Wes, nick, wolfgang and all,
Just found another person doing great beatles covers on gearslutz.
http://www.gearslutz.com/board/work-pro ... ost2518832
He has some classic Ludwig drums, an AC30, and some gretsches and an epiphone casino. But no RICKS!
Should we help him out?
"Every Little Thing" questions
-
revolver323
- Intermediate Member
- Posts: 997
- Joined: Mon Jul 04, 2005 5:48 am
- Contact:
Re: "Every Little Thing" questions
Given that the Beatles loved to play with tuning and tape machine speed, I'd say you've found the formula. Outstanding 12 string!
Re: "Every Little Thing" questions
Les, fine work on the 12, and very creative on your part to find an alternate way of reproducing the sound.
Re: "Every Little Thing" questions
Les, if you send me a 320kbps mp3 of the track sans drums I'll throw some real ones on for fun. Right now it sounds like the acoustic could use a lot more punch and the piano too, but the 12 sounds spot on.
Re: "Every Little Thing" questions
Thanks, Dave and Stan.
Wes, yeah my acoustic playing doesn't have the attack of john lennon's guitar. He really whacked that gibson
j160E when playing chords. I may do some more takes.
And yeah drum machines are not cutting it for me. I have started looking for drum kits on craigslist. Yesterday I rented a floor tom and tried to tune and damp it like ringo's drums to do fills. Fills and cymbals just don't work well with sampled drums. I used a constant 125 BPM which is easy to edit, but the original varied in timing. The verses were slower than the chorus in a very artistic way. Ringo is really an excellent drummer.
I have to go to work now (that microphone design gig) so I'm off to the acoustics lab. But i'll do a drumless stem render for you and throw it on yousendit. Let me give you a nice lossless FLAC file. I think the dynamic range will knock your socks off! I'm gonna separate the bass track too...perhaps I can get you to pull out that hofner club 40 too. The old EB-0 is a great guitar, but just not right for early beatles stuff. Rocks with Animals or Cream though.
Wes, yeah my acoustic playing doesn't have the attack of john lennon's guitar. He really whacked that gibson
j160E when playing chords. I may do some more takes.
And yeah drum machines are not cutting it for me. I have started looking for drum kits on craigslist. Yesterday I rented a floor tom and tried to tune and damp it like ringo's drums to do fills. Fills and cymbals just don't work well with sampled drums. I used a constant 125 BPM which is easy to edit, but the original varied in timing. The verses were slower than the chorus in a very artistic way. Ringo is really an excellent drummer.
I have to go to work now (that microphone design gig) so I'm off to the acoustics lab. But i'll do a drumless stem render for you and throw it on yousendit. Let me give you a nice lossless FLAC file. I think the dynamic range will knock your socks off! I'm gonna separate the bass track too...perhaps I can get you to pull out that hofner club 40 too. The old EB-0 is a great guitar, but just not right for early beatles stuff. Rocks with Animals or Cream though.
Re: "Every Little Thing" questions
I've got a DW kit at my disposal, so we'll see what I can lay down with the drums. You should probably keep the timpani sounding things on there though, they sound pretty good already. What recording program are you using?
Re: "Every Little Thing" questions
Wes,
I'm using reaper at 24/48. If you can do 24 bit that would be great, but Reaper allows mixing tracks of different formats
so no problem whatever you use.
Yeah, i'll leave the timpani in. That worked out pretty well. Those were from a 24 bit timpani pack at freesound. It was some work to get the glissando down pitch on the second hit. I had to slow it down and use reapitch, then speed it back up to normal.
Just taking a quick break from the lab...I'll get you the render this evening.
I'm using reaper at 24/48. If you can do 24 bit that would be great, but Reaper allows mixing tracks of different formats
so no problem whatever you use.
Yeah, i'll leave the timpani in. That worked out pretty well. Those were from a 24 bit timpani pack at freesound. It was some work to get the glissando down pitch on the second hit. I had to slow it down and use reapitch, then speed it back up to normal.
Just taking a quick break from the lab...I'll get you the render this evening.
