Sound a like reflection

We have finished up our sound a like and now it's time to reflect on the whole process! We definitely hit a few speed bumps on achieving the overall sound of the original, but given the circumstances i feel we did a good job.

Firstly after tracking drums, it was guitar day, and the guitarist that we organized pulled out the morning of. Which meant i had to learn and perform the song the day of. Needless to say that it wasn't the tightest and most spot on performance wise but we did alright with what we had.

Then we had Bass and Vocals. Bass went really smooth with Stephan on the bass. Got a good tone and performance. Our Initial Vocalist who was the partner of our guitarist who pulled out, also pulled out. So Izzy stepped up on limited notice and performed the song, again could of been tighter but we did what we could with the time and resources we were given. We had a bit of trouble with Mic placement and for Vocal tracking, and i think we screwed up a bit and had it sounding very boxy.

Then came the Mixdown, which was really fun and a great learning experience, again using all the outboard gear for the mix was great to get a feel of the sound of certain outboard compressors etc. I feel like we got our mix sounding quite good in terms of quality, maybe even a little too good because the mix on the original track, especially on the guitars, is quite poor.

So to breakdown and compare our track to the original

Instrumentation - We were spot on with exactly what instruments are in there, 2 guitars, Bass, Drums and Vocals.

Performance - Like i previously mentioned the performances could be better from some of us, myself mainly. But we did what we could given the last minute no shows.

Effects - we did our best to recreate all the effects in the original. The clean guitars have chorus on them, alot of reverb and delay on most things in the track. Distortion on the chorus guitars etc.

Mixing - Mixing was a bit of a weird session because we kept finding our guitars sounded a lot bigger then the guitars in the original. and we kept trying to make our guitars sound bad which was almost counter intuitive. However the rest of the mix process was pretty good. Even with our performances not as good as the original and the guitars sounding a bit different i believe we got the vibe of the original.

Overall we could of done a better job with artist communication, and finding out if they were set to come in or not. This assignment had a really quick turn around so getting reliable artists is a must. Although without being able to offer compensation or even tracks of their own it is a bit of a struggle.