Selectively Repressed [DnB / Neuro / Vocals]

I haven’t quite finished this, but it’s worthy of a listen, and I’m constantly updating it. After the minute mark it gets really heavy (by my standards at least),

I’m curious what people think of the vocal treatment. I have real trouble getting vocals to stand out and be legible without being a little too loud, usually I have to increase high end eq to above comfortable levels. At the moment it’s just acceptable, but any tips would be awesome.

Well, I’ve not had much luck improving the legibility of the vocals. They could use some space, but reverb doesn’t seem to be that effective. Neither does a little bit of stereo panning. Currently, my DSP chain goes like this:

Compressor, Gainer, Kerovee (free autotune VST, best one I’ve used), Delay (around a 7ms delay between left and right, no feedback), 2 5 band EQs and finally an mpReverb.

Any glaring omissions here? I used to use iZotope Nectar - it has a saturation module which really made vocals warm and space-filling, but I’m trying to use free VSTs now and also I’m on a 1.6ghz dual core with 1gb ram so require something a little more lightweight…

Maybe stop doing things with the vocals and shave off some frequencies in the vocal range from other parts of the track, to make space for them? I dunno. I like the uncompromising sound of this track, but the mix is a little bit muddled on my admittedly crappy speakers. It’s a bit too full on with distortion, compression and … stuff. Its various elements drown each other out somewhat.

Yes, I’m not an expert masterer by any stretch. Each song sounds a little better than the last but there’s still loads of room for improvement.

Anyway, I modified the kerovee settings a bit (formant shift) and also reduced the volume of all tracks, so it’s not clipping like crazy anymore! I think I just like the sound of maximizers. Honestly, I’m a bit intimidated by eq-ing tracks in respect to others, but I’ll give it a go once I’ve finished the arrangement. The feedback is most welcome and very much appreciated. My ears just go numb after the 50th listen…

I’ve updated the song. If you’re listening on the soundcloud app and you heard it before you’ll have to clear cache… makes more sense than uploading a new track for every revision though.

If you’re listening on the soundcloud app and you heard it before you’ll have to clear cache…

I wasn’t aware of this. Lots of my songs are updated but would sound the same to people who’ve heard them before. Not that people tend to listen twice, but …

Yeah. Sometimes I reupload a new song on finalizing the track to get around that, but it is pretty frustrating. Multiple listens is basically my gauge for success, hard to pull people in like that though, you really need your finger on the pulse or to sell out haha. On the upside, it’s pretty cool to see that people from all over the world have listened, even if it is only once.

I get very little attention, but getting out of my comfort zone recently (lost a huge library of VSTs) has really helped improve my tracks. Didn’t realize Renoise was so powerful, especially the Phrase editor (musically, locking to a particular scale is really handy) and sample modulation. Drums are sounding waaay better and are far more complex in terms of arrangement. It’s always fun to create and listen back anyway. I really like your use of samples, Hero Of Nowhere is a really cool track. Interested to hear more new stuff from you.