 Welcome to Featured Artists Live, a weekly show to discuss and listen to your music. With help from my other YouTuber buddies, we hope to give you words of encouragement, guidance or simply just enjoy your wonderful creations. I'd like to thank our sponsor DistroKid, all of the wonderful artists and all of you for watching. Now, let's get on with the show. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you are. That's a fancy new intro, wasn't it? I'm pretty excited about it. It makes me look a little bit professional. Welcome, welcome, welcome to all the people who are already here in the chat. Lovely to see you here. Don't forget, if you aren't in the chat watching live and I can see a few of you there, hit the like button for me right away. I know we're always asking you to do that. Just go and hit it. Apparently it lets the algorithm know that other people should come and watch the show as well and the more the merrier I say. And also, if you are live in the chat, don't forget to give us your opinion on the music that we're going to be listening to this evening or this evening for me anyway. It may be morning for you, maybe lunchtime, just let us know where you are by the way as well. I'd like to thank DistroKid, the sponsor, which is up there. Thank you so much, DistroKid, for sponsoring this show. I am a DistroKid user as most of my guests, I think, are on the show as well. Great platform to release your music to. We're going to be talking about DistroKid as the show goes on as normal. And if you would like to submit your music to this show to be featured, you can follow the link in the description down below for that. And I'll also say that if you are a Cakewalk user and you're a member of my new Cakewalk group on Facebook, you can also sort of post your music there and it may catch my attention. And I've been messaging some people and getting some music from there as well, which is all very good. I want to move on right away and bring my two wonderful guests in, gentlemen who I'm always interested to hear their opinion, both talented in what they do. And as I say, very valued their opinion, one of them is already covered. His his camera up. I can see in the background here, which is no real surprise because like you would if you had a face like that. There he is. Hi, Ed. Hi, Mike. I'm Ed and I hope you will. And I am very well. Thank you very much. Nice to see you here, Ed. We were discussing a little bit off of camera a moment ago. Are you going to Croatia or have you been to Croatia? I have been to Croatia. Yeah, lovely place. Yeah, it's quite like Switzerland in terms of its very mountainous, which I hadn't thought of. But yeah, beautiful country. Most people speak English, which is useful. But I went with someone who speaks Slavic, which is also very useful. And isn't it because most of us native English speakers and especially those who hail from the island of Great Britain itself are probably the laziest people in the world for learning foreign languages. So we're always happy to find people speaking English in their combination of laziness and culturally, we don't need to because everyone speaks English. So we're not exposed to other languages or pushed into there. We are. Yes, we get we get taught French and stuff at school. But who cares about French and we forget it as soon as we leave school, don't we? Yeah, you get you get taught to pass an exam and you don't actually really get taught to speak it. So. Let's know in the comments in the chat, how many languages do you speak? All about Mimo Japan. I know he he speaks English and I know he's German. So I assume he speaks German and he lives in Japan. So he's probably got three or more. Let's know about that in the comments. Have you written? Has anyone written any songs in a foreign language? Let's hear about that in the chat as well. I'd like to know that'd be interesting thing to do or second language, at least for lyrics, would be interesting. Yeah, would would. Lyrics are hard enough to write in, you know, in Northern English alone. In a second, more than English way up now. Let's bring in talking about people who speak more than one language. Let's bring in the man himself. Here we go. I can see what's going on here. Here he is. What's he up to? He's just being a child here. Oh, there we are. Massive improvement. All right. And that is gone. Hi, Ed. Hello. Have you written any songs in foreign languages, Marlon? I only write in English, so it's a foreign language for me. Yeah, you don't write music in Dutch. No. No, because I don't think you either have to be very talented to do it in Dutch. And if you were not that talented, you can do it in English. OK. Do you think Dutch is a nice enough sounding language here? This is a terrible thing for me to say right off the bat. But is it a good sounding language to sing in? I think some languages are not as good as others, personally. It really depends. I can hear the lyrics too well, so I don't know. So I personally don't like it. But it's a it can be a very strong language to listen to with a heart G and stuff like that. No, it's not that good. It works for rapping, though. That's interesting, because in German, you could argue isn't as nice a language to listen to say Spanish, which is very it's a sexy language. But Ramstein's songs sound great. And part of that is the delivery of the of the of the little but also German rapping is really it's actually really fitting because also it's really strong and really, really pronounced. I bet it sounds quite terrifying and brutal and aggressive. No, it depends. It really depends. Ramstein's probably the best hand in life. Before we get into things, I just want to say to the people in the live stream chat, I normally like to put some of your comments up on the screen. That's not working for some reason. I can see them off of my second monitor, so you're not being ignored. But if I don't manage to get your comments up on the screen during tonight's show, my apologies, the technology is just not working for that for some reason. I don't exactly know why. There you go. I'm playing around here. Guys, I'm going to start off with something a little bit different tonight. We if for those of you who do not know the format of the show, we'll be listening to three songs submitted by viewers tonight. A couple of things on that. I've been chatting behind the scenes to fellow guests on the show. And I've got to say, I agree with a sort of consensus, which is I have personally been a little bit tempted to play some of the best music that I receive on the show. And that's fine. But I'm sort of thinking now it's a little bit more helpful to play some of the music that I think may need some attention and could benefit from the critique of other people. So just have that a little bit in mind tonight. That's not to say that, you