so i am a long time lurker, first time poster, and really appreciate this site a lot. i feel like i have learned so much that has helped me greatly.

my church (very small) has decided to let me start up a small recording studio ministry (aimed at recording demo's for kids in the community for super cheap in order to simply bless them with no strings attached), and so this track is one of the tracks on the church's worship band cd we hope to use as an example of what we can do.

i have never done any serious recording before this project, so it is not nearly as good as i wish it could be. I recorded everything, produced it, mixed it, and mastered it (yeah, the first problem, but i had virtually no budget to work with, and never pretended to be anywhere near pro quality)

i played all the acoustic tracks, male vox, some electric, and all the bass unfortunately, since i am only average at any of them.

tools i had to record with:
- macbook pro
- cubase LE
- 1 firepod
- 1 ART MPA GOLD (i don't hate these, but don't love them either)
- 6 Behringer vocal mics (these suck so bad)
- 3 sm81's (better than i thought they would be)
- 1 Baby Bottle (nice mic)
- 1 Carvin kick mic (ack)
- 2 Carvin snare mics (ack, ack)
- Nice keyboard...really nice
- decent seagull guitar
- average peavey active bass
- nice pearl drum set
- sucky drum room
- decent closet for vox and such

(the song is a worship song...we did not write it, we just rewrote some of the music to fit our church's style)

http://www.fcccdoc.org/BeautifulOne.mp3

i would appreciate tips on anything in the song...what would you suggest in order to make everything sound better?

thanks for listening!

All I could download was a chord.

ok...the link is working now... sorry about that!

http://www.fcccdoc.org/BeautifulOne.mp3

I'm listening on crappy iPod headphones, but everything sounds pretty good to me. Very nice, especially considering your lack of experience.

The only things that stood out to me were:

1) the snare sounds weird. Does it have a slap back delay or something on it? It almost sounds like it's hitting twice on each backbeat, plus it's pretty thin tonally.

2) the tom fills at 2:35 don't make sense to me. They seem off - I'd just get rid of them.

Other than that, I found it very enjoyable.

Nice. I wish I had not read Walker's comments first. I agree with him about the tone of the snare being a little thin. Nothing else about it bothered me. I enjoyed it a bunch. The acoustic stuff and the vocals sounded very nice.

thanks so much for your nice words!

as far as the snare and tom fills...i completely agree. i was generally disgusted with my drum recordings for the cd, but then i forced myself to remember that i used behringer and carvin mics. so my first goal is to get better drum mics for sure!
i tried everything i knew of to fix that snare sound, but i kind of ran out of ideas. any suggestions for making it less thin? up the 1k eq?