My band's new recording - Needs Judgement

[Ranger Joe]

Ok, folks! I need some critical feed back or compliments on something. My band was chartered by an indy movie director to write the theme song for his vampire movie. We do operatic metal, with no synths or backing tracks. The lyrics, of course, are about the whole vampire, darkness within, what have you....We normally do very politically themed songs, so this was a bit of a dive into the stereotypical category, but I want thoughts from strangers. A few other recordings are at our various sites. I couldn't upload the song because proboard's wouldn't let it happen, but I will happily email the file (it's an mp3). PM me an email I can send it to and I'll send out a mass email Screw mass email! I discovered MediaFire!

www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=ed3cf176eea5a695e7c82ed4b8f0c380e04e75f6e8ebb871

Side Note: Before anyone asks, the thing our drummer is playing is called a Zen Drum. He's a hand drummer, so this makes him able to continue using that style of drumming as apposed to sticks.

SAUCE: www.zendrum.com

I would love to have some constructive feedback.

Thanks All.

[Armand Tanzarian]

Are you soundtracking the movie in general as well?

If not, can you ask if he needs one?

[Ranger Joe]

Aug 28, 2009 0:32:17 GMT -5 Armand Tanzarian said:

Are you soundtracking the movie in general as well?

If not, can you ask if he needs one?

I most certainly will ask. We are only doing two songs, so I'm sure there are others. I will PM ya if I get any information.

[Amaranth]

I gotta say, I can see this easily being a theme for a Vampire move. Quite cool. Only thing I don't like is the vocals, and this may be more a specific genre choice than anything bad about them. It's hard to quantify, but they seem out of place in like 80% of the song, and just...off, sometimes. I don't think she's off-key, but it does grate on me in the same way.

But full disclosure, I rarely listen to operatic metal in the first place. I try and be objective in my criticism, but there's a solid chance I'm just prejudiced against operatic vocals.

[lonelocust]

The bass sounds like it was slightly out of tune with the instruments and vocals. I'm not sure if it was an actual tuning or a mixing issue. Either way you can probably fix it with a tiny bit of mixing. The other thing is in the silent parts where it was just the voice, the vocal effect (or was it two stacked recordings of the singer?) made it very difficult to hear the lyrics.

I like the exaggerated dissonance in the melody. This is what Amaranth is referring to, I believe. It's actually quite jarring, but seems to be a specific choice. Most melodies contain some notes that are dissonant with the underlying music. The melody of the verses in this song has a lot more of these dissonant notes than what you usually hear.