know, there isn't great music in there, but I think there's some things that we can definitely make comments on. So let me know what you think about that in the comments again. What do you think in terms of should I play some of the worst music that I receive? Is that is that a good idea? Ed thinks so, he told me. I'm open to ideas on that. And I think that it would be interesting to see the nature the way the nature of the show goes and talking about opinions. I'm going to do something a little bit different to start off the show. I was watching a video the other day with the great guitarist Tommy Emmanuel. I'm a big fan of Tommy Emmanuel and he was being interviewed. Now, for those of you who don't know, Tommy Emmanuel has been he's probably been playing for about 50 years. He's sort of got more famous after YouTube came around because he is like a guitar virtuoso. He does incredible things with the guitar, percussive things, all the blah, blah, blah. I've been to see him live a couple of times, really, really good. And he happens to be a fellow Australian that's got nothing to do with it. He was being interviewed and he was asked a question by a young fellow about opinions about people giving their opinions on YouTube. And I want to play for you what his reply was. I thought it was really interesting. Here we go, Tommy Emmanuel. And it's dealing with the criticism that we receive as as musicians, especially in an online era where people have such easy access to be negative towards you. How have you dealt with that through your career and how do you what do you do to process the problem I have with this all that stuff? What you're talking about is like, since when do I think my opinion matters that much? You know what I mean? I do. When, you know, if you want my opinion as as a fellow traveler, as a friend, I'd be happy to give it to you. But if you don't ask for my opinion, why do why should I think that I should force my opinion on you? You know, I don't get that. I agree. So, you know, YouTube, Facebook and all those things have created a generation who think that their opinion really matters. Yeah. And it doesn't. One of these days, they're going to wake up and realize their opinion means nothing. Well, I think he said it pretty he said it pretty hard. So we've gone straight to Marlon there. I just was kind of I'd like to hear your opinion on that. What do you think? Well, he has a point for sure. What is someone's opinion? What doesn't matter if you give your opinion? But what he doesn't realize is that your opinion or your video you make can help others in their research for plugins, hardware, whatever. Well, I think he's more specifically talking about people's comments in terms of their opinions of people's work. You know, our comments are not care about comments. I'll delete them all. No. Do you think he's got a point, Ed, though? Just what do you think is everyone gets to just think because their opinion is so important now? What do you reckon? I think it's time to close my channel because it's all based on opinions. Marlon has a valid point. I mean, he also has a good point in terms of everyone does feel like they can hide behind keyboards and make themselves feel better about themselves by pooing on other people's achievements. But there was a very good phrase said to me, which was the only people who will criticise you are people behind you in the journey. So people who aren't as good at you will criticise. People who are better than you will just think, OK, they're working on it. They understand the journey you've been on. They're not going to criticise you unless, you know, you know, it's Marlon, right? But no, that obviously comes from a friendly place of care and consideration. Yeah, I mean, opinions, everyone has one. I think I agree with them that we are a generation now. And I think everyone falls. It can be guilty of thinking their opinion is useful. But as Marlon also said, in terms of what we do, creating videos to help other people make decisions, opinions are important. Well, I think that's the distinction, though, isn't it? That is that we, people are coming to us for those opinions. You know, we're not shoving them down the throats in the comments of... As influences. Well, yeah, exactly. Yeah. However we became qualified to be influences, which is another whole thing. I will say, though, it's kind of interesting because the three of us are going to give our opinions throughout this show on the music that we're hearing. And constructive opinions. Well, absolutely. And that's the point, I guess, is that for the people who submit their music and no doubt, we'll have some things to say tonight, which are a little bit. Let's use the word critical in the negative sense, rather than the overall sense. They've implicitly sort of sought our opinion and we're going to give it publicly. But hopefully that will be helpful to them, is the main thing that I hope. And I've got to say that we've done 15 episodes now, and I haven't actually told you guys, but I've received a number of emails from artists who have been on the show who have been really thankful for the opinions that people like you guys have given for their music and it's helped them to think about moving forward for the next releases and things. So I think that's really good. I've had a few personal messages as well on Instagram. Yeah, same here. So they're useful, very grateful. If in the criticism, constructive criticism, we give to help them out making better mixes or better music. So that's good. Absolutely. So I'm going to read out some comments here. We've got Doug here in the comments, he's saying negativity is alive and well, unfortunately. Yes and no, Doug, you know, I think that it depends on the people you hang out with. I personally try and try and seek people who are going to, you know, sort of help me grow in music, in life and everything. And for people that are just full of negativity, then, yeah, out they go. Surprised I haven't said goodbye to Ed and Marlon now. But yeah, I get what you're saying, Doug, it certainly feel like that. And now sausages, nice to see sausage in there. Opinions like arseholes, everyone's got one. Yes, a classic old one, a drum drum thing from you there, Ed. He's not paying attention. Anyway, let's move on. The first piece of music in the show, because Ed is not paying attention, I'm going to have him read out the name of the next artist. It's a foreign language name as well, which should really, you know, eat away at his northern Englishness. So here it is, here it is. I'll let you read that one out, Ed, and we'll get some information. Ladies and gentlemen, coming up, we have No Mad Luke by DeMar Evans. Oh, that was good. I think it probably is DeMar. Anyway, so this song was recorded, mixed and mastered in Studio One. It's mainly got guitars in