can't tell you why. Do some image searches for text logos, copy the work that stands out for you. Use those to compare to a feeling you want to give the viewer. I like the name and concept, that is way cool I like the art quite a bit. Your saturation and black and white levels could be better. A hard and very picky critique I know. I hope that you don't mind. J

Thanks John!! I'm so glad you liked the blog!

Thanks just1l! glad you found it.

Ha! Wait no longer Part 3 is up http://forums.songstuff.com/blog/186/entry-1394-how-to-make-your-songs-sound-better-in-3-easy-steps-part-3/

3 Easy Steps to Better Sound - Part 3 - High Frequencies - Control Your High end, - give some sparkle and air This is the third part of three steps to improve your demo recordings. If you have not read the other two, no worries. You can find them here. The Three Steps: click on a link to view that document. Part 1: The Low Pass Filter - Less low noise, -this will clean up your sound and make all the parts sound out clearly Part 2: Sweep - Find the bad sounds and cut those frequencies from your song Part 3: High Frequencies - Control Your High end, - give some sparkle and air There is a lot to know about mixing and being a sound engineer. I am not a sound engineer, nor I am a professional with years of work in the studio. Those professionals are part of what you pay for in the studio work. They are well worth it. The High Shelf Filter What we've done so far We've gone through the steps to control the low end. We then found the bad frequencies and brought those sounds under control. We now want to give back a bit of the high end. A little bit of sparkle and air is how I hear it. It will be different for each ear. Listen carefully to what you hear without it and then with the filter in place. The high shelf filter looks like the screen below. What we are going to do is to boost the signal about +6 db and then move it to the left to increase the range. As we do this we listen to the difference in the sound. When you find what you like stop and roll it back a bit to the right I will do this with a clean EQ, in other words there is no other settings being used for the moment. Why do it this way? I do this so that I can get a feel for how much high end I want to boost. You may have heard that you don't boost you cut. Yes that is true. For the most part you really don't want to boost your signal. However, you can do so, and by the way, the pro's do it all the time. Just keep in mind that those pros are boosting very good recordings. If your recordings are on the thin side you should boost in very small amounts. Somewhere between +1db and +3 db. The numbers that I call out and the screens I show are only rough ideas. Your final settings will depend on what your ears say it the right amount. Stage 2 Now that you have an idea of what your high pass filter will add to your sound its time to use it with the tweaks we have used from parts 1 and 2. The screen below has the low pass filter done. The notches are in that cut out the unwanted frequencies. All we have left to do is to add in our high pass filter. Place your High Shelf filter around 10 k Hz to start. Again your final setting will depend on what you hear as you adjust it's place to the left and right in the frequencies. How much you boost will also depend on what you hear and what you like. My starting place screen below. And where I ended up placing it for this song. I had it a bit more to the left and then I made the effect less by going a bit to the right. That's it. you are done. You can play with this and all the other EQ tricks that I talked about in these three documents. The main idea that I hope you get is to have a basic starting point and then play around. Your ears will be the only real guide for this task. Stay fresh, don't work too long, and enjoy your self. With The High Shelf Disabled, all the other tweaks are on. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/62908045/Mix%20screens/Hifgh%20Shelf%20Disabled.mp3 And now I've enabled the High Shelf Filter https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/62908045/Mix%20screens/Hifgh%20Shelf%20Enabled.mp3 You can find the full version of this song on my soundcloud Closing Words I wrote these easy steps with the idea that it could help those of you who create great music but found your final product not sounding as good as it could. These documents are just a small beginning of what might happen in a studio. I wanted to keep it very simple and clear. I hope that it will help you all feel that it's not so hard and that you can control your EQ just a bit better. If you have any questions or comments do post them. Send me a pm or two. I'd love to hear from you. James

A followup Website research Ghandi.net - looking to be fairly good, Name.com - some very negative business practice reports, quite worrisome. You can read for yourself http://www.destructuring.net/2013/02/28/name-com-is-doing-some-really-sketchy-stuff/ GoDaddy - no, never. Hover.com - still checking Create two Flags The Beat 64 New Unnamed Band - Original

