New Member - New Song

[Sherwood Everhart]

Check out my song if you have a few minutes to spare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLxjmzzNaQE

[Chris Templeton]

Hard to make sense of the song.

[Steve Wilson]

Jezz! Tough Room!

Welcome to the Forum, Sherwood. Very interesting song. Original? Thank for posting! Love the old D8 Fender with the traps.

[Sherwood Everhart]

Chris: I was hoping the math checked out on it but perhaps you're right

Steve: Thank you for the kind words. Yes, I wrote the song a few months ago. I've been writing a lot of songs for the lap steel over the past year or two. What more is there to life?

[Bill Groner]

Ah, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

[Chris Templeton]

It wasn't clear what the chords were to the song. so I could latch on to your steel. Keep after it and I look forward to hearing more.

[Joe A. Roberts]

Cool tune, I suppose it does meander and I see where Chris is coming from but I like it!
However, it has a really prominent 4k+ hz hum that makes it very harsh to listen to, especially with headphones. It even gets louder at 1:10. Then really bad again with the armpit guitar solo.
I also think the acoustic guitar backing is way to loud and the steel too quite, so I find myself turning the volume up to hear the steel better, but then the hum is just too brutal.

What does "curves in the aspect" mean?

[Sherwood Everhart]

Yeah, I need to step up my recording skills - wish I knew more about it. Any ideas on how to reduce the hum? The title comes from something I read out of an astrology book years ago, not that I know anything more about it than the avg. Joe

[Peter Jacobs]

Welcome to the forum! There’s some good stuff happening there, Sherwood, but as some of the others mentioned, the mix could use a little fine tuning. A little less acoustic guitar, a bit more steel would help. What recording software are you using?

— The best advice I got on mixing is to turn things down if you want to hear something else — so to hear more steel, make other elements just a bit quieter. Turning things up too much just gives you distortion.

— Hum is tough to deal with. Two thoughts: first, is the hum worse when you’re near your computer monitor or speakers? If you’re using a laptop, this is probably not an issue, but you never know. Second, with single coil pickups, which direction you’re facing with the instrument makes a difference in the amount of hum, so try moving around a bit — always start with the low-tech, free answer!

Others here know tons more about this than me. You might ask some questions about recording in the Electronics forum.

[Sherwood Everhart]

Peter, I listened to it through one device and it sounded trebly, and I listened to it through another and it sounded bassy I have been promising myself that I would make tracks toward higher fidelity for years, but clearly I still have a ways to go.

This song, for me, was actually a breakthrough in sound quality, believe it or not - much better than, say, the song Broken Wreaths, which I recorded about a year ago and re-recorded the lap steel part yesterday for the sake of the video (that will probably be my last post for a while because my job kicks in to full swing next week). The reason it was a breakthrough for me was because I placed a mic over one of the F holes on my ES-175. Not rocket science, I know I even dropped large coin on a uke, but the simple act of adding another instrument to the mix just made everything sound even muddier, so the uke is on the back burner for a while. It's a tricky wicket - recording. I could always pay somebody to go into a studio, but I seem to figure out a lot of my better lap steel parts while in the creative yet slow process of recording, and with the meter running I'd go broke after about three songs

Thank you for the information, and I will definitely go read up in the Electronics section. I didn't even know there was such a section in The Steel Guitar Forum.