24-01-2019, 08:16 PM
Hi APZX! The balancing is pretty solid here, and I love what you've done with the effects on the guitar solos. The tempo-related echoes work particularly well with the more rhythmic parts, such as the riff first heard in the Reintro. The overall mix tonality could probably have a little less 130Hz and a little more sub-80Hz, as well as being brighter overall, given that we've got current mainstream sonics in the crosshairs. However, if you do lift the high end, you'll probably want to tame the open hi-hat and cymbals around 4kHz as well as reining in that slightly needling resonance in the rising guitar line that leads into the Outro. The claps will also need rounding off a bit, as they're currently a lot brighter than the rest of the kit.
I like the subtlety of the Hammond during the first chorus, but the higher-register part in Chorus 2 is probably a little too strident around 2kHz, so that it's masking the vocal more than I'd recommend. Although I love the timbres and effects you've used for the solo guitars, they do present a few balance problems, in my view. The Intro guitar sound is quite full-sounding, and I found it distracted attention from the lead vocal during Verse 1, and also when it plays that riff during Chorus 2. The Verse 2 guitar, on the other hand, seems underpowered by comparison, and I'd have liked to hear more of its lower-level details. So those are definitely tracks I'd recommend applying some careful fader automation to.
I like the drum sound on the whole, and the kick and bass guitar share the low end well, I think. Bass small-speaker translation is good too, despite your having a warmer and more rounded tone than mine (in the library preview mix). The snare and side-stick sound fine in combination with the kick, but do feel like they lack some weight and power when heard on their own, which loses the Reintro and Outro some rhythmic momentum and makes some of the drum fills less exciting than they might be.
The rhythm guitars really suffer in mono, and I think that undermines the groove under single-speaker playback conditions. I'm guessing that this might be a result of panning the individual multimics without sufficiently polarity/phase-matching them, so you may be able to address this quite easily with a simple sample-delay or polarity-inversion here and there. Despite this specific mono-incompatibility, though, the overall sense of stereo width in your mix isn't huge, and I'd expect most mainstream music releases to be rather more widescreen than this -- certainly anything with pop pretensions. Maybe just widening some of the reverb returns a little with an MS plug-in might help, for instance. The piano might be an option for widening too, when it comes in, as it's currently a bit too solid-sounding in the mix, given that it's not the most natural-sounding of sampled instruments that's been used here.
The lead vocal feels quite rich in the low midrange, which tends to make the mix sound a little bloated from time to time, especially when the vocal is part of the thicker Chorus or Mid-section textures, or when the variable proximity-effect bass boost inherent in the raw recording is at its strongest -- for example at the end of Verse 1 and the beginning of Verse 2. So I'd first try to even out some of those low-frequency variations with frequency-selective dynamics processing or manual region-specific EQ, and then I'd try to be more cautious about how you allocate the 100-300Hz headroom amongst the available instruments during the different sections of the song. That may mean that you end up wanting to mult the lead vocal, or automate an EQ plug-in for it, to adapt its low-midrange contributions to changes in the arrangement. Whatever you do, though, you'll also need to get into a bit more detail with vocal fader automation, I think, if you're going to maximise the lyric intelligibility here -- the vocal level is currently a little unstable throughout the mix, especially during Chorus 1, for instance.
Your effects use in general is one of my favourite parts of your mix, with lots variety, contrast, and general good taste in abundance. This all adds up to a lovely sense of depth between the close vocal, drums ambience, rhythm-guitar reverb, and solo guitar echo tails, for instance. The hi-hat and snare felt a bit stark during the Choruses and Mid-section, so I'd perhaps automate in a bit of extra ambience for those sections, and the congas and timbale feel a little too upfront in general too, compared with the drumkit.
The long-term dynamics are reasonable, although the Verse 2 conundrum (ie. it having the same arrangement as Verse 1) could maybe do with a bit more work to keep the listener's attention all the way up to the first chorus. The Outro arrives nicely, on account of the entry of the Hammond as much as anything, but the similar transition from Chorus 1 into the Reintro doesn't feel nearly as satisfying without that textural change (the Hammond's already in during the Chorus), so maybe you could find some way to 'lift' the energy of that section a touch.
