The Watering Hole

little thing just tossed off today - mixed on headphones so no idea how this sounds out in the real world yet.

you'll probably think the same things I'm thinking about the mix... so I won't comment on that.

I like the progession/mood of it.

ironsheep — Aug 08, 2015you'll probably think the same things I'm thinking about the mix... so I won't comment on that.

I like the progession/mood of it.

Wow yeah way too much drums.  Must get some monitors again for mixing

And too much low end as usual :)

Here's another go at the mix.  I applied some science to it this time bY cutting frequencies to carve out spaces for the kick and bass and guitar so hopefully that fits together better now as they shouldn't be competing for the same sonic space now.  I also used a reference track to ensure I was "sort of" in the right area.  Not sure if the guitar is now too loud ? I can't seem to judge how loud the guitar should be using headphones, it's an odd thing.  I switch the mix to mono every now and then to check levels and the guitar then seems too low so I pushed it up a bit and then in stereo it sounds too loud (in headphones).  The guitar is DI and this is just using a fuzz VST plugin then into Two Notes Wall Of Sound for the cabinets. I haven't listened to this on the main house stereo system yet so fingers crossed this is better ?   Will start recording through the supro amp soon. I have plenty of mics now etc so should be able to get some good sounds from that as it's a lovely sounding amp.

Thoughts on the mix would be appreciated as I always struggle with this.

it's hard for me to get a sense of what's not happening... but something's not marrying those three together quite right. each sounds fine when I focus on them... hard to say.

might be that the drums and guitar have sufficiently different reverbs that it's noticeable... or that the drums are too low in the mix - they could use some weight. I can pick up the kick ok but the snare is a little lost. cymbals are generally good (overheads might be a little low where the ride is concerned)

the guitar sounds a little loud in the mix to me - but I'm not sure if that's because it's on the left or if it's just a little loud. seems like mono tracks behave strangely on their own when panned far out (noticed this on my own stuff) -- sometimes they need to be bumped down to compensate, but sometimes they need a little boost compared to straight up center/mono.

I can't mix with headphones at all - I don't even try! heh. what I tend to do lately is check mixes through my iMac's built in speakers. after checking the mix on crap speakers, it (almost) always sounds immensely better on monitors. they have zero low end... helps a bit with getting things balanced out when I'm not worrying about the kick's peak but if it can be heard at all if the low end it sliced off at around 100Hz. same with the bass -- I tend to keep an eye on achieving a very nice looking frequency distribution on the spectrum meter (heh) but if I don't make a point of checking how it sounds on crappy speakers, it'll turn out sounding like there was no kick or bass at all. just a wall of nondescript "low end". your mix didn't have that wall... but the kick was mostly subwoofer content only -- give it a big eq boost somewhere in the 1k to 2.5k range till it sticks out a bit, see if you like it.

I think a big problem is the guitar sound....far too bright and eating up all the space for the snare etc. if I take the guitar out the bass and drums sit together nicely.  I think I will try again with the amp and mics and see what that does. Also, the drums is superior 2.  I've aleays had difficulty with that as everything needs a lot of eq etc to make things fit.  In contrast I also have addictive drums and that just fits right in to most mixes without hardly any tweaking so might try replacing the drum track.  On the other hand might just go down the reharsal room with my son and get some real drums on it, always sounds so much better.  Anyway, just a test to get back into all this stuff as I have a bit of spare time now.  Wish I could aford to employ someone to mix it for me :)

I like it Jon.  Very Achilles Last Standish.  I'm not much help on the mix.  I thought the second version was good but the guitar seemed very left heavy.   If that's where you want it, that's cool by me.

I dig the track and the playing.  Good stuff.

DM — Aug 10, 2015I like it Jon.  Very Achilles Last Standish.  I'm not much help on the mix.  I thought the second version was good but the guitar seemed very left heavy.   If that's where you want it, that's cool by me.

I dig the track and the playing.  Good stuff.