it, mainly guitars, some other things recorded with two SM57s and an SM7B. Guitar process with what's that plug in? Archetype Pliny by Neural DSP. Haven't got my hands on any of their stuff yet, but everything I've heard is really awesome and use a synth called Serum, which is pretty well known as well. I haven't personally used it, but very well known. And this music is solely instrumental, acoustic guitar inspired by artists such as Mike Dawes and Alexandra Misko. Again, these are virtuoso type guitarists. And I know Mike Dawes has gained a lot of notoriety recently, especially on YouTube. And indeed he's been supporting Tommy Emmanuel, who we heard from earlier. Anyway, the music he creates is meant to be story driven and emotionally captivating. Now, he also sent me a remix of this, which was really quite different, I have to say. However, I decided to play the original because that's what's available on Spotify from him at the moment. So here we are. This is the song called Nomad Loop. So that was Nomad Loop. And funnily enough, I was going to go to Ed first and he's the one who popped up. Ed, it's going to be opinion. Merely my opinion, let's be clear. OK, I only wrote three things down. Firstly, the the guitar motif caught my attention straight away. I like that kind of feel. A little bit Metallicaesque, which is always a win. From a mixing point of view, it sounds like there's quite a lot of compression going on, but there's also some resonant frequencies on the guitar, which as a result of the compressor are just created just a bit muddy and a bit washy. I would suggest putting an EQ before the compressor. It's also worth always trying an EQ after the compressor. And sometimes you need both. So before the EQ, you can and there's so many great plugins now. Marlon did a fantastic video this week on the new Rezo plugin from mastering the mix, which is brilliant. And I know is it soothed does a similar thing that finds your resonant frequencies and also Clara by Sonox is a very good plugin for identifying resonant frequencies and giving you the ability to the option of removing them. And these plugins use AI and identify them for you if you don't want to do the old school way of sweeping us across the spectrum and finding the frequencies for yourself if you don't know what they are by your ear. So I'd suggest EQing before the compressor. There was a tuning issue when the bass came in. There was one note on the guitar that was flat, I think. And then the guitar melody or is it a synth or a guitar? But the high pitch melody came in and I thought that was lovely. And I was thinking, hang on, that's come in after a minute. Can't have come in after maybe 20 seconds just to keep the song like the harmonics, maybe the harm. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I thought it was really nice. Isn't that a pitch, pitch something like an octave up? Effect or doubling or something like that? I'm not a guitarist, I don't want to guess. But I thought the melody was lovely. Could it have come in earlier? Now, from that point, I felt like it was very repetitive and I found myself drifting off. But I mean, my attention spans minimal today at best. But it did drift off a little bit. However, I really did like the sound of the reverb on the high-pitched guitar sound on the melody. I like that. OK, cool. Interesting, a lot of the stuff that I was going to say there. So thanks very much for that aid. I always do that. What a talent. Marlon. Yeah, as usual, Ed's already covered most of it. I wrote down it's over compressed, over limited like crazy. It's so squashed, this song. There's no dynamics. I would cut the intro, I thought it was a bit long. And it's also mentioned in the comments of the video. And then I agree, the bass timing, especially at the start, seems off at times, right? The year that bass is struggling to keep up. And to be critical, I got distracted after a while, like 30 seconds in, 40 seconds in. I noticed my attention wandered away. I could not keep attention to this song. There's too much of the same thing going on and on. I would really mix it up to make it more interesting, a little bit more dynamics would help for sure. And maybe chord changes or something like that. So that's that's what I got from this song. You know, I think there's a number of people who agree with you in the comments there as well. A number of people were saying that they would like to see more chord changes. Sausage thought that the bass was out of time here and there. Someone said, sort of reminded them of tubular bells a little bit in a way. Brad Ferguson was saying he wanted chord changes. So was Chris. Sorry if I get your name wrong, Chris Peasy. So here's my take on it. First of all, to Demere. I think it's Demere, if I'm pronouncing his name correctly. I'm not sure which stage you're at, you know, in your sort of music making career or or pastime, whatever it is. I think context for this piece of music would be interesting. So if it was for a piece of film, for example, it may work really, really well, even with the repetitiveness, because sometimes for background music for film, you actually really don't want it to be distracting at all. You want it there to sonically create an atmosphere, but maybe not be that interesting musically. So if that was a context, then I feel that it kind of worked a lot better. But in terms of a standalone piece of music, I think that one of the tools we have in music is repetition. And we can if we overuse it, it's one of the worst things that we can do as well. So we need repetition to create familiarity within music, to create hooks and things like that. But once you overdo it and I think these days that we need to break the rules a little bit more. So for example, a chord progression like we had there, I think it was four chords, usually at the beginning of a song, a guitar or a piano or a run around it twice and then vocals have come in. And I think these days we've got to go, oh, let's just do it once or maybe straighten with the vocal because over the last 30, 40 years, those formulas have been used so much that people can switch off like really, really quickly if we're not careful. So but I disagree with Ed and Marlon in the overall production demand. I thought that you were on to something. I thought the production was fine. I didn't really detect the over compression that these guys detected, but, you know, they may have better hearing than me on it. But in my opinion, for sure. But but I, I I sort of was more focused because I let me put it this way, the mix and the production, I didn't think was the really problematic part of it. So the other thing is from a guitarist point of view, and I don't know if anyone would agree with me in the comments. It may be my hearing again. There was one string, there was one string, an open