Yeah.That's a reasonable summation of the situation.Your tunes seem to veer between subtle textural ambience with suggested underplayed moods to over the top rock-outs but my own, and I'm not afraid to admit it, limitations kick in with the oforementioned Velociraptor lyrics and vocal style which seems crass to me by comparison as your other tracks are quality.
Please disregard my comments as music should be all about difference and opinion and if you liked it then that should be enuff.I've done plenty of tracks which I felt were maister works and with retrospect were shit.A trackI didn't really rate is currently my most bumped so I obviously know diddly, just opinionated so keep doin what your doin, the gems will keep coming!
OrB

hey no worries about the delay :) and the new songs are totally worth the wait ;) great stuff, thanks a million!

I think the radiohead influence definitely shows, but I don't mean that in a bad way! this is great music and still distinctly your own, for sure..
I think the songs are composed excellently, but I wish I could hear the vocals more clearly. Do your record them straight into your computer? You could try running them through a 4 track deck with a mixer (or something better if you've got it) to boost the signal before running that into the computer. That's usually what I have to do to record my vocals, because i've got a really soft voice and a not so great recording setup. But I'm sure you've got better equipment than I do : )
Not that you asked for advice, but I do really like these tunes!

Really dug The Jobs. Hope you post more.

Pretty slick. Keep up the good tunes.

ugh, longest wall post ever. sorry. :)

Gah. I've tried to write to you a few times and have had to redo my post because I tried to look something up, and used this window by accident. I should get to sleep!

Anyway. I was saying that your stuff reminds me a bit of my friend's earlier recordings, maybe because he had a similar setup. I think he has better gear now, as he's done some recordings for different artists out of his basement as well. He's now also working on his own album. In any case, when he started making tracks I couldn't get into a lot of the stuff he'd preview for me, and a lot of the time I think it came from him being so close to the work that it was hard to judge where it was at. Again, I'm no musician, but I am a visual artist so I understand the concepts behind creative work.

I think that while you say you add reverb to go for the more atmospheric feel, I feel your songwriting and structure already achieve that, so the reverb on the vocals are kind of overdoing it. Like emphasizing text with bold, underline and italics at once. I think my friend did it with the compression and reverb on his early songs too. (Decay In Motion is his artist name on here.) It alternately overwhelms or dulls down the entire song. My favourite of these old tracks of his would be Lost, but--to use a visual term--I think it could benefit from more "contrast" throughout, because it currently sounds a bit flat throughout. Guitar gets a bit punchier, but the keyboard bit never does, and the vocals are (to me) too understated.

I don't ever really listen to Sigur Ros, but this song blows me away and is a good example of good balance and confident production choices: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0AZIFmkogY

Clear vocals (though it sounds like it might be tracked twice with slight compression on the second), with dreamy piano and the pacing makes the song atmospheric. Well, it does help that the words are nonsense. However, if the vocals were reverbed, it would blur and muffle it into the same ranges as the piano. This way, they stand out on separate frequencies and read cleanly.

Near the end, there's a variant on the vocals where they use much more obvious and clearly intentional compression (like you do in the "youknow,youknow,youknow" part in Big Mistake) with more layering--but everything stands out distinctly except for maybe the harmonizing violin during that loud build.

Now, I compare not because I am saying you should sound anything like sigur ros, but it seems like the song structures are somewhat similar, and I just wanted to point how the distortion or reverb is relative because of how the rest of the song is. At the beginning of the song: vocals are prominent and "up front" while the piano is atmospheric. End: it switches around, and the piano moves forward to take the "voice" (without any change in sound) while the vocals recede with the compression. Net result is amazingly powerful pacing and an epic track.

Time does sound more organized and a bit clearer, but the atmospheric impression I get is still muffled, not stylistic, because everything sounds like it's under that. Like hearing someone on a karaoke machine when the music is not up loud enough, or leaving a sound card equalizer effect on by accident. The "youknow" part is less refreshing to the ears because there's an effect on everything.

Sorry if this is all rambling and makes no sense, I'm sleep deprived and up too late again. Please don't take my comments to be overstepping; opinions are just that, but I'm all for discussion. Cheers!

I'm actually not a musician myself... my limited experience includes making some brutal 30-second clips in a beta of FL while I was in junior high school. So, take my next comments with a grain of salt!

I think a bunch of your songs have a lot of promise, but I think a cleaner mixdown would do them more justice. I assume the reverb on the vocals are intentional, but I think the effect comes across differently... my personal take is that it just seems to muddy the track and bury your vocals and percussion, then the guitar overwhelms both. Is the reverb the exact type of vocal distortion effect you have in mind? Limitations of the Zoom?

The "you know, you know" part in Big Mistake sounds good, and much more intentional. It'd be interesting to have a whole song with the vocals distorted that way.

I think if there was more clarity to "You Come To Mind" it'd sound even better. Do you intend on updating these with new versions once you settle in?

Anyway, just my two cents. Keep on keepin on.

Welcome to thesixtyone from a Calgarian. When's the move? I'm also curious... what sort of recording setup did you have for the material you've uploaded so far?

You bet. Good stuff. Not polished enough for mainstream yet -- but maybe that's why I like it :-)

no prob. Love the bio, btw!

FAWM! FAWM!