I have recorded some demos over the past few months testing out my recording equipment and want some feedback on them. I am aware that the bass is very inconstant for some reason on the first two tracks, I'm not sure how to fix this. Another thing I noticed that is very apparent with thee rhythm tracks is that you can almost here a delay in the strumming, I have heard this in other raw recordings by friends and other people here, I would like to solve this if possible.

I have the following equipment:
- Lexicon Alpha USB interface
- Line6 Spider IV 15w
- honeytone pocket amp
- monster and soundwave cables
- fulltone od/disortion pedal
- Ibanez ijx10
- Washburn/ Oscar Schmidt OE-20
- Fender/ Squire p-bass
- Big baby Taylor
- Audacity
- Cubase Le5 (I dont really know how to use this)
- Star power sp-1 mic, stand, and cable
- plenty of free vst's
- hydrogen drum machine
- yamaha psr-22

I want to know what your favorite to least favorite tracks were, what parts of each track sounded good or could use improvement, how I could go about improving these, ect. I dont plan on re recording all four exactly the same, I will probably re write some of them based on what you guys say and try to improve them.

http://satanpope.bandcamp.com/

Is the delay in the strumming something that happens when you are recording or at some later point? I used to have a similar problem with my USB interface causing delay while recording until I read that having a printer also plugged into a USB port can cause latency issues.

On the hydrogen drums I suggest you try tweaking with the sounds because the preset ones sound really bad raw. There is also death metal kit one you can get through the program if you go to import library and it will sound much better. However, there are a ton of different ones you get try out so see what you like. If you want to alter the sounds try tweaking the ADSR controls, humanizing the sounds with the mixer button to change the velocity and timing, or adding some effects so the drums match the rest of the stuff you have going on. From a composition standpoint the drums are pretty damn repetitive.

I think the third track was my favorite because there we no drums and it had more of a black metal feel than the others and that is what I am into. The last song ends bizarrely abruptly. I don't think I could say I had a favorite because this isn't a style that I am into but I hope some of what I wrote helps or was informative.

The Delay happens while recording, I'm not quite sure if it's a frequency issue or sound card issue or something, but I've heard other recordings on here that had a similar strumming delay. All I usually have plugged in are my keyboard, mouse, monitor, and interface, so I'm not sure if any of those would cause a latency issue. With the last song Are you talking about the song in general ending to early? or it cutting off to early? I might have vamped it too fast, or maybe I should have let it go a little longer to silence out.

What could be causing the delay/latency is having a guitar cord plugged into the soundcard BEFORE turning on the soundcard itself. No idea why, but that exact thing was what kept happening to me til I figured that out.

Could leaving the volume on the instrument input cause it as well? I have my interface plugged in all the time now and use it for my headphones so I can control the volume better, but I will give that a shot and see if it solves the problem.

I meant cutting off too early, more time to silence out would fix that.

I found this discussion that might help you with the latency where it seems like you can avoid the symptom in recording and then treat the problem afterwards in Cubase: http://acapella.harmony-central.com/showthread.php?2510678-Latency-problems-with-Lexicon-Alpha-guitar

I'm not listening on the best speakers, they're short on low end, but here's my thoughts:

Cut back the distortion on the low end and leave some head room. Multi-track with less gain rather than single tracking with more gain - some really heavy tones have come with the gain around 2-3. Try to keep the amp EQ's more towards the middle (50% or 5) rather than to the extremes, then emphasize ranges in mixing.

The low end sounds like a horrible mess. No head space, lots of clipping, too much distortion (enough to brickwall the bass). Lower the volume and gain and give it more head room, so it looks like a waveform rather than a wall. The clipping here is brutal, and not in a good way, it sounds like shit. Reduce the input level, your interface/DAW should have a green/yellow/red display - make sure that stays green, then don't add too much distortion.

You need to leave a lot of room during mixing, then cut each instrument its own spot in the mix - try cutting the guitar's lowest ranges where the bass is in the mix, and heavily reducing the bass in the guitar's main ranges, and cutting it at the highest. The recordings are full of synthetic noise, which is awful. Play around with multi-band EQs and see what you can do to make it sound less like an air conditioner.

Thankyou for the feedback. I set the EQ between 6 and 12 for all the eq tracks, so I will try setting hem lower. I will also give the multi track/ less gain thing a try. My vst amps are a little hard to get to sound right, so I will try multiple tracks with different settings. I think a big mistake I made was using single tracks for each instrument.

I found I quite liked the inconsistent bass sound on "Spring", it gives a good Doom Metal flavour. If you wanted to rein it in a bit though I'd recommend some compression and a low cut filter (50 hz). You could also try eqing some mud out of the bass by notching at 200-300 hz, again if you want to remove those raw artifacts.
I didn't find the drums too bad because they were masked by the bass, overall my advice would be to bring bass down and boost the guitar.

thanks for listening. I will give that a shot, but I think part of the reason why this isnt working so well is my lack of knowledge in vst's. I've been doing some playing around with my amplifiers and my interface opposed to using vst's, and I'm getting a more consistent tone. But I dont have a bass amp, so I need to find a good bass amp, or a decent tutorial on how to record bass with vst amp sims properly.