A couple of final guitar-effect minutiae: Could the solo-guitar delay repeats be muted for that pre-Chorus 3 gap in the arrangement? It's not that I dislike the echo effect (on the contrary, in fact), but I think the gap might actually be a more dramatic statement at that point in the arrangement. And I also felt it was a bit of a shame when the end of the mixdown audio file truncated the decay tail of the final guitar line -- last impressions count almost as much as first impressions, where mixing's concerned.
Thanks for uploading your mix and getting involved in the contest! Hope some of the above is useful too!
I like the subtlety of the Hammond during the first chorus, but the higher-register part in Chorus 2 is probably a little too strident around 2kHz, so that it's masking the vocal more than I'd recommend. Although I love the timbres and effects you've used for the solo guitars, they do present a few balance problems, in my view. The Intro guitar sound is quite full-sounding, and I found it distracted attention from the lead vocal during Verse 1, and also when it plays that riff during Chorus 2. The Verse 2 guitar, on the other hand, seems underpowered by comparison, and I'd have liked to hear more of its lower-level details. So those are definitely tracks I'd recommend applying some careful fader automation to.
I like the drum sound on the whole, and the kick and bass guitar share the low end well, I think. Bass small-speaker translation is good too, despite your having a warmer and more rounded tone than mine (in the library preview mix). The snare and side-stick sound fine in combination with the kick, but do feel like they lack some weight and power when heard on their own, which loses the Reintro and Outro some rhythmic momentum and makes some of the drum fills less exciting than they might be.
The rhythm guitars really suffer in mono, and I think that undermines the groove under single-speaker playback conditions. I'm guessing that this might be a result of panning the individual multimics without sufficiently polarity/phase-matching them, so you may be able to address this quite easily with a simple sample-delay or polarity-inversion here and there. Despite this specific mono-incompatibility, though, the overall sense of stereo width in your mix isn't huge, and I'd expect most mainstream music releases to be rather more widescreen than this -- certainly anything with pop pretensions. Maybe just widening some of the reverb returns a little with an MS plug-in might help, for instance. The piano might be an option for widening too, when it comes in, as it's currently a bit too solid-sounding in the mix, given that it's not the most natural-sounding of sampled instruments that's been used here.
The lead vocal feels quite rich in the low midrange, which tends to make the mix sound a little bloated from time to time, especially when the vocal is part of the thicker Chorus or Mid-section textures, or when the variable proximity-effect bass boost inherent in the raw recording is at its strongest -- for example at the end of Verse 1 and the beginning of Verse 2. So I'd first try to even out some of those low-frequency variations with frequency-selective dynamics processing or manual region-specific EQ, and then I'd try to be more cautious about how you allocate the 100-300Hz headroom amongst the available instruments during the different sections of the song. That may mean that you end up wanting to mult the lead vocal, or automate an EQ plug-in for it, to adapt its low-midrange contributions to changes in the arrangement. Whatever you do, though, you'll also need to get into a bit more detail with vocal fader automation, I think, if you're going to maximise the lyric intelligibility here -- the vocal level is currently a little unstable throughout the mix, especially during Chorus 1, for instance.
Your effects use in general is one of my favourite parts of your mix, with lots variety, contrast, and general good taste in abundance. This all adds up to a lovely sense of depth between the close vocal, drums ambience, rhythm-guitar reverb, and solo guitar echo tails, for instance. The hi-hat and snare felt a bit stark during the Choruses and Mid-section, so I'd perhaps automate in a bit of extra ambience for those sections, and the congas and timbale feel a little too upfront in general too, compared with the drumkit.
The long-term dynamics are reasonable, although the Verse 2 conundrum (ie. it having the same arrangement as Verse 1) could maybe do with a bit more work to keep the listener's attention all the way up to the first chorus. The Outro arrives nicely, on account of the entry of the Hammond as much as anything, but the similar transition from Chorus 1 into the Reintro doesn't feel nearly as satisfying without that textural change (the Hammond's already in during the Chorus), so maybe you could find some way to 'lift' the energy of that section a touch.
A couple of final guitar-effect minutiae: Could the solo-guitar delay repeats be muted for that pre-Chorus 3 gap in the arrangement? It's not that I dislike the echo effect (on the contrary, in fact), but I think the gap might actually be a more dramatic statement at that point in the arrangement. And I also felt it was a bit of a shame when the end of the mixdown audio file truncated the decay tail of the final guitar line -- last impressions count almost as much as first impressions, where mixing's concerned.
Thanks for uploading your mix and getting involved in the contest! Hope some of the above is useful too!