I wanted to post about getting better mixes. I know we all struggle with this. You've got your tracks all recorded. Everything is in tempo and on key. When you mix it your final result is not sounding good. Why not? What Happened? 3 Easy Steps to Better Sound I'll try and give you a three step process you can use as a starting point to get better results. This is not a magic bullet. It will not make your music better than what you recorded but your overall sound should improve in three areas. PART 2 This is part 2 of 3 of making your songs sound better in three easy steps. You should read part one first but it is not needed nor required. Yet It would be recommended, it will make part 2 easier to understand. Remember! This EQ plug-in is for the Main Mix Track, this is done so that these EQ changes will be heard for every track in your mix. The Three Steps ; Low Pass Filter - Less low noise, -this will clean up your sound and make all the parts sound out clearly Sweep - Find the bad sounds and cut those frequencies from your song High Frequencies - Control Your High end, - give some sparkle and air Getting started with 'The Sweep' You should now have your low range frequencies under control. Time to get out the stethoscope and do a fine tune check for the 'bad' sounds. How do you do that? It's pretty simple. We start by creating a bell type filter in our EQ plug-in 2. Now change the bell to look like the narrow spike show above 3. Now boost it to about +10. Make sure your song is playing.... ...and move this narrow bell filter from the left to the right and back again. Yes, its that simple. What you've created is a powerful and focused stethoscope. As you sweep you hear a boosted part of the full EQ. As you move the bell filter, focus on the sound. I'll even close my eyes while I do this. You are going to find some frequencies that are creating a sound that you will want to remove or cut. Once you find one you will then cut that frequency by -2 to -6. You can create as many bell shaped filters as you need. In the below screen I've located a frequency to cut. This is all about the Ears Listen for those sounds that grate on the ear. Go slow, take your time. The more care you take here the better. So take your time. Below is a sample of my sweeping. You'll hear the music and then I isolate the frequency I'm going to cut. Again this sample is of my song! Your song will be different but you can use this technique for any song. NOTE: Make sure your speakers or headphones are turned DOWN! This is a bit painful. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/62908045/Mix%20screens/Sweep%20To%20Bad%2001.mp3 Below I show what this looks like on my EQ plug-in. The Dark Grey wave form is the original sound. The Brighter grey is the banshee wail. You should have some fun here and just create as many of these sweeps as your song needs, again judge how many you need with your ears. These examples are what I found for my songs. You'll find different ones. Maybe more, maybe less. There is no rule to this, just trust your ears. You could end up with an EQ that looks like the screen below. Two short music samples. The first example the EQ filter is OFF. The next one is ON. - Listen carefully for the difference. These changes are subtle, it can be a struggle to hear the difference at first. When you start doing this for your songs, your first might sound like its doing nothing at all. That's OK! just means your doing it right. The effect slowly builds up as you find more of what you need to filter out of your mix. Don't worry about losing some of the high end. We are going to address the final stage in part three. The EQ plug-in is OFF https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/62908045/Mix%20screens/Sweep%20Off%2001.mp3 The EQ plug-in is ON https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/62908045/Mix%20screens/Sweep%20ON%2000.mp3 You can find the full mixed versions of these songs here note: I've had to remove the demo songs-- they are part of a new album and I can't have them out in the public. Sorry

Just1L I was to very glad to help out. It really makes me learn this stuff too. This mixing stuff is hard and then again, its easy. Be sure to post some before and afters of you music here. I'd love to hear'em.

Let see if this will help answer your questions. W Bear with me for a moment, I'm going to be very simple and just confirm some of what we are seeing in the above screen. To the Far right you will see a 0, at the intersection with the yellow line. Above the zero is +, boost, below is - or cut. The Darker grey is the original sound wave. The light grey wave shows the current resulting frequencies with our Low Cut Filter active. We can clearly see a difference in the wave form. The light grey (what you hear as the end result ), active wave is smaller than the original. We can see that the current low Hz area is being cut. Its not totally gone but enough has been reduced so that our ears are no longer hearing that range of sound. Anything to the left of the yellow line is being filtered. From 0 Hz to around 30 Hz So what happens when we move this Low Cut Filter to the Right? Take a look at the above screen shot. The active sound, light grey is now totally missing the low HZ frequencies. From 0 to 30Hz (ish) it shows no activity. It has also lowered all the mid range sounds. Again when you do this in real time the difference is very obvious. With the two screens shown, I hope how the Low Cut Filter is used will be easier to understand. Why the 28 Hz.? That number was a just to give me a start. You will have to experiment for each songs Low Cut Hz, it will change with each song. The final result will depend on what you hear and like or dislike. So you would start somewhere around that 28Hz, then, close your eyes and just listen as you move it from left to right. You'll get far better results with your ears rather than using your eyes. Keep in mind what we see in the screens here is just used as good visual to help us understand what the Low Cut filter is doing. Please do post anything that is not really clear. This helps me understand it better too. So thank you. James