string, maybe the B string, I think was being played throughout the whole piece, which is fine. That's the kind of a drone kind of thing. I think it was slightly out of tune, that string, just ever so slightly. And it was kind of bothering me a bit. So when you release your music and you put it out there, especially if you're trying to put it out there in the context of the artists that you mentioned, those things have kind of got to be right and got to be second checked and the things like the bass guitar being sort of out of time was definitely was out of time in places, which kind of can make the I mean, you don't have to perfect time. I'm not saying put everything on the grid or anything like that, but it can make the the listener sounded feel a little bit uncomfortable when they're listening to it, when that bass is just slightly out like that. So yeah, it's OK when something is out of tune. It really doesn't matter if you listen to the songs by Richard Dawson. I don't know if you know him. Guitar player as well. He uses a lot of detuning detuned guitars and it sounds absolutely great because he intends to use that. If you're not intending to be out of tune, then it can be really gnarly at times. Yeah, and I have to say what some interesting stuff recently in terms of tuning, I didn't know this, but I was watching. Rick Beato did a great interview with Brian May from Queen and he was explaining that on the outro of Bohemian Rhapsody, that last little bit where it goes really quiet. And there's like, I'm not going to sing it, but there's a little bit of guitar just on the end. Brian May was saying that he it was it was actually out of tune that he was bending the notes course on guitar. You can only you can't you can only bend sharp. Yeah, you can't bend flat. And he was saying he just hadn't got quite right. So he didn't bend either. I think he went too sharp on it and it bothered him for like 30 years that that was slightly out of tune. I've got to say, I never, ever noticed it. He was saying that this is the interesting thing for me for all those people out there who are cynical about new technology that when they got they got the opportunity to remaster, I think in 2005. He didn't really record it. He pitch corrected it. Oh, just so you know. So for all those people who you should never pitch correct, you should just re-record it until you get it right. Yeah, yeah, you can argue with Brian May about that, I guess. But yeah, so his opinions are right. And I think the other one, what's the one? Can't remember the one, but it starts off with Freddie Mercury, the drums and then the guitar comes in. He definitely comes in. We will rock you. We will rock you. Definitely comes in a little bit either out of tune or out of time. I've always noticed that over the years. Didn't stop it being an absolute hit. So, you know, take up speaking of speaking of speaking of pitch ban and out of tune. If you listen to Roxanne by the police. Yes, I don't know if they have corrected it, but if you listen to the at least the older versions, you can hear in a very first second, you hear the tape pitching up like, yeah, so fun, so fun. So it's interesting. I think what my sort of thing is, is obviously bad timing and pitch cannot prevent an absolutely incredible song from becoming, you know, a massive hit that will last for decades. However, you do have to have a fantastically incredible song to overcome those flaws. Yeah, there's a few people with Mac songs that he's dry army, but seven nation seven nation army by the White Stripes. If you listen to the timing of that, the drums, not that great. Do you know the song Free by Denise Williams? Don't know. That's a 70 song. It's basically over in a fire with a great singer. But that song starts, I think 20 BPM slower than it ends. I think that's OK. Maybe maybe it's intended, but it's good. Yeah, I think regarding songs as they were recorded without clicks speeding up is is fine. I mean, there's a couple of great fleet with Mac songs that tempos dive in the middle after the first chorus. That's fine. I think what we're talking about in this track is the subdivision timings between the instruments. And this is something I as a drummer, I can't help it. I guess so anal about quantizing when I do my my songs. But I would say timing discrepancies are the difference between a good sounding track and a professional sounding track. Don't get me wrong. You don't have to quantize everything to within an inch of his life. You know, I've quantized drums in Pro Tools once and once I did that, I could hear every single track that had been Pro Tools quantized because there's a there's a there's a feel to it that as a drummer isn't natural. The average person isn't going to notice. But in terms of just tweaking the odd bass note that's one gin or the odd guitar line, if it is a loop, if all these sections in this nomad loop have been copied and pasted, just be worth spending time just getting those four bars or whatever the loop is. Just get them to sit right and the whole production will be elevated considerably. Yeah, I should mention that I said at the beginning that he also sent me a remix, which I decided not to play because it's it's not the version that was originally sent to me. And it's also not the version on Spotify. The remix has got drums on it. And it's sort of, I don't know, pretty electronic electronic drums. And that makes the whole thing feel like very, very, very different. But as I say, that's the reason I didn't play. You touched on that there. Now you say, Ed, I wonder whether he didn't quantize the bass and get the quantized settings wrong, you know, like if some things in say straight sixteenths and you you actually accidentally, you know, do it dotted like triplets and and it just doesn't work. You know, I am not particularly a fan of quantizing to a grid. Per se, I do really like instrumental timings. That's really important. So the bass has to be in timing with the drums and stuff like that. I don't mind if it goes a bit like this at all. It actually helps a song in most instances. But I lost my train of thought. That's good. What I sometimes do is I actually manually line things up with each other, not all the time, but just occasionally. So not, you know, there's a bass and a and a kick drum. So a bass guitar and a kick drum, which are supposed to hit the same note, not all just exactly with each other. It can be like magic, you know, often that can be just before. It's a difference between I think it's a very small instruments line them up. So we hear the other remix. I don't have it to hand. He only sent me the way file and I can't just play way files on here, unfortunately, but yeah, I'll send it to you, Ed. Talking about it, Ed, you've got a choice. I'm going to talk about DistroKid at the moment. Now or later. I'm going to give