Thanks to the 4 of you for the replies, the tips, advice and comments. I'll try to reply to each in turn but I'm sure that there'll be some crossovers.
Thomas:
Commercial Trance will do fine as the genre.
I wanted to write my first trance track, but I wasn't certain as to whethere I had drifted away from the recognised form of trance during the composition.
Yes, I think that the main melody sits too far back, but it was a first mix before I went to Bonny Scotland (I threw some snowballs - in October!!!!!!). Also it sounded so different on 4 hi-fis and my ears were a bit over-tired from all the mixing/remixing. I will bring the main melody up more now that I'm home.
The Kik drum does need more definition and a quicker decay. While I was putting this together I liked the combination of the EDS8i Kik and the JV1080 hats. I wanted to steer clear of samples and loops for this track so I could've used some better kik samples for instance. However, I wanted to get under the skin of trance so I opted to do it all in midi, and believe you me, I had to nail some notes in one at a time to get the end result!
On listening more closely now, a shorter Kik with a bit bigger attack would allow more space in the mix for the other sounds to come through.
Tempo wise - yes it could be faster. I have another track under construction that is at 138 BPM, but seeing as how everything is coming from midi on this track it will be easy to up the tempo a bit.
Finally the bass - at the end of each "verse" I chose to pan the bass around a bit, slowing the attack while I did this. Don't ask me why, it felt right at the time!
Basic Pitch:
Wow, a whole bunch of tips from someone obviously schooled in trance. Thank you for every tip.
Yes, I do understand what you mean about the shakers.
I've played around with the Choppy Bass on the Uknow 007 - this reacts well to velocity for changing the timbres. Perhaps I'll use this instead.
The 303's is a bit more difficult. With 3 of them on the track, all doing their own little things, it was difficult to separate the sounds of the 3 of them, especially where all 3 come in together on the last "verse", but it is something I can try, if not on this track, certainly on the next one.
And the main synth - yes, it was a case of not having time to get to know its capabilities before using the patches that I used. The only variations on these came from velocity.
I'm really grateful for your .02
Kensuguro:
HAHAHA back - glad I caught you out. Of course, with it being my first ever attempt at trance, I'm embarrasingly pleased with your comments - glad you liked it.
Thalamus (Noah)Again, glad you liked it, but I'm young for my age (never had kids so I've not grown up myself yet!)
I'm also hoping for more than another 50
Regarding the vocals - it was a bit lucky that I could use them at all. They were simple and a bit dirty 8 bit clips I found on the net. They're hidden in the mix a bit on purpose (as loud as I could get away with)
Out of interest - is the telephone filtering the technique that you use on many of your tracks with the vocalist?
There were many other problems in puting this together too:
For instance I get lots of PCI overload errors and DSP overflows etc. I frequently have to use more than one project for each track.
Another problem is dirty hiss that I get from the outboard JV1080. I have a de-noiser plugin but this introduces too much latency to play along with. So I laid down the tracks with the plugin and then recorded to audio but found the latency had affected the timing of the hihats. The only answer that I could come up with was to record all and then have the plugin as the first one in my master effects chain, thus putting everything through the plug-in.
It kept the timing together but I didn't know if it would affect the overall mix.
Hence the early upload.
Anyway - again thanks for all your tips and comments. I feel confident to attempt another couple of tracks in this genre now and also have the advice to improve it.
One final question please - how do I re-upload a track once I've redone/remixed this one?
