Comparison to industry

In this blog I will compare my recent 3 track ep to some of the influences I used as well as the main one of Led Zeppelin.

The main reference for this album was Bron Y Aur by Led Zeppelin, and there is a certain aesthetic that I was going for that I think this song gives. It's a sort of easy going flow that I was hoping to capture in my songs. I have done a case study on this song which you can find here:

http://fraserguitar.wixsite.com/theshak/single-post/2018/07/06/Case-Study-1---Bron-Y-Aur-Stomp

Another aspect that I touched on with my first case study a couple months ago was the unique panning on the drums, I tried to recreate this on a slightly different level. I theorised that the wide kick drum sound was created from the spill in the hi hat mic panned left plus the kick mic in mono. I tried to create something similar with the snare drum in my song Behind Bars. I've recorded drums which i panned centre, and I used midi drums to add stereo width and panned the snare off to the left. I think this gives a similar effect.

I've also taken influence from the steady kick snare drum beat, that creates this always going beat that the vocals are the main focus and are the thing that really moves around the rest of the song. It makes the vocals the centre of attention, and the way melody that the vocals are sung with change throughout the song. This is common in lots of Led Zeppelin songs and it's something I wanted to include in this album.

In the song Disillusion I included quite a lot of backing harmony vocals, some of which are my own style, and some are layered in a way that is reminiscent of these Led Zep backing vocals, where it seems they've taken 2 of the same main vocal and layered them together in time to create a thick vocal, but since they're sung slightly differently in each take they layer uniquely.

One thing that I'm reconsidering now listening to feedback and also to this was not putting my backing vocals through distortion, to sort of give a break from the overwhelming distortion on the vocals.

There are of course more differences between these songs than similarities, but I've looked at the waveforms and they both have some nice transients above a very bassy thick waveform, and also they both have differences between left and right channels, that you can see during the softer parts in both songs.