Dinner Music

TommyM

My three year old niece and I have a wee song we sing when she's having her dinner, which basically just entails me hitting her toy drum while we both sing "Dinner Music" repeatedly. Being me and being, as she calls me, "Silly Uncle Tommy", I ended up making it into a proper track last night and sent it to her today. She loved it, but now she also want "Plate Music" so I suspect I'll need to produce an EP of this carnage to keep her happy. I thought I'd post it on here for a laugh 'cause it's FAR from serious and the vocals were done at 2AM on a crappy dynamic mic in my kitchen, but I reckon at least a few of you will get a chuckle out of it.

(For anyone who's a geek like me, the sung vocals are deliberately auto-tuned into oblivion and dragged up an octave, submixed through four doublers and a synth effect that works kinda like a vocoder. There's also about a dozen rhythmic chant sections run through a 4kHz filter and compressed to smithereens. Plus it's all panned all over the shop and EQ'd in an attempt to distinguish at least SOME words.)

@Diego - I mixed something like 48 vocal parts on this. I had long hair yesterday. Today, I'm bald. And this wasn't even a serious track.

@videoace - I know you said you're an engineering junkie...well check out this utter monstrosity. It's probably illegal in at least 48 states.

[Deleted User]

I think you underplayed your description because that was a pretty good mix. When you have that many things going on, and I can pick out every single one, that to me is a good mix. The drum sound I really liked. They were punchy/snappy which always sounds good to me because I like the bass guitar to thump right along with the drums.
Sounded good.

Peace, Tony

TommyM

Cheers mate, I think I'm just my own worst critic like we all are. The drums were just the "Dry Studio Kit" in Ableton Live, played in via MIDI keyboard and then quantized a bit but from the start the volume was really low. I ended up having to compress it pretty hard to get the snare to really crack through the voices and then EQ'd to bring up the beater sound on the kick around 2kHz. I think running a limiter on the master bus at the mastering stage really brought up the drums to compete with the vocal and synths, otherwise I was ending up with clipping when I tried to boost them on their own channel.

Also, it doesn't really help matters when I'm mixing on slightly-better-than-absolutely-crap in-ear earphones or a set of headphones with the right-hand side constantly breaking up. Needless to say, I aim to upgrade the whole shebang as soon as possible and get proper monitors.

[Deleted User]

What part of the globe are you from?

Diego

Hahaha! very nice little song you have there.
It's catchy, I like it.
It's very well done I have to say, It's very fun.
I can hear all of the vocal parts, they really mix well.
This sounds like an intro for a kids show haha.
Good Job Tommy!

-Diego

TommyM

@videoace Scotland! Although my accent is so thick you could beat a whale to death with it.