Re: "Every Little Thing" questions
OK Wes, finally got it.
I have 3 tracks.
First one is just without drums.
Second one is without drums or bass.
Third is bass only.
This will let you do a monitor mix with different bass levels. I keep the bass pretty low in the final mix, just like the beatles did. I turn it up so I can just hear it distinctly, then back it down a hair. Just start both files at the same time and they'll sync up. If you get the urge to pull out the hofner club you can do a new bass track. The bass is pretty simple, mostly one note as was typical for beatles "filler" tacks.
These are all 125 BPM if you need to set up a click track. I needed to due to the 6 beat delay between the opening riff and the acoustic/drum/bass intro. I think I included a closed hihat intro count as well. We can wipe that later.
I did switch to 320 mp3, but I also have the tracks in 24 bit flac. I started to put them on my ftp site but my transfer rate
is too slow. Beter to get them to you on yousendit. It's fast. I'll need an email to send them to...you could pm one or click on
my web site ( at the signature line below) and click contact and email me. It's up to you. The files are big, but sound better.
http://www.lmwatts.com/music/everylittlething6julND.mp3 (no drums)
http://www.lmwatts.com/music/everylittl ... ulNDNB.mp3 (no drums or bass)
http://www.lmwatts.com/music/everylittlething6julB.mp3 (bass only)
Hasve fun and thanks! Hope you can do this in 24 bit.Can't wait to see what you come up with!
I have 3 tracks.
First one is just without drums.
Second one is without drums or bass.
Third is bass only.
This will let you do a monitor mix with different bass levels. I keep the bass pretty low in the final mix, just like the beatles did. I turn it up so I can just hear it distinctly, then back it down a hair. Just start both files at the same time and they'll sync up. If you get the urge to pull out the hofner club you can do a new bass track. The bass is pretty simple, mostly one note as was typical for beatles "filler" tacks.
These are all 125 BPM if you need to set up a click track. I needed to due to the 6 beat delay between the opening riff and the acoustic/drum/bass intro. I think I included a closed hihat intro count as well. We can wipe that later.
I did switch to 320 mp3, but I also have the tracks in 24 bit flac. I started to put them on my ftp site but my transfer rate
is too slow. Beter to get them to you on yousendit. It's fast. I'll need an email to send them to...you could pm one or click on
my web site ( at the signature line below) and click contact and email me. It's up to you. The files are big, but sound better.
http://www.lmwatts.com/music/everylittlething6julND.mp3 (no drums)
http://www.lmwatts.com/music/everylittl ... ulNDNB.mp3 (no drums or bass)
http://www.lmwatts.com/music/everylittlething6julB.mp3 (bass only)
Hasve fun and thanks! Hope you can do this in 24 bit.Can't wait to see what you come up with!
Re: "Every Little Thing" questions
I'll just to lay the drum tracks on the mp3 for now. If they turn out good I'll get you the actual tracks so you can put it all together.
Re: "Every Little Thing" questions
To be honest, the verses could be a little more on time. I'll try to make it work though.
Re: "Every Little Thing" questions
I did a couple takes and this is what I came up with. A bunch of the kicks in the verse are slightly off, but it's tough because the original recording isn't quite on time there. I'm going for the lo-fi sound of the drums on the mono recording.
http://wesmitchelldesign.com/every_little_thing.mp3
http://wesmitchelldesign.com/every_little_thing.mp3
Re: "Every Little Thing" questions
Cool!
Yeah, it's gotta be hard doing the drums after the fact, because it ties every thing else together. Everything follows the drums, and when they are not there it's tough. I couldn't do it.
That's why I figured you might need a metronome clicktrack at 125 bpm.
On the acoustic I used a new guitar, a blue ridge dreadnaught. Kind of a beater. It's a $400 Chinese prewar scalloped bracing d-18 clone.I often use the guitars I have made, but they are all parlor guitars and I wanted a dreadnaught sound, but I had traded my martin d28 for a classical. I was getting murdered by the high factory action. One take and my fingers were shot. I just did an action job on it though, so at least I can practice more without blowing my fingers away. I need more attack on the acoustic.
