First mix posted in quite some time.

[pauli]

Hey Dave, thanks for the critical listen and thoughtful comments. You always manage to suggest something (or 3 or 4 things lol) that I hadn't considered.

by energy, do you mean volts and the subsequent loss of headroom relative to the needs of the chorus?

In this case by energy I didn't mean anything literal or technical, I was mainly referring to feel/excitement for various reasons, but that certainly applies. I wanted to give the choruses plenty of room to hit hard, because this arrangement has a tendency to shrink in the choruses if you're not careful.

expand vertically? you mean treble-wise (re. the 3-dimensions)? i think the kick could come up a lot more generally, but what i'm missing here and in everyone else's mix, is the bass guitar, or rather it's bassss. so, i pulled the multi and took a quick look, and it seems the bass is often higher up the register, making the low-end somewhat thin and weak'ish and a touch devoid of rhythm and pulse - the emphasis seems placed on the guitars as a consequence? as a side note, the heavy guitars are calling for some distortion on the bass so it can hang in there with the gang.

I meant both treble and bass. The kick is mixed in a good deal louder in the choruses, and the stereo enhancer brightens things up as they often tend to do. That's a very on-point observation on the bass guitar vs. guitars. The bass guitar's contribution could benefit from multing and processing the verses and choruses entirely different, in hindsight. If I revise this, I'll probably let the electro kick fill out the bottem in the dance-inspired verses and use the bass guitar for low end in the rock inspired choruses.

i especially liked the character you'd mixed into the e-guitars.

Thank you!

on the vertical dimension, the ramp up at ~2:16 sounded generous in treble? i'm wondering if less is more in this instance, it would benefit the vocal too, which sounds like she's struggling to keep her head up here. did you automate her upwards at this point? also on the vocal, i'd give her some width in the mix (but not a reverb) - note she's very present in mono...which suggests there's some scope. but the snare disappears here, so too the kick. still in this area, the RH cymbal appears somewhat overly present in the ear and it's fatiguing in my cans (i'm on the Ovations). i'm thinking that if the kit is somewhat in the depth field, so the cymbals can go pretty much mono perhaps with trebles rolled off a little, which would also work in your favour by reducing the spectral skew?

Yeah, I agree on all points. It's not just the treble enhancement that's boosting the cymbals overmuch, either... that's an issue with the supplied overheads and the issues highly definitely warrant a different mixing strategy with the drums.. probably focusing more on the spot mics.

i'm not sure i'd want the kit so far back as it appears in the illusion you've created though, but i guess also from the other elements, that you wanted some space in your vision?

lol yeah. I layered a master reverb under everything, a lexicon impulse of some kind, hoping mostly just the glue things together and fill out any holes in the stereo field, but it's adding too much depth to the drums in particular, given the emphasis placed on the overhead/room mics while mixing the kit.

occasionally the sibilance has moments where it's a little on the uncomfortable side, though when the song is banging and the cymbals are flying, it doesn't stick out because of the masking, but then i find the trebles difficult. what technique did you employ to de-ess, out of interest?

No de-essing I think you're right about the cymbals, because they mask the sibilance and in so doing fatigue the ears. The esses didn't seem like a problem when I posted but I can hear them now.

this is probably THE most dynamic mix i've ever come across in the forum. incredible. Mastering engineers dream of getting such clients!

Lol thanks! Took a bit of work considering a compressed/distorted the living hell out of a few elements for color/character. I metered it, and if memory serves it was around 16 LUFs over the course of the song, but the verses were significantly more dynamic.

Thanks again for the thoughtful review, this will be a lot of help going forward.