Funny you should say that. Achilles last stand is one song that is always floating around in my head, always has been for the last 40 or whatever years. That song just has it all and whenever I'm noodling I always seem to pull from it, just can't get away from it :)

Good job as usual Jon!  Speaking of Zep, did you happen to notice that Coda, Presence, In Through The Outdoor and Physical Grafitti were just remastered and released less than two weeks ago?  I've been listening and there's 16 unreleased tracks that are now on Coda.  Sounds pretty good actually!  

Heh... I was going to post a link to the new, full album from YouBoob, but it looks like it's been taken down already (account terminated).  Oh well...  ::)

Hey Craig.  Yeah I need to buy all the albums again to get the companion disks that go with all of them.  I still have all of the original vinyl albums of zep, complete set that I bought as they were released all those years ago. I bought zep 1&2 when I was 11 years old in 1972 and then bought all the others soon after and as and when they were released etc.  Amazing to think that the vinyl albums are in better shape than I am  ;D

Not so hectic business wise here now so now have time to play again at last.  Lots of recording to come especially with my son on drums, he really is a mini Bonham.  Has all the Bonham tricks, fills etc down to a fine art.  He is taking grade 6 drum exam at trinity college in September, then his teacher has said he will skip grade 7 and go straight to grade 8....which is the highest grade there is.

How's business by the way, on the up ?

Things are currently slow since my two main clients both had pretty much nothing going for July and August (which is why I'm glad I got all those cables sold).  After my hard drive wiped out all of my new business files, images, ideas, etc. I'm just slowly starting over again!  If the hard drive had just died, I would have been ok, but it was slowly corrupting all the files which ended up propagating to my backups as well.  Between that and having to move to a new place (which did NOT go smooth), it pretty much took me back to zero financially and health-wise.

The new place has been great.  I have a friend who also went through having his house stolen by the banks but, since he used to be in the Navy, was able to buy another one sooner. His last child moved back to the area that his ex-wife lives in (3,000 miles away) so it made for a perfect chance to rent a room from him.  Since we're both IT geeks and dart players we get along well.  Plus his Boston Terrier loves me so it's been good for all of us.  :)

As for My Private Documents, I chose to not start over because of offers like Amazon's Cloud Drive (which I'm actually using myself) that offers unlimited cloud storage for only $59.99 per year...  Hard to compete against that!  :(

Hope they don't invade your little kingdom over there!  ;)

Amazon cloud is over here too, but people and businesses don't trust it, and with good reason.  Read the small print.... The 'periodically' refresh (wipe) customers data to keep their systems in good shape and if you don't have a backup you are fucked. Myweboffice is going from strength to strength.

That small print doesn't exist for US customers (I've read their entire legal mumbo jumbo).  The only time things would get wiped is if you don't pay for the next year (and even then you have some time to renew before they remove anything).

Are you using Amazon Cloud storage or Amazon Cloud Server (a virtual server that you configure)?

I just found another "gotcha" on the Amazon cloud storage that I find amazing to say the lease, and I quote:

3.3 Our Use of Your Files to Provide the Service. We may use, access, and retain Your Files in order to provide the Service to you and enforce the terms of the Agreement, and you expressly give us all permissions we need to do so. These permissions include, for example, the rights to copy Your Files for backup purposes, modify Your Files to enable access in different formats, and access Your Files to provide technical support. Amazon respects your privacy and Your Files are subject to the Amazon.co.uk Privacy Notice.

No thanks to that !

I'm not seeing the problem there.. you are using a cloud service... if you won't let them back up, the service is useless.  Modifying the files for access in different formats probably means zipping or taring your files in a backup set, and accessing your files for tech support seems self-evident. Do you mean to tell me you have never accessed one of your customer's files, or had a need to back it up, zip it, or help a customer to recover a file?

This is exactly why I run my own successful cloud data centre hosting mostly goverment data as the amazon terms are far too loose and can be manipulated to mean whatver they choose it to mean.  I wouldn't go anywhere near that sort of agreement as you are effectively giving them permission to do what they like with your data.  Amazing. Agreements of this kind need to be specific, this is far too loose.