you the choice about you would like people to know about the spot playlist feature spot playlist. And if you know, if you talk about it, you get 50 percent of all revenue. My guess, I just paid myself for a load of DistroKid stuff. Actually, this week, that was fun. Let's go spotlight. OK, cool. Interesting choice. By feature, it gets entered into this competition where it gets played alongside other songs and people will vote for which of the two they see on the screen is their favorite. Now, the bit more likely you are to appear in one of DistroKid's playlists on Spotify. And that means your music's got a much better chance of being heard. So you simply go ahead and select one of your songs. And then you've just got to select a 29 second clip. The best way to go with this. And you've got this nice to do that. You simply then select the connect with Spotify button and you're away. There you go. Thanks for choosing that. It's quite an interesting feature and a bit of fun as well. The next song up has got quite an interesting backstory. This one, let's have Marvin read out the actual fact. Oh, no. Here we go. Easy. Can you do it with a Jackson? Yeah, but I'm just interested. The next song is Dave Sweeney with Gersh. This song caught my attention in the cakewalk in my cakewalk group. Message Dave and say, could we put it on the show? Just a bit of an interesting one. Now, it was inspired by a news article about a person who went out at night time and was dressing up in a creepy clown outfit. And people were taking photos and he got a bit of a clown and he was dubbed. He was dubbed Gags, which is that's what it's the the the type. So background on the actual production chose a minor key with a weird sounding thing, since I can speak, to represent his personality. He wanted to create something unsounding music to match the character of this sort of clown phenomena. Productions, by the way, I just love songs which are by a thought and ideas. I think they're thinking about the music in terms of it. Create a song was this is interesting as well. He produced this after watching my series, which I had a series which I created early on in my YouTube career called Record Mix Release, where I sort of went through the whole process of recording a song and releasing it on disroking. In fact, he followed that and said that that great really influenced him, which I'm really surprised by because whatever you guys think of the mix, I actually think it's a better mix than I could do. So figure that one out. So plugins he used were Fab EQ or some good choices, in my opinion. Virtual instruments were Easy Drama 2, Ed. Modo bass, Raven's Croft piano, which is one of the best pianos around and expense. And he mixed the song over several weeks, taking lots of time in between. So you can gain perspective, Mark, Dave Sweeney. Yeah, all sounds. This is my initial reaction. The exact opposite of the last song, isn't it? Right. Instantly, the song worked. I really, really liked it. Right from the intro, that mood, right? The mood he sets with the sample mood. It's a bit of a super-tramp-meeting-musical song for me, vibe-wise, of course, that he used and the way he sings. On this, I think it's an excellent song. The only thing I can comment on is in the mix at times it's a bit sharp in the four to six K range. You can hear that filtered with the distortion. It's also later in the song on this. It's a bit sharp, but it's the only thing I can comment on mix-wise. I would dip it a bit or do it in mastering or in the mix. But that's actually all I can say about this song. It's really good. I really like it. You were frowning a lot. Yeah, I love this. Yes, this is a circus theme. I was thinking Psycho Circus by Kiss kind of vibes. It fits the story of this guy dressing up as a clown and wandering around Mike's neighborhood. Might even be Mike. And then I thought I'm so glad Mike's changed platforms to restream because hearing that in mono would have been atrocious because there was a great use of stereo on that. So Mike, well done. I love this. I quite like the... Is it an envelope filter on the VV? Yeah, some sort of filter with an envelope on it, yeah. Chorus, maybe? I don't know. Yeah, very theatrical, perfectly matched the subject matter. The lyrics quite suited other than telling him to go home. That was the only lyric that... Bo-esque sound. The arrangement development on this is spot-on. And as Marlon said, the opposite to the last track. Things were happening. Every is a bit of a pop modern part of a better phrase and then it's popular and you need to keep people's attention. But this song did that. Something changed every four bars, something developed. Incredible orchestration between all the instruments. I was thinking there's one bit when the drums broke. Fantastic programming. Great attention to detail. The danger with programming is just to get it together and it just sounds rubbish. But the detail they've put into this, massive thumbs up on that. It works well with the bass and then the... Nothing's overplaying in creating the groove of the song. And this is what turned me on so much about this. I love all that interplay stuff. It's something I think about extensively when I'm doing my tracks with Where's the Space? This was very well done and as a result, I think it sat very well. And it was very musical, creative section. They've had a few different sections, maybe six or so and a few of them repeated nicely. I didn't get bored. I thought the snare sound was a little bit weak. I want more of a rim shot backbeat sound just to give it some drive because the instrumentation is driving the song in this. I just wanted a bit more of a solid backbone to the snare drum but that's the drummist, purist opinion. But yeah, overall I loved it and I'd like to listen to it again at the end of the show, Mike. Yeah, okay, we might do that as the outro. I'm not going to add anything. I did enjoy this song right away. I remember listening to it, I think it was last Sunday morning and I was just like, ah, yes, thank you. This is just fun. It just cheered me up, the whole thing. But also, beyond that, look, I think it's a huge compliment to me. Thank you if he's created this after watching my series. Then great, I should do this as an advert for my series. I actually do think it was mixed way better than a lot of the songs that I've mixed in the past, to be honest with you, so. The student becomes the master. I know. Exactly. Wait, you can stay closer. The student becomes the master. But thanks for the compliment anyway. A few who are getting bits of this on YouTube. It seems to me like it's buffering on YouTube but we're simultaneously streaming to Facebook. It seems okay on Facebook in my creative source group if you'll tell over there, but sorry about that. We or I cannot do anything about it and it's a