I could see on the original that John L. Was delayed a lot on the 325 12 riffs. I guess he wasn't used to it....George was supposed to show up but didn't. I can tell from the mic bleed that they had about 20-30 ms delay.
Anyway I'm amazed you could get the timing that good with a drumless track without a click track. You just had so few timing cues. Better to do drums first, huh? Of course The DAW can quantize timing stuff accurately, but that's cheatin'.
In fact using a drum machine kinda turned my project into musak, because the original has artistic tempo changes that were lost with the constant timing. I did turn the "drunk" control to about 10 oclock on hydrogen, but that just attempts to put random timing changes in in attempt to humanize the tempo. The original's tempo changes were artistic though, not random. Having the drunk control up is probably what you heard, because I tried to follow it with the later tracks.
Great job though! I don't know how you could do it!
Yeah, it's gotta be hard doing the drums after the fact, because it ties every thing else together. Everything follows the drums, and when they are not there it's tough. I couldn't do it.
That's why I figured you might need a metronome clicktrack at 125 bpm.
On the acoustic I used a new guitar, a blue ridge dreadnaught. Kind of a beater. It's a $400 Chinese prewar scalloped bracing d-18 clone.I often use the guitars I have made, but they are all parlor guitars and I wanted a dreadnaught sound, but I had traded my martin d28 for a classical. I was getting murdered by the high factory action. One take and my fingers were shot. I just did an action job on it though, so at least I can practice more without blowing my fingers away. I need more attack on the acoustic.
I could see on the original that John L. Was delayed a lot on the 325 12 riffs. I guess he wasn't used to it....George was supposed to show up but didn't. I can tell from the mic bleed that they had about 20-30 ms delay.
Anyway I'm amazed you could get the timing that good with a drumless track without a click track. You just had so few timing cues. Better to do drums first, huh? Of course The DAW can quantize timing stuff accurately, but that's cheatin'.
In fact using a drum machine kinda turned my project into musak, because the original has artistic tempo changes that were lost with the constant timing. I did turn the "drunk" control to about 10 oclock on hydrogen, but that just attempts to put random timing changes in in attempt to humanize the tempo. The original's tempo changes were artistic though, not random. Having the drunk control up is probably what you heard, because I tried to follow it with the later tracks.
Great job though! I don't know how you could do it!
Re: "Every Little Thing" questions
The choruses are in time, but the verses are all over the place. The main problem is the acoustic stuff. If it's not right on time then the kicks get funky. I tried the click track but I ended up following the metronome not the song so that didn't work out.
One thing you should work on though is getting all the instruments to sit together better in the mix. Meaning that everything shouldn't sound so isolated. Some global reverb and compression helps a lot with this, and of course lots of careful EQ'ing.
I think with this song, it would be more powerful to put everything straight up the middle to emulate the mono version. The stereo version lacks a lot of the punch of the mono one because everything is so pushed apart.
Another little thing you should think about is cutting the highs on everything, especially the acoustics. No early Beatle recordings really have anything above 15000 Hz or so, so clip the tops off so that they don't sound like they're as live.
One thing you should work on though is getting all the instruments to sit together better in the mix. Meaning that everything shouldn't sound so isolated. Some global reverb and compression helps a lot with this, and of course lots of careful EQ'ing.
I think with this song, it would be more powerful to put everything straight up the middle to emulate the mono version. The stereo version lacks a lot of the punch of the mono one because everything is so pushed apart.
Another little thing you should think about is cutting the highs on everything, especially the acoustics. No early Beatle recordings really have anything above 15000 Hz or so, so clip the tops off so that they don't sound like they're as live.
Re: "Every Little Thing" questions
Yeah, i'm gonna do some more takes of the acoustic with the newly improved action. It needs to be tighter and have much more attack.
I think George Martin had the same opinion as far as the stereo separation. These cuts were for am radio airplay, and he wanted a solid mono mix. I think they all hated the capitol stereo mixes. Some were truly horrible...worst was "I feel Fine".
I think they expressed their opinion with the famous "butcher" cover art.
