[French Touch] Underwalker

[Quarmat]

Hello, here's my latest.

Basically I wrote about thirty bars in classic funk style, sampled them, threw in different Mimic instances, flipped and effected them. I compressed everything compressible, highpassed it a little to make room for the bass line and sidechained almost everything to the kick. There's a little synth interlude and I recovered the samples that didn't fit and put them at the end, a bit in the background.

As always any criticism is welcome, especially on the mix+mastering side.

Thanks for your time.

[aeox]

Excellent!

[Jac459]

Congrats on the good work! The French touch vibe is definitely there !

Some constructive (I hope) feedbacks:
- MIX:
The stereo is problematic in my view for 2 reasons: you have placed entire groups of instruments on the left and rights and for example, the first funky mashed loop has a chord almost 100% on the left and it makes it tiring too fast. Secondly it seems the stereo distribution is equal for all frequency range. I would personnaly try to recenter things in particular in the mediums and lows and spread the highs.
Talking about the highs, I don't know if you tried to reference your track but I have the feeling it lacks medium highs and highs, like after 3khz. I am no expert but that's the feeling I have, it is maybe worth a check.
Finally considering the genre, I wonder if a bit more compression with pump effect would give an additional sense of groove.
COMPOSITION:
Many things works very well but:
I wonder if the tempo isn't a bit slow. Again to increase this groovy feel.
Related to the genre, some additional voice shops and breaks could be nice (again, only my taste).

Just food for thoughts.

[Quarmat]

Excellent!

Thank you Aeox <3

Congrats on the good work! The French touch vibe is definitely there !

Thank you for your kind words and in-depth analysis!

- MIX:
The stereo is problematic in my view for 2 reasons: you have placed entire groups of instruments on the left and rights and for example, the first funky mashed loop has a chord almost 100% on the left and it makes it tiring too fast. Secondly it seems the stereo distribution is equal for all frequency range. I would personnaly try to recenter things in particular in the mediums and lows and spread the highs.
Talking about the highs, I don't know if you tried to reference your track but I have the feeling it lacks medium highs and highs, like after 3khz. I am no expert but that's the feeling I have, it is maybe worth a check.
Finally considering the genre, I wonder if a bit more compression with pump effect would give an additional sense of groove.

You're 100% right. Midrange and upper half are weak, I am revising the mix right now, and I am trying to adress this issues, albeit with my limited skillset, referencing to this track. I also agree on the guitar chord hardpanned to the left: it is very annoying but i need to find a way to move it a litte bit in to the mid without having to resample it, it would be a nightmare. I do love Mimic but I would love it even more if there was a way to set slice start position by entering a number and not only by dragging the marker left and right: this would allow to edit sample material, re-sample it and having the slice attacks in the same exact position.
I might have compressed a bit more, but I prefer to gravitate towards the early 00's Daft Punk sound than the current ultra-compressed Future Funk sound. I find the latter ear fatiguing.

COMPOSITION:
Many things works very well but:
I wonder if the tempo isn't a bit slow. Again to increase this groovy feel.
Related to the genre, some additional voice shops and breaks could be nice (again, only my taste).

Just food for thoughts.

I wanted a slow tempo (105 bpm) because I wanted a more "walking" allure rather than a "dancing" one (hence the name). And about the vocal chops, again you're right. I tried some vocals, plain, effected, chopped, but they all were unsatisfying so I removed them. I might try again in the future, once the ears are fresh again about this specific track

Thank you so much for your feedback!

[Popey]

Nice Daft punk vibes on this. Feedback wise the guitar chord has already been mentioned (i wondered if perhaps you sent this to return to channel with verb panned to the right and then eq'd the verb to just contain midrange frequencies would balance this out).

Only other thing i did not like personally was one of the perc sounds around 1:02 seemed really compressed and clicky (perhaps due to attack/release times) and seemed quite uncomfortable as i was listening to the track quite loud.

Overall though i really enjoyed this and look forward to hearing the revised version.

[Quarmat]

Nice Daft punk vibes on this. Feedback wise the guitar chord has already been mentioned (i wondered if perhaps you sent this to return to channel with verb panned to the right and then eq'd the verb to just contain midrange frequencies would balance this out).

Only other thing i did not like personally was one of the perc sounds around 1:02 seemed really compressed and clicky (perhaps due to attack/release times) and seemed quite uncomfortable as i was listening to the track quite loud.

Overall though i really enjoyed this and look forward to hearing the revised version.

Hey Popey, thank you for listening! I just updated the file (same link) with the new mix. Following yours and Jac459's suggestions I gave more brightness to the mid and mid-high frequencies, tamed some crazy resonant peaks when the bitcrusher does his stuff, polished the mix and the mid-side mastering, and some minor issues. Aaaand about that nasty left panned and too loud guitar chord, it drove me crazy, i ended up with narrowing the stereo widht of the sampler, and reducing its (sadly very very broad) area of interest on the left channel only. Not perfect, not at all, but better, i hope. I need to move on now, I am starting to hate this track

Thanks everybody!

[PhillipOrdonez]

Dope!

I want the strings more in your face!

[Jac459]

Quarmat, on our stereo discussion i think you just need to frequency split this in 3 bands and have only the higher band to be full stereo. The lows you put mono and the mid you reduce. You can do that as an insert after mimic with mclass racks

In your global mix you may also wants to have a different approach by band for stereo.

[Popey]

Nice Daft punk vibes on this. Feedback wise the guitar chord has already been mentioned (i wondered if perhaps you sent this to return to channel with verb panned to the right and then eq'd the verb to just contain midrange frequencies would balance this out).

Only other thing i did not like personally was one of the perc sounds around 1:02 seemed really compressed and clicky (perhaps due to attack/release times) and seemed quite uncomfortable as i was listening to the track quite loud.

Overall though i really enjoyed this and look forward to hearing the revised version.

Hey Popey, thank you for listening! I just updated the file (same link) with the new mix. Following yours and Jac459's suggestions I gave more brightness to the mid and mid-high frequencies, tamed some crazy resonant peaks when the bitcrusher does his stuff, polished the mix and the mid-side mastering, and some minor issues. Aaaand about that nasty left panned and too loud guitar chord, it drove me crazy, i ended up with narrowing the stereo widht of the sampler, and reducing its (sadly very very broad) area of interest on the left channel only. Not perfect, not at all, but better, i hope. I need to move on now, I am starting to hate this track

Thanks everybody!

Works for me and the guitar chord does not sound so out of place now. Was it a bitcrusher that was causing the perc sound to be so sharp? it is so much better now.

[rare_shadow]

Really cool track! You created your own unique production style.
I really like those tiny gaps for example at 1:04.
All sounds fit together nicely. Very well done!

I would be interested in listening to your original funk track before resampling.

[Quarmat]

Really cool track! You created your own unique production style.
I really like those tiny gaps for example at 1:04.
All sounds fit together nicely. Very well done!

I would be interested in listening to your original funk track before resampling.

Thank you! Well, to be honest, flipping samples is certainly not a new technique, let's just say that maybe not many of us write the material we then sample.

In any case if you're interested here I've recorded the original samples:

[rare_shadow]

Very cool! The source material would be a great release on it's own