Please Rate my Cover/remix of "Raise Your Weapon" (SAE School Project)

[DJZILCH]

Hi there, this is the second track I ever made, its a remix/cover of deadmau5' raise your weapon

this is just a rough mix, to be mastered soon

This is a school project i did for my school (SAE Institute)

I recorded a female vocalist (Shaa) to cover the singing

anyways please give me some input so i can rework the final mix and master it

arrangement? snares too soft? snares need more reverb? too much gated white noise burst on snare? please be as critical as possible

keep in mind that this is not the final mix and is yet to be mastered

[Reveren Kamakaze]

Not bad, I was expecting something more different, So many dub step versions are already out there. I'm no expert on production since I haven't gone to a school; just a lot of internet, but that snare need's more presence, overall good quality, Love the synth at 2:46, what plug in did you use for that? And are the vocals an acapella ?

[DJZILCH]

hey there thanks for the feedback
almost everything is self recorded,
the vocals are recorded with neumann u87, a female friend of mine sang for it
the drums are actual drum kits which are sampled and then layered on top of each other (3 layers of kick and 5 layers of snare)

im my school they dont really teach how to make electronic music into too much detail, mostly they cover live bands and real instruments, so most of this is really self - learnt haha, im quite a noob in electronic music production this is only my second attempt at creating one, so yeah i still need to learn much

The synth is sylenth1 , i composed the melody myself (im not a musician so its just me putting notes on the piano roll and go by "feel" rather than actual music theory rules)

there are no sample packs being used in this - except for a layer of kick because the drum kit in my school does not deliver a kick that is powerful enough for a dance music production

thanks for the feedback! will definitely look into those snares

this is a slightly revised mastered version:



I didnt want to overdo it so I just did extra EQ, cleaned up some messy parts, multi-band compression, multi band exciter etc

thanks again for listening, really appreciate it

[dryzero]

Sounds pretty cool to me! Nice cover

[fullenglishpint]

You're telling me that's not the original vocalist? Good lord.

[DJZILCH]

thanks man, she struggles a bit on the vocal though, took me two 4 hour sessions to get the vocals right, and a lot of heavy compiling and choosing the best takes, i must have probably spent 200+hours on the whole school project from sampling the drums , recording the vocals to mixdown and mastering

i am about to get graded tomorrow in a presentation - so SCARY! Never been so terrified in my life! So about 4 senior audio engineers are going to sit down in front of me while i explained what i did for the project etc, and then i play them the song, hoping that they like it, they can be extremely critical sometimes - thats why its so scary!

[16b441khz]

You're telling me that's not the original vocalist? Good lord.

Exactly what i was thinking, she sounds amazing.

This is a really good job, maybe layer an extra synth to go on top of that LFO bass so that it has just a bit more grit/bite to it. Maybe bring that in on the second chorus because its meant to come across as a more agressive drop. Just some ideas.

Keep us posted on the progress.

[strategicsilence]

musically, i really like what you did with the song. the chord change with the bass is extremely effective compared to the original root not drone. im a big fan of this song so its cool to see what you did with it. i really enjoyed the more ambient vibe you put into it. keep it up.

[D.J.E.A.T.A.]

Ehemm... if i may... I think that, for an electronic/dubstep track the kick is quite a bit weak, and with the strengthening of the kick, the snare would sound weaker and so i suggest an over all boost to the instruments. For that bass you could probably just use a vocoder and wavashaper on it. Pretty much it all sounds even, in terms of strength, but its all evenly low... if you know what i mean. So over all it just needs more strength. I must say though, it does sound clean, so excelent job on that. And also, for your second track ever, its quite good. Keep it up.

[DJZILCH]

hi there guys many thanks for the comments!

this is the actual version I submitted to my school, slightly improved:



for the wobble part I added a layer of single oscillator sine wave, with the midi notes dropped by one octave, and it does seem to thicken the wobble bass a lot more

and yes i do agree that perhaps the snare needs more oomph, the kick was miked up using the sennheiser E602 + shure SM57 perhaps i need to layer one more kick that is chunkier, getting great kicks with real drum kits is a lot of challenge, maybe i should layer some samples on top