06-03-2014, 06:56 AM
wow, I think there's a lot of good to be said about this mix. I worked on it a bit, trying to comp the guitar solo... I remember a bit of it but it's been a while. Having said this I think your comp sounds great and has a live feel, much as you intended. Jives very well with the vocal performance... I think it could sound a little more present to create the illusion he was playing it while singing, perhaps, but I dunno if you should mess with the balance because I think in that respect it's pretty good.
I think the vocal sounds quite good myself. There's quite a bit of sibilance on the vocal, but that adds a bit to the classic sound you're going for in my opinion... if anyone here has an old pressing of the crosby, stills, nash and young album deja vue, check out "teach your children". they wouldn't have been able to address sibilance without the poor guy in the control room lunging for the fader, and pop filters only go so far, so on that particular tune they made it part of the sound. in all fairness though, our ears are all different and I've noticed Dave's are more sensitive than most to the frequencies around 4k where you'd expect sibilance to live, hence his frustration (my personal "discomfort zone" is in the 500-900 range, so I always have to take breaks to make sure I don't goose too much out
). If it's an issue for you that you feel is worth addressing, maybe you could maintain a classic frequency balance and address the sibilance with some sort of tape saturation/clipping, which might smear those frequencies out a bit like old analogue systems did naturally. Obviously I was just a kid in the very early 90's when analogue recording largely fell out of favor, but I remember reading that in order to compete with the noise floor, they recorded as loud as they could without clipping in the 60s and 70s, and the closer the needle gets to 0, the more smearing you get... so any sorta frequency spikes sorta naturally de-essed.
Which, by the way, the LCR panning strategy works for me, since it reflects the stereo limitations of the era that they made part of the sound.
My main reservations, albeit small ones, are that I feel like the kick has too much low end power for the style and the upper mids get harsh in a couple places, but it's not enough to make my ears too uncomfortable to enjoy the mix! I think vinyl only goes down to 40hz, so filtering everything below that out of the mix and putting a really colorful tape saturation/clipping plugin on the master fader might improve an already solid mix.
I think the vocal sounds quite good myself. There's quite a bit of sibilance on the vocal, but that adds a bit to the classic sound you're going for in my opinion... if anyone here has an old pressing of the crosby, stills, nash and young album deja vue, check out "teach your children". they wouldn't have been able to address sibilance without the poor guy in the control room lunging for the fader, and pop filters only go so far, so on that particular tune they made it part of the sound. in all fairness though, our ears are all different and I've noticed Dave's are more sensitive than most to the frequencies around 4k where you'd expect sibilance to live, hence his frustration (my personal "discomfort zone" is in the 500-900 range, so I always have to take breaks to make sure I don't goose too much out
). If it's an issue for you that you feel is worth addressing, maybe you could maintain a classic frequency balance and address the sibilance with some sort of tape saturation/clipping, which might smear those frequencies out a bit like old analogue systems did naturally. Obviously I was just a kid in the very early 90's when analogue recording largely fell out of favor, but I remember reading that in order to compete with the noise floor, they recorded as loud as they could without clipping in the 60s and 70s, and the closer the needle gets to 0, the more smearing you get... so any sorta frequency spikes sorta naturally de-essed.Which, by the way, the LCR panning strategy works for me, since it reflects the stereo limitations of the era that they made part of the sound.
My main reservations, albeit small ones, are that I feel like the kick has too much low end power for the style and the upper mids get harsh in a couple places, but it's not enough to make my ears too uncomfortable to enjoy the mix! I think vinyl only goes down to 40hz, so filtering everything below that out of the mix and putting a really colorful tape saturation/clipping plugin on the master fader might improve an already solid mix.
I'm grateful for comments and suggestions. Thank you for listening!