New Toontrack Southern Soul EZX

Nice! Did you use real strings? If not, what do you use?

Excellent, the snare particularly, nice and fat. Well done!

No Chuck that was stereo recorded.  What happened was the sound post in my 1865 German fiddle fell out when I was changing strings one day and I tried to put it back in without the right tool.  The post was in the wrong place and made the fiddle sound peculiar.  I had it put back in by a luthier after I recorded this.  Need to go back and redo some stuff.  I just retracked the vocal tonight.  I uploaded the new file above.

Just used the 70's kit with the Klanghelm comp on it...and that was it. Didn't even break it out. Surprisingly great...

Sounds great, Herbie.  I love the fiddle layers.  

Couple thoughts about the drum sounds and mix/part here:

-the kick is really uneven. What it sounds liek is a drum buss limiter is grabbing the harder hits and then giving the appearance that the lighter roomy hits are louder. It makes it sounds really roomy, then tight...then roomy....in what sounds like an inverse relationship to actual playing dynamics. I mostly ship the kick directly out if I'm gonna squeeze the drum buss. I liek a nice tonally even kick....tape emulations are terrible that way. We always had to gain the kick WAY low to get it to not fart out the tape...so, sticking a tape sim on the drum buss, while it's a kickass quick way to get a nice vibe, will lead to some weirdness IME with the kick and low toms.
-as...."loose" as the timing is on the kick/snare, and sparse....you need the hat/rides louder and providing the subdivisions. It should allow you to leave those loose without sounding as abrupt

Unrelated, the acoustic is a little bright for my taste. It's just so much brighter than everything else in the mix....and combined with the cymbals being buried makes it stand out a lot more than I would want a strummy strum part to stand out. Maybe just bringing the cymbals where they should be will mask that a little....but....thought I'd mention it.

Well, this is a thread about the drum samples - the example was just an example.

Pre conceived or organic ? I have only been recording seriously for about 3-5 years and mostly focussed n my own songs. I always had a pre-conceieved idea of what the finished songs was supposed to be but I have found each time that things happen while recording which alter that pre-concieved idea and that if I am open to that the song grows and evolves in a good way.

I realize that is not going to be true in all situations but for my songs, I like to see the production is just another part of the creative process.

hey how would you feel if I let one of my buddies play drums and bass on this?

Sounds good cowboy, just a little big and roomy for my taste, but good.

I probably need to go back and properly learn how to tame the Superior Drummer snares and kicks. What Popmann referred to happens all over my tracks. I have one snare hit that's perfect, and the next is too hard, no matter how I dial in the velocity, I can't seem to get it right. I've been doing this in Logic's automation area. Maybe I should be doing this in Toontracks automation area?

EZ Drummer tracks work in Superior Drummer, right? I think I've done this before, but I'm just checking.

I SO wish they'd update SD to include that program where you play a simple beat on the digital drum kit instead of a keyboard, and it automatically searches for similar beats in order of complexity. That would save me a world of frustration.