bit of a shame. It seems as though it may be okay now looking at it over on YouTube, so thanks for hanging in there in the chat. Marlon, you've got a choice. You can either let people know about, why don't we go for here. You can let them know about the pricing of DistroKid or you can let them know about just DistroKid in general or the Wheel of Playlist. The what? The Wheel of Playlist. It's one of their features. Oh, do that one. Okay. Can you point to DistroKid for me right now? Wait, this is... Yeah. That's it. That's all here. Just say, thank you, DistroKid. You're awesome. Just say that for me, Marlon. Thank you, DistroKid. You're awesome. Let's hear about their Wheel of Fortune. One of the ways to actually get your music heard on Spotify is to get onto a playlist. Now, DistroKid offers a really fun with their Wheel of Playlist feature. Simply head over to your DistroKid account, go to the top right where it says Goodies, Playlist, and then you start off simply by selecting a song, something you've already released and then click on Connect with Spotify. Now, obviously the further or likely people are to actually... So what DistroKid do here with this feature is they give you three chances to spin a wheel, a kind of a Wheel of Fortune type of thing going on here. Now, the best result of those three spins determines your number in the playlist. And as I say, the higher up you are, the better. So on this occasion, I achieved 1,088. You can try every day if you like. So maybe that's something you'd like to do to actually get your music in a playlist on Spotify. Cool. Have you tried that one, Ed? I have, Mike. What gives that away? I just thought I'd just get you out of your bubble there. Ed, in fact, you can read out the name of our final artist and song here tonight. Northern Accent. Northern Accent. Northern Accent, please. Introduce him from... Very good. Actually, we're on Accents. That was a Yorkshire accent. Can you do a Jordy accent? I'm going to get a Jordy and Scals mixed up. Wait, I'm on. All right, now. Maybe how much Scottish? All right, on the creative... Running in tonight on Creative Source, we have Kevin Worley doing Art of Stone. Yes, yes, yes. I love it. I love it. Very good. Very good from Accents. So the song was, after a heated conversation about social responsibility versus social freedom. I don't think I want to know about the context of this conversation, although I can probably guess. Usually, Kevin performs this with his wife as a duer and a single guitar, and that's something to keep in mind. That sounds familiar, Mike. Yes, something to keep in mind when you listen to this song. I've got a comment about that later. He used a product called Band in a Box, which I've heard a lot of people use in conjunction with Cakewalk. I've never used it personally. Doesn't probably sound like my cup of tea, but each to their own. And I think with Band in a Box, you kind of like give it some chords and it automatically creates a bit of an arrangement of bass, drums and piano or something like that for you. Anyway, he's done that. Now, he does one of the issues, because I do ask people to talk about what issues they have in their production. He was saying he suffers from hearing loss in high frequencies. So older fellows like me know about this. Just you've got to be very, very aware as you get on in your years, especially just about those high frequencies, you can easily misjudge the high end of your mix. I think there's ways around it personally, but yeah. And he also mentioned that he was using a really old pair of monitors, which he'd got years ago in an untreated room when he mixed this. And he's since upgraded to some IK Multimedia i-Loud monitors. I didn't use those, must get my hands on some, and using the acoustic calibration software as well. And he's also using Slate VSX headphones. Have either of you guys used those headphones at all? No, I reached out to Slate this week following my video partly reviewing the Adam Audio SP5s. And they basically said no, they weren't interested in doing a collaboration with me. It doesn't mean you have to be negative about them, but it may affect your opinion, I guess. Oh, by the way, Ed. I'm not going to pay for them, for sure. I've got half a dozen set of headphones. Just to sidetrack, didn't you, those Adam Audio, which ones did you have, the five inch ones or the 18 inch ones? The speakers, the TV T5Vs, yeah. Yeah, did you enjoy those without spoiling your video? Ooh, everyone should have watched the video, shouldn't they? I watched a bit of the video earlier on. No, you didn't. I turned them on and genuinely, very impressed, immediately. Great sound, frequency response is pretty flat. In these kind of low cost speakers, yes, there's a tiny bit of, I don't want to say distortion, because it's not really distortion. THD sound when you boost them. There's a tiny bit of that, but they go loud and it's barely audible. Yeah, really impressed. Fantastic. Revens as well, right? Reven tweeters, right? Also the small ones. Yeah, they do. Yeah, I think across the range with Adam or everything's. Yeah, but I didn't know if the small ones, also Adam, the cheap ones, that's what they do. All right, well, let's listen to this song anyway. We've digressed Hard of Stone from Kevin Walley. Get comfortable, this is a five minute song, guys. So have a listen to this. Listen, keep the story in mind as well. You were a friend of a friend. Started out fine when the talk was live. The guy's a bit near the end, but you seem to see around. The blinders that he wore. He was so wrapped up in what was in it for him. He considers life a sport. Holy, it's all that matters. That's all it is. Try to tell my story to a man with a heart of stone. He wouldn't listen to what the facts would tell him. He couldn't see that the lies were his. He wouldn't open his eyes, no matter what he'd shown. He's got a heart of stone. He's got a heart of stone. He was so down to the meeting, hoping to stay in my feet. They wouldn't even obtain the fact I had something to say. They didn't even notice that the time was growing short. They were so wrapped up in their own little world they considered life a sport. Only to win, that's all that matters. Only to win, that's all it is. Try to tell my story to a people with hearts of stone. They wouldn't listen. They couldn't know. They couldn't know what the facts would tell him. They couldn't see that the lies were theirs. They wouldn't open their eyes, no matter what they'd shown. They've got hearts of stone. They've got hearts of stone with heart of stone. The truth doesn't matter, it's a place that can be reached first. It's all closed off, it's made up behind an answer. Are there any answers? Listen to me, y'all. He's got a heart of stone. He's got a heart of stone. He's got a heart of stone. He's got a heart of