Blue: Updated

[pauli]

Thanks as always for your review, Dave. This is a very challenging mix. A very, VERY challenging mix. Tracking difficulties aside, this is always a tough genre to work on, since it tends toward midrange heavy arrangements, lots of dynamics, etc etc.

in your v2, there's a gtr note that really jumps out @0:06 around the 500Hz zone. actually, i found the levels on the guitar to be a little on the intrusive side on occasions? perhaps the reverb is helping to exaggerate this somewhat. it's very dynamic, perhaps excessively so, as i'm almost losing it while auditioning at the comfort level with the cans.

Agreed... while the lack of "air" in the raw multitracks was the primary challenge I focused on solving, much as with Like Horses, the guitar was the other thorny issue for me, mainly due to the 500 hZ zone. As with most electric guitar recordings, the body of the tone here is centered on 500 hZ, but its also very dynamic in this range, so straightforward surgical EQ goes back and forth between doing too much and not enough. There's a multiband compressor at play, but even that sort of processing power falls a bit short. I'd personally prefer to reduce the guitar's contribution, but since we have Patrick here to explain his vision, I did my best to work with his intentions in mind

on the subject of reverb generally, i think you might be overdoing it, cos there's times when the accumulative effects are stacking up against you and there's some "ambiance collision" going on, especially around the mids (400-1000Hz) and up in the HF zone - the cymbals for example seem to be adding "tape hiss", a sign of too much reflection, hard surfaces and/or extended decays in your emu - not a cozy ambiance. with extended listening levels, this won't be user-friendly because of the equal loudness contours.

I didn't add much reverb at all... just a teeny bit of plate on the guitars and vocals, but it's barely there at all. Most of what you're hearing is printed on ambience with the drums and rhodes/vibes... not intending on remixing this because I've already spent way too much time one it, but in retrospect, it makes more sense to mute the room tracks and narrow the vibes/rhodes until there's very little to no ambience to help control it. There's the airy pad I added which might be contributing to the tape hiss sort of effect, but once again, it's barely there at all in terms of relative level... I thought it helped liven up the mix, but I can post a version with it muted if you guys are interested.

sibilance is a [major] problem.

There's pretty hardcore de-essing going on, too :/ 8 to 10 dB of gain reduction. Not much that can be done, there.

i've read the discussion already about mike choice for the vocal....another sad day. i wish there was a law against using sm57/58's for tracking vocals

According to U2's recording engineer (pre-fix: I'm not a fan), Bono has been tracking his voice on an sm58 exclusively since The Joshua Tree. He says in its raw state it sounds awful but after mixing it's the only mic that "sounds like Bono." Lenny Kravitz (again, not a fan) is also said to track his voice mainly with an sm58.

IMHO, dynamics are good vocal mics in a situation where the singer is really wailing into the microphone (punk rock or something like that) or if the singer needs to hold the mic to capture the same energy of their live performances. They're also a consideration if your tracking room is really bad... and a 57/58 is the best mic many can afford (though we'd all love a U47), and as such the 57 is the best selling mic in the world. You can also throw them at a brick wall at least twice without breaking them, and this I know from experience (LOL).

In this case though, I'd have preferred a condenser. Warmth can be good, but as Bob Katz once said, "warmth is just another word for mud."

loved the way you got the toy piano working in the mix.

Thanks, that was the easy part

not sure why you were running a 10Hz test tone.....this is seriously outside the box's working/design specification. i'm surprised the woofer didn't jump out and go for a jog down the road. feeding it an out-of-spec wave can risk permanently damaging the driver by exceeding it's mechanical limits, so go easy. the upright bass is quite lumpy, a character we're unaccustomed to hearing in your mixes.

It was just a sweep, -12 dB with the volume turned down most of the way. Wouldn't ordinarily do something like this (why bother?), but my son turned the sub's dust cap into button... had to poke a hole in it to pull it out and get any mixing done at all, so it's basically ruined anyway. The fact that I was hearing anything at all at 10 hZ told me all I needed to know: time for a new sub.

Lumpy bass is indeed something about which I try to be very vigilant, and uprights are always tricky in this regard, and this was programmed a bit out of time, too, which is also tricky. I layered a triangle wave sub-synth using the provided midi data and compressed the low end of the combination to help this a little, but obviously my monitoring is a bit compromised. Glad you flagged it up though, because I was thinking along the same lines but couldn't be sure.

looking forward to getting the old Pauli back.......

Yes, Pauli's been deliberately choosing difficult multis to mix lately. I'm learning a lot though, and the provided midi data here was a great chance to explore/experiment without spending hours programming it myself that should be spent walking the dog