Thread Rating:
  • 2 Vote(s) - 4 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
Siren - AZ mix
#1
Okay, here's my first attempt at this.

With electronic multitracks I have learned that one of the first things you have to do is spend an hour or two trimming things and listening for coarse edits. Since even background vocal parts are treated as a loop. there's a lot of cut and paste which means that you don't take from instance #6 of a phrase to fix instance #3 but rather you have the same mistake six times. That makes life fun. It is clear that the vocal tracks suffer from overly aggressive pith correction prior to packaging. I'm sure there's a way to fix that but I don't know the technique so I just did my best to hide it. There is pretty extensive use of the mute button in my session to try to create variance and build throughout the tune. It was difficult though to find the right balance between making room for things and sapping the tune's energy. There are also many group faders and a few extra FX returns. The heaviest use of plugins was on the vocals.

Now here's where I need a few suggestions. I tried to create in the chorus the sense of decreasing distance as you progress through the song. To help build the tune, I used imagers on the vocal lines to go from a narrow sound to an increasingly wide and more present sound. The problem is that this tended to create just a cacophony of sound as you got farther along. One thing I was never quite able to figure out what to do with were the SFX tracks that were included. I get what they're trying to do but without a defined and immediate peak, I had to try to fake it and let the guitars create the sense of arrival. Any thoughts on how to handle this would be welcome.

Anyway, here's my mix after somewhere north of about 25 hours work. (I got into it and stopped watching the clock a couple of times. Undecided )


.mp3    siren-mix-ltd.mp3 --  (Download: 15.34 MB)


Old West Audio
Reply
#2
I can imagine this as a perfect bonus track, kinda a halfway remix (nor a simple extended cut, like primitive remixes, nor a complete deconstruction). That intro is great, so carefully built. Same for the break, which is way too long for a pop mix but works very well here. If 2 hours is the time you need to do those edits, then I'm doing something wrong!

Those hard to balance vocals yep, weakest part of the mix since they are just too muffled and distant sounding from the beginning, when the sparse first verse seems to ask for a close-nasty vocal to fill the space. The choruses don't work for a "official" mix because there's no reward without present and juicy vocals, but they'd be great as part of a long, extended second half. And yes, last chorus sounds phasey and messy.

There's a feeling of emptiness, probably because the steady parts (loops, bass and vocal) are soft and there's too much noticeable reverb filling the space, plus some ear candy parts that are just drawing too much attention on themselves, like the cymbal rolls and specially that filter sweeping synth that comes in and out from the second verse. Listening to Kiley's "I believe in you", that tune has the kind of mermaid-like vocals and low end this mix seems to be missing to go beast mode.




Reply