Pedaling Prince MIx: Enda Reilly - Cur An Long Ag Seol

[Pedaling Prince]

[T]he vocal sound as such seems to be very good, but I feel that it feels a little suffocated with those spacious string instruments. Especially if you listen with lower level. As we don't have a possibility to take the space away from those instruments, I think you should add just a little bit space to vocals, to make it blend better with surroundings. I don't mean it should be anything audible with a tail, but just a small amount of ambience that is heard only when it is muted.

There was already a subtle reverb there for that purpose but maybe I made it a little too subtle; I brought it up a touch.

I'm not sure if it's typical to Irish accordion player, but this one seems to like walking around while playing. I think it was a good idea, but it distracted me from listening the music, when I started to follow only him: "is he moving?".

You pictured it exactly as I did, as if the accordion player was off to one side waiting for his/her cue then walked across the stage playing their part. If this were part of the main song I'd consider the distraction a bad thing but as the accordion player's first appearance is during a break in the song where the vocalist isn't singing I thought maybe it brought a bit of interest to this lull point.

I know you dislike the use of compression, but in this case you could use (more?) compressor as a leveller: to balance the volume differences within playing and make it more even. I'm quite sure that this bass wasn't of the highest quality as the playing had so big level differencies.

You're right that I don't like to use compression, but my strongest objection to its use is on the master buss; I don't have any compunction about using it on individual tracks when the occasion calls for it. I do tend to avoid the use of compressors on acoustic instruments as I tend to want to preserve the original shape of the sound but in this case you're right about the bass; it is a little too boomy (my building superintendent actually called me while I was balancing it; I didn't take her call but I already knew she was complaining about the bass shaking the building so I switched to headphones, which I was about to do at that point, anyway). So I applied compression on both bass mic tracks with a gentle ratio but a fairly high threshold to try to even them out a bit. Settings, threshold -7.5 dB, ratio 3.9:1, 47 ms attack with 2 dB of makeup gain.

But main thing. I like the sound very much. Very good job!

Thanks! Hope you like the improvements!

This mix nicely captures the jaunty feeling in this I just feel perhaps the vocal could have a touch more air to just bring it closer to the ear. But I very much enjoyed listening

Glad you liked it! To try to air out the vocals a little for you I made a few EQ adjustments: I made a 4.5 dB cut at 315 Hz and boosted 12 kHz 4 dB more for a total of 7 dB boost at that frequency; I also left in the 3 dB cut at 80 Hz and 1.5 dB boost at 6200 Hz that were already there.

Here's my revised mix; what do you think?