Equestria Girls Death Metal

[Pickslide1992]

[Aussie]

Oh my god.

[Versilaryan]

Lawl. I guess I'm not the only one that thinks it's really funny to hear deathmetal versions of really happy songs. xD

Critique! So first off, you should work a little more on pitch accuracy when singing. Breath support will fix that -- if you look for the thread where Circuitfry requests singing help in the technique forum, I've got a pretty lengthy post about that. If you look up the "GSnap" autotune plugin, that will also help pitch accuracy. =P (It's a really great plugin. It'll nudge some stray pitches in place without altering the sound at all.)

Secondly, you should work on not making your singing sound forced. If you want to get that hard rock Avenged Sevenfold sing-scream, the trick is actually not to force it but to relax your voice. A TON of breath support and singing really loudly while relaxing your voice in a certain way will get that growl. The only reason I bring this up is because you try to sound darker at certain points ("You can travel the world") and you just end up sounding like singing suddenly became really hard to do.

This last bit is just personal preference, but I think you could've added some vibrato to those really long notes in the guitar solo, just to add some interest to them. Electric guitar is NOT a very expressive instrument -- the volume decrescendos the same way for every note you play, and it's really difficult to vary the dynamics by picking harder or softer. So you make up for it with melodic phrasing. That being said, it really bothers me when I hear a guitar solo starting with a long note that just sits there and doesn't do anything. It's the equivalent of singing a note and just sitting on it, singing flatly with no expression.

Recording-wise, if you're singing louder, back away from the mic sufficiently or lower the volume. You can always raise the volume again later. I can hear the sound clipping and overloading at times, and it's not a pleasant sound. Especially when you're screaming or shouting.

Producing-wise, you should do some EQing on your guitars. They sound really dirty, and not in the good way. Upping some of the lower frequencies while lowering the higher frequencies should help get that low, bassy deathmetal guitar sound. Similarly, for the solo guitar line, you should up some of the higher frequencies to help it cut through the mix a little more.

Reverb! I think you have just a little bit too much on the vocals. It muddles the sound and too much is really uncharacteristic of this genre. But on the lead guitar line, you don't have nearly enough.

And lastly, the drums. Snare drum can be a little bit louder, but that's personal preference. The bass drum, though, is not the right sound at all. It's just a low thump, and metal bass drum has this really loud THWAP sound that helps it cut through all the bass. Right now, what I hear as bass drum just feels like little pressure thumps on my ears. This works great for dance and other things where you want that thumping bass, but in a genre where almost every instrument is playing in the bass register, that kind of bass drum sound doesn't cut through at all.


Haha, that's a little more than I thought I would say when I started this post. xD You did a pretty good job with this, the little faults aside, and I'm looking forward to hearing more from you! =)

[Pickslide1992]

Lawl. I guess I'm not the only one that thinks it's really funny to hear deathmetal versions of really happy songs. xD

Critique! So first off, you should work a little more on pitch accuracy when singing. Breath support will fix that -- if you look for the thread where Circuitfry requests singing help in the technique forum, I've got a pretty lengthy post about that. If you look up the "GSnap" autotune plugin, that will also help pitch accuracy. =P (It's a really great plugin. It'll nudge some stray pitches in place without altering the sound at all.)

Secondly, you should work on not making your singing sound forced. If you want to get that hard rock Avenged Sevenfold sing-scream, the trick is actually not to force it but to relax your voice. A TON of breath support and singing really loudly while relaxing your voice in a certain way will get that growl. The only reason I bring this up is because you try to sound darker at certain points ("You can travel the world") and you just end up sounding like singing suddenly became really hard to do.

This last bit is just personal preference, but I think you could've added some vibrato to those really long notes in the guitar solo, just to add some interest to them. Electric guitar is NOT a very expressive instrument -- the volume decrescendos the same way for every note you play, and it's really difficult to vary the dynamics by picking harder or softer. So you make up for it with melodic phrasing. That being said, it really bothers me when I hear a guitar solo starting with a long note that just sits there and doesn't do anything. It's the equivalent of singing a note and just sitting on it, singing flatly with no expression.

Recording-wise, if you're singing louder, back away from the mic sufficiently or lower the volume. You can always raise the volume again later. I can hear the sound clipping and overloading at times, and it's not a pleasant sound. Especially when you're screaming or shouting.

Producing-wise, you should do some EQing on your guitars. They sound really dirty, and not in the good way. Upping some of the lower frequencies while lowering the higher frequencies should help get that low, bassy deathmetal guitar sound. Similarly, for the solo guitar line, you should up some of the higher frequencies to help it cut through the mix a little more.

Reverb! I think you have just a little bit too much on the vocals. It muddles the sound and too much is really uncharacteristic of this genre. But on the lead guitar line, you don't have nearly enough.

And lastly, the drums. Snare drum can be a little bit louder, but that's personal preference. The bass drum, though, is not the right sound at all. It's just a low thump, and metal bass drum has this really loud THWAP sound that helps it cut through all the bass. Right now, what I hear as bass drum just feels like little pressure thumps on my ears. This works great for dance and other things where you want that thumping bass, but in a genre where almost every instrument is playing in the bass register, that kind of bass drum sound doesn't cut through at all.


Haha, that's a little more than I thought I would say when I started this post. xD You did a pretty good job with this, the little faults aside, and I'm looking forward to hearing more from you! =)

^Wow, that's probably the best comment I've gotten on this site so far. Really this is more of a beta test for this sort of thing. Let me try to address every critique you gave me.

For the pitch accuracy thing, I try to stay away from autotune, I feel it's a bit of a cheater move as every pop star under the sun abuses it nowadays and makes any joe schmoe into an instant pop star, but I'll try my hand at doing so. Really I wanted to do death growls, but I need to practice those.

Yeah, that was kind of the point. I wanted to sound a bit rough, but maybe I did it a bit too much?

Ironically, I love doing vibrato on guitar. Maybe Ace Frehley or Paul Stanley influenced me in that regard, but I guess I derped out on this track and forgot to do it. Really this is my biggest self complaint, I needed to make the guitar solo a lot more involved and melodic rather than sounding a bit generic.

I did try to mix it a tiny bit, but my only other option in terms of clipping was to rerecord and my vocals were drained at that point and I didn't want to lose my voice.

Tone wise, I see where you're coming from. It sounded good but as I worked on it, I guess it's a little thin, or maybe I should use another amp model instead of the Marshall one.

Reverb I feel was a bit necessary but again, maybe I overdid it.

The drums I'm afraid I can't change because I don't have a really competent drum program outside of the stock ones in Riffworks, and the drums on my synth sound like crap, to be honest, so I can't change that until I get something that can do drums better than these two things.

Looking back...This track kind of sucks. Sorry to be hard on myself, but they say that you are your own worst critic, and I'm living proof of that fact.

[Versilaryan]

If you don't like autotune, your loss. =P Just going to say, literally every professional studio uses it, regardless of how good the singer is, 'cause I'd much rather hear something that's in-tune than out-of-tune.

And yeah, you want your voice to sound rough, but at the same time, you want it to sound easy. Like you just trekked through the desert and you've still got it in you to walk back, not like you just trekked through the desert and you're barely alive. If you want to get a ragged voice, I can't help you too much with that, but if you do want a throaty growl in your voice, you do actually need to relax your voice as opposed to forcing it.

For the drums, what I ended up doing for one of my tracks was downloading free drum synths online, and I stuck the bass drum in a separate track and ran it through some EQ to emphasize that thwack more than the rest of the sound. It doesn't sound perfect, but it's not bad at all.