Thanks, though it should work for any Eq filter that you use. I've used low cut filters in Audacity too. Though the big drawback in audacity is that you can't hear real time changes. Make a Change, save, listen, etc etc. Very slow J

Nice! love that song, Great mix and a great vocal !

I wanted to post about getting better mixes. I know we all struggle with this. You've got your tracks all recorded. Everything is in tempo and on key. When you mix it your final result is not sounding good. Why not? What Happened? 3 Easy Steps to Better Sound I'll try and give you a three step process you can use as a starting point to get better results. This is not a magic bullet. It will not make your music better than what you recorded but your overall sound should improve in three areas. The Three Steps will be; Low Pass Filter - Less low noise, -this will clean up your sound and make all the parts sound out clearly Sweep - Find the bad sounds and cut those frequencies from your song High Frequencies - Control Your High end, - give some sparkle and air There is a lot to know about mixing and being a sound engineer. I am not a sound engineer, nor I am a professional with years of work in the studio. Those professionals are part of what you pay for in the studio work. They are well worth it. The Low Cost Demo That being said we all do need to create demo's of our music.I don't have the money to go into a studio so my solution was to learn enough to let me do a decent job using my computer and equipment at home. How your home computer can do this and how to set that up is not what I will talk about here. I will talk about easy ways to mix your songs to get a result that will give your songs a better sound, just from these 3 steps. Please keep in mind this is only a starting point. You should also be careful of ear fatigue, this is important, If we spend too many hours without a break tweaking our music what happens most times is that you end up having to redo the mix. We can only listen for so long before our minds stop being able to process what we are hearing. So try to avoid this kind of work path: Tired Mind = bad music decisions = redo the work with fresh ear and mind. Step 1, Low End EQ Filter I'm using Mixcraft 6.0 and Fabfilters, This technique should apply to the software that you use for your EQ and mixes. In the above Sceen: The Dark Grey Wave = Original Sound, Light Grey Shows the Current Sound, i.e. what you hear from the speakers. In the above screen shot of a Low Cut Filter. Any sound below the 28 Hz frequency will be reduced. The 28 Hz used in the example was just a start point. The number you end up with will vary depending on what you hear as you mix. You will use this Eq Filter on your Main Mix, this way it affects all the tracks for your song. Once you've place your EQ filter to your main mix you will need to edit the Low Cut Filter. Edit while your song is playing.... Move it slowly to the right to increase how much frequency you will cut. Once you can hear it, roll it back slightly to the left. You want to not be able to tell its there yet still get the benefits from the filter. Very subtle, so take your time and have some fun with it. That's it your Done. The goal here is to take out all of your unneeded low end. This is one of the reasons the mix can end up sounding dull and flat. With the low end frequencies taken away you should hear a nice improvement of the overall tone of your music End of Part 1 Go to Part 2 http://forums.songstuff.com/blog/186/entry-1391-how-to-make-your-songs-sound-better-in-3-easy-steps-part-2/ edit: Changed the screen and added a note about that screen.

Yes, the rest of the band is into the idea of adding the original songs into the act. We plan to keep the cover band going and then also play a some of the new songs during the act. We are going to try and record ourselves. Save on the studio cost and all that. We'd rather use the money to sell t-shirts since that is a better way to make money with the act. Unfortunately, sad but true.

I like it

Yeah, I think you have a very good point, right person , right time. I have met a few good people like that. Heck I feel lucky to have meet the guys in my band if you know what I mean. Oi! please do send me luck! Really I need all I can get. J