Santa Fe - Rook Mix

[Monk]

Here is my shot at Santa Fe. v3

Cutting to the chase, the biggest problem is the missing spatial glue and commonality all the instruments are missing. This doesn't mean I think you should feed everything into a send with a verb emu dangling off it. You need to make this 3D. At the moment, it's still very much a 2D presentation.

The challenge of this multi makes it particularly interesting, because it’s not rich with spill (I suspect the gtr cabs were in another room!), so there’s missing that subtle sense of depth and space which comes from the phase inter-relationships between the mikes which our unconscious attention would compute in our mind’s interpretation.

Couple this to the problem of the gtr effects, which although by definition are not ambient in nature, they do provide a sense of depth and space, albeit in an unconventional manner to which we humans are accustomed to in the Real World. Also, they don’t balance spectrally in the stereo domain in the tracking, one pulls more than the other because of this.

Your gtrs are the weakness to the illusion which nobody has so far illuded to. Next is the keyboard because that’s as dry as hell in the tracking and necessitates even more diligence. Once you sort out your stereo domain to reflect more in the way of Nature (3D), you should find the vocal will be fairly easy to position in the scheme of things.

The drums are a whole discussion in their own right, for a number of technical reasons. But if I have to hear the needless stick count again, I’ll go insane.

By the way, by “plural”, I meant “more than one”. You’ve incorrectly assumed I used 2. It’s not really relevant here, but some might think that 2 compressors is the way to go. The only way, of course, is how you need it to go to achieve your goals

I hope this helps