stone. Sorry, thank you, Ed. Assuming anyone can hear, we're going to go to Ed first. Folks, do check the links in the description down. Links to the YouTube channels of my guests on tonight, both Ed and Marlon. They both have great channels. Marlon particularly focuses in my mind on great plug-in reviews. Ed does some fantastic stuff on hardware, particularly on audio interfaces, microphones, headphones, that kind of reviews on that kind of stuff. So definitely check that out. And also, I'm not really familiar with Marlon's music, but I really do enjoy Ed's music. So he's a great drummer. He's done some great mixes as well. Not an issue. Ed, I would love to hear from you on this track that we've just been listening to. The channel shout and the kind words, Mike. I appreciate that. Let's talk about this one. My initial reaction was drum sound and I'm being kind, I think, by saying this is not appropriate for the song. It sounds like it and the file of a T.D., Roland T.D., whatever. Could be programmed. But there's some humanized bits in that, I think. Lady Antebellum, sorry, Lady A. They had to rename there. That's a great story, by the way. If anyone knows, that's not brilliant. Anyway, that's a good story. They're a music production. Marlon, can you tell that Ed only had about four hours sleep last night? I just want to tell you just a little word about it. You know, yeah, carry on, carry on. It's very interesting. Let me kind of say this isn't appropriate to the song. Check out Lady A. Stuff, their production is unbelievable for this kind of, it came in on the vocals and I thought they were very, this person's clearly very good at delivering backing vocals with themselves. Now, that might sound attention to detail with your diction, with your syllables, your phrasing, when you're coming off words, when you're starting words, how you're emphasizing words. And I like the vocal melodies. I like the phrasing and I liked the fact that they were bold to take space between some of the lines. It's very tempting just to fill all the space with lyrics because you can do, but I think some of the greatest songs aren't afraid to perform on with another bit. It could be another line or that's good. Now, with the vocals, I felt like the vocals were the only real source of development in the song. Instrumentally, it was very repetitive until the middle eight. So instrumentally, I wanted more development. Now, the song works, I think, because of the melodic development and the melodic development is good and the phrasing development is good. I like that. But if it had some instrumental development as well, it would elevate this song again. Everything just going on a loop all the way through. I don't think works as we've discussed in this live stream already. What else was there? I wasn't convinced by the bass sound being appropriate for the song as well. I thought it was a bit thin and a bit toppy. But then it seemed to change towards the end after the middle eight seem to just get better. It seemed to fit in the mix a bit better. And the mix is a bit heavy on quite decide which frequencies. But certainly on my headphones coming in about 800 to one and a half K was a bit prominent and not necessarily in a nice easy listening way. OK, interesting. Well, Marlon would love to have something left for him to say. Sorry, guys, I do have a habit of saying that. No, it's because I have an opinion and I space it. You do. You make the most of this point. So what's your opinion? Everyone wants to say yeah, come on now. We're going to go to Marlon. But as I say earlier, do check out the links in the description. Marlon's released some really interesting videos recently, particularly the last couple of videos. I found them really, really good and interesting. Check them out. He's done some great reviews. There are some great plugins as he always does. So follow the link in the description for that. Thank you, Marlon. One day I'm going to actually listen to some of Marlon's music. I have listened to some of it, like your kind of experimental forty five minute death metal thing. I am. No, it's really broad. I have several projects going on. My thirty nine minute doom blast beat metal, which is only in a really the only play a that's right. Life performance. I play with a bass, which is tuned in three octaves in a. It's lovely. Awesome. Anyway, getting back to this. Yeah, sure. Um, you pointed out at the start that hearing loss was an issue and acoustics was an issue and more. And that's all over the song. It doesn't help to, in my opinion, to point out a specific thing. But all all things you hear in this song mix wise are due to bad acoustics and poor listening conditions. You can hear all the mistakes, which happened with a two roomy two five year room and also the best thing would be to put those speakers in a very damped cupboard and remix everything. Give you all different perspective. It won't be perfect at all. But maybe just the headphones, maybe just the room out of the equation could be, could be. But I think it's I don't necessarily know if that is also your headphones can skew your mixing perspective also really badly. That's because of that, there are a lot of headphone mixing tools out there, which I will release a new video on in exactly 52 minutes. That's a nice takeaway, isn't it? I'll be doing a bit tonight. Yeah, I care. Yeah, here's your bedtime, right? What worked for me for this song is actually the tempo. If this were any slower, it would be I would lost any attention after I think 30 or one minute, 30 seconds to one minute. So I think the tempo was actually really good for this song. And it kept the pacing going on. So that was good. I agree with Ed on everything he said. There's literally no development in the song at all, not even between choruses and verses. It's all one dynamic. That is actually something which is not dependent of your listening of your acoustics or hearing loss. That is arrangement wise, something you can work on. Yeah, that's about everything I have to say. And I can agree with everything Ed said for the rest. It's interesting, the last sort of point you made there, because when I got the way file for this song, this is particularly striking for this style of music, which I don't think this isn't a country song, but I'm going to hazard a guess that they come from a country background. The way file was like a sausage for this song. It was it was just and I don't even think that was compression. I mean, it was partly compression, but there was the song did. I'm not necessarily meaning mix wise, that has no dynamics. I mean, arrangement wise, you can do a lot. But adding a guitar, changing up the bass, reminding me of the bass. The bass had also had some timing issues. A little bit here, yeah. I think electronic keyboard bass sound like samples to me. And