A spectrogram reveals a rapid rolloff at 10kHz on the original. Back then tape bias was usually set very high to improve
signal/noise and distortion because so many generations of tape were used. This caused self erasure of the highs, but hey,
AM radio didn't go past 5 kHz anyway.
They also used tons and tons of Fairchild compressor/limiter. I didn't use any compression. That's why the original wav
files have 115 db dynamic range. But it makes it sound very thin especially on small computer speakers. I had a good discussion about dynamic range over at gearslutz with Dan Lavry, the guy who makes those outrageously high dynamic range converters (123db!!!!) In general people don't like that much. They find it irritating, I guess. Try throwing some compression in.
I did do a render with lots of global compression, and it sounds much more like the original. I like lots of dynamic range,
but I'm a gear designer. And my monitor speakers have 3000W rms behind them! The timpani on this track nearly takes the roof off, even when the other stuff is at low volume.
This fun stuff makes me remember way back. I'm old, and once...just once... I got to play in a real recording studio. It was what is now Full Sail in Orlando. 1969. Our organist's mom was rich, so she paid the $100/hr for a session. That was a ton of money....a new car then cost $3000. We tracked stuff on an ampex AG440 8 track with 1" tape. Neuman U67 mics were used on drums and vocals, and the monitors were HUGE Altec A7 voice of the theaters. 101 db with one watt!!! I just couldn't believe the sound. I had never heard anything so clean and clear. But by the time it was mixed down (on an ampex 2 track with 1/2" tape) and a mono acetate was cut the sound was squashed. Did't matter anyway, because we , uh, sucked.
But I think that started me toward an engineering career designing gear. And you know what? I have a pair of Altec A7s in the studio today! Don't use them much, but i'll always remember that sound. They actually started making the things again:
http://www.alteclansing.com/index.php?f ... duct_id=a7
Good thing I got mine 30 years ago.
I kind of don't like the price now.
I think George Martin had the same opinion as far as the stereo separation. These cuts were for am radio airplay, and he wanted a solid mono mix. I think they all hated the capitol stereo mixes. Some were truly horrible...worst was "I feel Fine".
I think they expressed their opinion with the famous "butcher" cover art.
A spectrogram reveals a rapid rolloff at 10kHz on the original. Back then tape bias was usually set very high to improve
signal/noise and distortion because so many generations of tape were used. This caused self erasure of the highs, but hey,
AM radio didn't go past 5 kHz anyway.
They also used tons and tons of Fairchild compressor/limiter. I didn't use any compression. That's why the original wav
files have 115 db dynamic range. But it makes it sound very thin especially on small computer speakers. I had a good discussion about dynamic range over at gearslutz with Dan Lavry, the guy who makes those outrageously high dynamic range converters (123db!!!!) In general people don't like that much. They find it irritating, I guess. Try throwing some compression in.
I did do a render with lots of global compression, and it sounds much more like the original. I like lots of dynamic range,
but I'm a gear designer. And my monitor speakers have 3000W rms behind them! The timpani on this track nearly takes the roof off, even when the other stuff is at low volume.
This fun stuff makes me remember way back. I'm old, and once...just once... I got to play in a real recording studio. It was what is now Full Sail in Orlando. 1969. Our organist's mom was rich, so she paid the $100/hr for a session. That was a ton of money....a new car then cost $3000. We tracked stuff on an ampex AG440 8 track with 1" tape. Neuman U67 mics were used on drums and vocals, and the monitors were HUGE Altec A7 voice of the theaters. 101 db with one watt!!! I just couldn't believe the sound. I had never heard anything so clean and clear. But by the time it was mixed down (on an ampex 2 track with 1/2" tape) and a mono acetate was cut the sound was squashed. Did't matter anyway, because we , uh, sucked.
But I think that started me toward an engineering career designing gear. And you know what? I have a pair of Altec A7s in the studio today! Don't use them much, but i'll always remember that sound. They actually started making the things again:
http://www.alteclansing.com/index.php?f ... duct_id=a7
Good thing I got mine 30 years ago.
I kind of don't like the price now.