Cut Short, not a demo anymore. Comments welcome!

Hey, i posted a thread about a demo i had a few days ago. Here is the real song now. I think i like how it came out, it might be a little to compressed for some people, but i like how it sounds cranked up in head phones. Tell me what you think. The songs name is "cut short" and you can listen here.

http://www.myspace.com/callingyou478

~Jake

Everything sounds good turned up loud on headphones. The vocals during the loud parts don't really sit well in the arrangement. I like the harmony vocals, and the singing during the quiet parts.

It is also paced really well--the switch between loud and soft is a little extreme, but I like the way you restate the soft-part chorus over the loud-part chords. It keeps a very simple song interesting. I'm not sure the instrumental break was neccessary, but the whole song keeps my attention throughout.

I think your lyrics are exactly what you intended, but they aren't exactly Shakespeare.

Posting somewhere other than myspace will get you more interest--a lot of the regulars here can't access it at work, and the player frequently crashes.

OK... I'm gonna make this a good news/bad news thing... with the proviso that the bad news is almost good news.

First the good news: I'm really liking the way this song feels. (I still haven't tracked the lyrics, so this is your basic drive by assimilation of the song.) The full instrumentation drives it alone really nicely... I like the breakdowns and I like the urgent pop punk vocals quite a bit (AT artifacts and all).

Now the bad news (don't worry it ain't so bad): the mix production really doesn't work at all well for me. The instrument parts are great, I think, for the song. The musical arrangement is cool. But it's not put together well, from my point of view.

Still, dialing in a mix is relatively easy and writing a good, catchy, exciting pop song that grabs people -- as I think this one could -- is not easy at all...

I think the back tracks (guitars, bass, drums) are too far back and too muddy and mostly seem to come off as mono most of the time... in fact, it sounds like someone ran the back tracks through a really clumsy compression setting that lost all the detail and pushed everything into a lump in the middle. And that's a shame cause I really like what's going on... it just shouldn't be a job in production forensics to hear what's going on.

The production really holds this back -- but otherwise the song is just BURSTING out and wants to take over... I think it's going to be a killer track. You're 90-95% of the way there in terms of effort -- but that last 5 or 10% will probably make a 75% difference in sound quality if you do it right.

I really like this tune.

There are things I like about it and things I don't. I'm not too happy with the compressor that's pumping on the drums or perhaps the whole mix. In a couple of places the pumping actually conflicts with the rhythm being played.

I think you have a good song here. When you posted the demo I wondered how you would handle the stop time parts. I have to say that I'm also not happy with what you did with those here. The stopping really kills your momentum imo and it lingers in stop mode for too long. Still, it's a good track.

(I've written my comments and only now notice that b2b agrees about the compression issues.)

+1 on B2B's analysis. I think you have a really good post-punk/emo song here, and while I think you are going in the right direction with the sound (thinking Franz Ferdinand here), the production needs to be better executed.

As a demo, I think it's great, and if you guys work this one out live for a while, the production will come together more easily.

i love this song even more now ... the energy is there, and the melody kicks, and it's a very appealing song ... i could easily hear this on the radio

but i triple (or quadruple) the mix thing, particularly on the instruments ... they seem scratchy and fried or something

good job, though ... this kicks ass

Maybe I like the stops/breakdowns because I'm getting old and they give me a chance to catch my breath.

Breakdowns got way overused in the electronica and trip hop scene where I dwelt in the late 90s early 2000s... but I have to say, I think they're really valuable in busy or complicated music. (And, of course, in contemporary electronic music, it's hard to know what to do in bridges and other places where you might have a solo -- since, by and large, conventional instrumental soloing as done by a guitar in rock or a lead synth in old skool e-pop has tended to be looked on as corny and anachronistic. Not, maybe, quite as bad as spoken word drops, at this point, though... give me a good mini-moog solo over yet another riled up TV preacher or Oxy'd upvalley girl on someone's answering machine.)

If you look at classical and orchestral music, great dynamic and tempo swings are often used, even pauses are used all the time... and, of course, there are the brief usually rhythmic pauses that come between movements in some works.

The conductor of my local symphony really hates it when the rubes start applauding during these quick between movement pauses or use it as a cough or -- Heaven forfend! -- talking break. He's got the audience pretty well trained by now, though, after a few years -- or maybe, really, we've trained him... he never, ever lowers his arms in between movements now. It was, indeed, really embarrassing when he first came to us from Mexico City and found people in the LBC bursting into applause during symphonies. I know I was embarrassed... (OK, once, on one of those 19th century barn burners with the crazy ass fourth movements, I wasn't paying attention and... well, just call me 'rube.')

i took a music appreciation class in high school, and the one thing i remember is you NEVER clap between movements in a symphony

memory is a weird thing