this can be that sort of touches upon my sort of main point. And I tried to highlight this when I was introducing it because Kevin and his wife do perform this song regularly as a duo live. And you can hear from the quality of their voices that they are experienced live performers. OK, you touched on the harmony and quite typical of, you know, partners who sing together, it was really nice, tight harmony. They obviously work together a lot. They know what they know, what each other are going to do kind of thing. What I would like to say to Kevin, if when you're watching, I don't know if you're in the chat at the moment. So this is a storytelling song. This is really important. This I picked up in some of the lyrics, some of the background for sure. But the music doesn't, in my opinion, suit this song, right? I would encourage you to do whatever you do live normally with your acoustic sound. You normally play it with just acoustic guitar and your vocal. Make a recording of that. I would nothing against band in a box. I haven't used it, but forget your band in a box. You may have used that as a kind of a crutch thinking, oh, when I record this song, I've got to have this whole band. Try and record this just as an acoustic song. I bet it would come to life a lot more than actually having all that backing in there at all. Sometimes no backing is better than bad backing and I'm being a little harsh. But I really think, Kevin, maybe you've done this out of a lack of confidence, maybe thinking, oh, you know, just acoustic and vocal is boring. Nothing can be further from the truth with a good storytelling song. Then people would just hone in on the lyrics. And yeah, I still think maybe it's a little too long even under that circumstance. I don't know. But you see length of a song is only dependent on how interesting you can make it for that length of time. And Marlon's touched on it there and it as well. Dynamics really is a part of it. And I know I was talking about dynamics in terms of, you know, that sausage wave, but obviously dynamics can be created through arrangement as well as Marlon was saying. So like, I definitely feel, Kevin, I'd love to hear this song again. Actually, can I challenge you to record this song again, but just with acoustic guitar, maybe a bass just to add some low end in there. But I would ditch the drums and everything else in there personally. Maybe instead of the bass with a cello. Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah, something like a cello. I would try first just acoustic guitar and vocals. And it reminds me, it doesn't have to be acoustic. It can even be electric guitar depends on what you want. But I really love Jeff Buckley's live at C&A's EP. I don't know if you know that EP. It's so good. It's just guitar and his voice. It really draws me in right from the very first second you listen to it. It has only his guitar and only his voice. So you don't need anything in backing or whatever to tell a great story. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that hidden under, you know, this accompaniment here is probably actually a really good song. So I really encourage, Kevin, thanks for sending your song in. And I hope that's going to be helpful to you. And sometimes I just a little story. I remember there's a song here in Australia called The Band Played Walsing Matilda. It's a kind of an old folk song about the First World War. And I used to perform it live when I was gigging solo. And, you know, people kind of love that song and they liked my rendition of it. It was just me and guitar. And then I decided to make a CD and sell a gig. So I recorded this song. But in my mind, you know, the song had an orchestra and all kinds of things on it. I spent four months recording this song, tracking it, getting these perfect string parts and everything. Loads of harmonies. And I played it to a friend and we just kind of soloed just the voice and the guitar. And he said to me, it sounds so much better with just the voice and the guitar. You should teach the rest. And I was like, yeah, I know it does, doesn't it? It's the it's the MTV unplugged effect. If a song works unplugged, just acoustic and vocals. It's a great song. If it relies on production and doesn't work on its own, then put it in the bin. Yeah, absolutely. And I can see we've actually got the comments that you can see me putting them up on screen here right towards the end of the stream. Better late than never, I guess. But there you go. Thanks so much for the people who have been watching. Don't forget to if you want to send your music in for some for some constructive criticism, then please do that. Follow the links in the description down below. Another thanks to the sponsor for the show, DistroKid. Who are doing a great job of distributing people's music. And of course, a huge thanks to my thanks to my bearded friends here tonight. Look at them either side of me with their ginger beards. Full of opinions, these guys, and I'm glad of it because where would we be without your opinions on these shows? Thank you so much again for the people who have been sticking around in the live chat here. There's a few of you still left and you've had to hang in there because there was a lot of buffering on YouTube tonight, which surely just really spoils your enjoyment of, especially when you're trying to listen to some music tracks. But you've hung in there and I appreciate it so very much. Folks, do keep sending your music into me as well. Some of you in there, we've listened to some of your music and I'm quite prepared to put songs by an artist on twice. Ed asked for it and I'm going to do it. I'm going to play the second song, which was buffering a lot actually in fairness, it was buffering a lot. So we're going to leave on that song. But Ed, any final words from you before you nod off to sleep for the day? I think the theme of the live show has been to consider orchestration. And I would say consider moving the song along by bringing in different elements. Every four bars is a good rule. It doesn't have to be anything much. It can be a tambourine or moving. Even suddenly, yeah, it can be it can be a backing vocal. It can be a delay on a vocal. It can be a call and response. It can be anything, just something to give some audible change every few bars. But ultimately, you know, as we're going to listen to now, a great song is a great song. Cool. Marlon, anything you that I mean, Ed usually seems to speak for you, but anything you can add. No, I'm not a nice. I'm better in UK, right? Still, I food over there. Now, I just had a nice outro, actually, just just a goodbye. But then you have to play the song, Mike, so I don't know if you want to do that. I will do that. Thank you. OK, thank you for hanging out. Make sure to subscribe to Mike's channel and we'll see you at the next three.