Setagaya Night Safari (and about home recording and DAW)

I never do any cover for a long time, so I decided to do Setagaya Night Safari \(^O^)/

This song is initially going to be used for acapella Utacha, but hell, doing acapella version of this song is very difficult. Of course especially because I can't do acapella (tss tss dum dum tss, SO DIFFICULT!)
I choose this song because it's not very high (I can't do high notes) and the guitars are so damn catchy!

In the end I decided to put the instrumental and a bit of mixing, and tada!





edit: procrastinating on my homework, I decided to tune and fix some timing in the cover and upload a new one. The one above is now private thus it can't be found haha. But if you want to hear the first one, here it is.


Before (procrastinating):




After (procrastinating):




SOME WRONG LYRICS. SORRY ABOUT THAT. And pardon me for the off notes here and there, this is a one shot, and tuning is really troublesome (especially because my Melodyne crashes every 3 seconds. Yes people, I'm not against tuning! >:)) (edit: in the end I did some tuning using Cubase, because Melodyne is being a bitch)

And I'm sorry that I don't have a nice voice.
It can be better, eg I can redo some parts and I can add more harmony and so on and so forth.

But in my defense, it's very troublesome to do recording in my room.
To remove all the noise, I need to close my window and turn off my fan (blessed are those with air con in their rooms) and only after that I keep the noise level to the minimum. Result: great recording but by the end of it I was almost dead of suffocation.



Not only the recording, the mixing part is also a pain in the ass. I believe it's because I haven't mastered the technical stuff about the DAW yet.

Most people use FL Studio for mixing, but I can't use FL Studio, so I use Ableton or Cubase. For timing, Ableton sucks big time. It's very easy for the voice to be distorted and thus I can't get the sound that I want. Moreover, the window is quite small. Of course you can make it bigger, but the zoom in and zoom out function in the Ableton is quite troublesome for a long track. I always use Cubase for timing (especially because I'm more used to Cubase for this job).

However, when it comes to mixing (in this case, putting on reverb), the preview in the Cubase only gives the track that you put the effect on, instead of the whole tracks together. As a result, I can't really know whether the reverb that I put in is enough or whether the track fits in with the other tracks. In this case, I prefer using Ableton since I can monitor the whole thing while changing the reverb parameter simultaneously. I can also mute or solo the tracks to hear how it sounds individually while putting the effects.

Moreover, about the audio driver. My Cubase immediately switch to ASIO4ALL. I have nothing against it, but then because of ASIO, the sound that comes into my headphone is only the one coming out from Cubase. After I mixdown the whole track and I want to listen through the media player, the sound will come out of the laptop speaker instead of my headphone. Thus I have to close Cubase to listen, and if there's something wrong, I need to open Cubase again and edit and mixdown and close it again to listen to the song through normal media player. IT'S VERY INEFFICIENT, DON'T YOU THINK?



And I do the recording in Audacity, because I have no idea why, the recording result in Audacity and Cubase are very different.


For example, this is the result of recording (with my fan on and my window open) in Audacity:



and Cubase:

See? I have no idea why this happens.




So basically this is how I do stuff:
Recording in Audacity --> Export everything as WAV --> Open in Cubase for timing --> Export as WAV --> Open in Ableton for effects --> Export as WAV --> Open in Audacity to be exported as MP3 BECAUSE ABLETON CAN'T EXPORT THE TRACKS IN MP3

I find this freaking annoying because Ableton and Cubase are quite heavy AND MY ABLETON CRASHES A LOT. I can't really blame them but this really irritates me sometimes.





I believe most of the problems I have above is because I still don't understand some technical stuff of Ableton and Cubase. Thus if you happen to find this post and you can help me, kindly leave a comment below. Thanks a lot!