I'm only using them as archive, offline storage.  As soon as I can afford it, I'm going to get two matching 4 TB hard drives and put them into a RAID 1 configuration.  That, along with the usual image backups (which also get uploaded to Amazon), should protect my data.  The fact that I can access the data from anywhere is just a bonus.

I think it will be a lot better than hoping my non-RAID'ed hard drive doesn't get messed up between backups and keeping copies of the images on another hard drive that is kept in a fire-proof safe (not exactly the correct "offline" storage solution).

Soon I'll be redo-ing my PC with Windows 2012 Server R2 as my primary OS on a 250 GB SSD drive and three virtual machines.  One will be for Adobe, Microsoft Office, everyday type stuff; one for development (Visual Studio 2013, Eclipse and SQL Server, etc.); and one that will be my Internet whore (catch a virus from some website?  Just restore the Golden Copy of the VM.)  All of this, along with lots of Lynda.com tutorials will help me get up-to-date on current technology.  My roommate has access to all Microsoft software as a Gold Partner so I also have the chance to become familiar with things like Sharepoint Server, Project Server, and Team Foundation Server.  Thanks to someone creating a cash cow for themselves, it seems you now need certifications for everything (at an average of $150 for each cert. test).  So I want to be ready and then I can get whatever cert I need when/if I need one.  Fuck, Microsoft has over 170 different certs and many have prerequisite certs so they know you'll have to spend to get them.  Sorry, rant over!

I think you would have a better, more solid solution if you purchased 2 NAS boxes (maybe 2 or 4 drives in each, eg, upto 16 terrabytes in each NAS box) both running RAID of course. Use one of those as the "live" drive and use the other as the backup drive synched to the "live" drive.  Always better to separate the operating system from the data store.  The synology NAS boxes are really great value and very secure.  Plug them into your network via ethernet, set them up with usernames and passwords on the top level shares that you want, give your server(s) and or desktops access to those shares and you then have a nice solid system that keeps the volatile operating system completely separate from the data store.   If your pc goes down, your data is safe as it's not on your pc.  If one of your raid drives go down in the NAS, just pop-in another disk and the data will be rebuilt based upon information that is stored in the other disks in the RAID set. If the enter NAS goes down, you have a copy of everything on your other NAS.   Most importantly, get yourself a UPS (interruptable power supply) so that if the mains goes off you have an hour or so to shut things down nicely. Mostly if the power goes off it's only for minutes at a time so you do nothing and the UPS just keeps everything running.

All of that can be done for not very much money.

Damn, seem to have hijacked my own thread :)

Jon — Aug 13, 2015All of that can be done for not very much money.

My current solution will cost $300 US once, plus $60 US per year.  Someday maybe a NAS will be the ticket, but now it's overkill.

Jon — Aug 13, 2015Damn, seem to have hijacked my own thread :)

Nah, this just falls under the "stuff" category in the title!  ;D

Jon — Aug 13, 2015Damn, seem to have hijacked my own thread :)

Nah, this just falls under the "stuff" category in the title!  ;D

Fair go.... I'll go along with that  :)

Well, there are better solutions than Amazon.

I like Backblaze and Crashplan (I use backblaze personally and crashplan at work).  Backblaze is limited to 30 days of backup, which seems short, but if I don't know I've crashed in 30 days, then I'm just out of the loop.  Crashplan never deletes your files (until you stop paying them, or unless you specifically set a time limit) but their backups (judging by my work version) are a little wonkier to manage.  Either one will send you a drive from which to reboot - either USB or hard disk.  I think backblaze charges some money for a restore drive mailed to you, crashplan does it free but expects the drive back in a certain amount of time.  

After my last hard drive crash I started using multiple 4GB drives and running manual backups every couple of days, and I shelled out for the online backup. Initial backup online takes a while... like, days. But I'm covered in multiple ways.  My buddy installed a NAS with 16GB and I like the conceptual idea but again, a little wonky for me.