Hi all,
I really like this song and thank goodness for that considering how many times I had to listen to it in the context of getting this mix done!
Sorry in advance for what might be information overload below.
A few things that I want to say up front is that from listening to some of the other mixes here, people are tending to skip the step of listening to the individual tracks and fixing/editing issues that exist. There was a strange sound in one of the vocal takes that sounds like corrupt data rather than a recording issue. I've heard this still present in mixes on this forum. It is in a part with doubled vocals so you can easily remove that tiny section of audio without hampering the sound of the vocals.
Another thing with editing is the clean guitars in the bridge type section (I don't know what it is actually called). Some of the notes are played out of time and needed editing/massaging to get to sound correct.
The truth is that these issues are often hidden when you are listening to the raw tracks all together but as your mix starts making things clearer and more audible, they can really stand out in a bad way. Paying attention to those kinds of details makes a big positive difference.
The "commercial mix" of this song for me was just drenched in way too much reverb. There were elements of it that I liked but it was just swimming in the thing. I wonder whether that was an attempt to try and mask the harshness of the vocals which are really difficult to get to sit in the mix? I know that Blitzzz and a few other people wrote about their frustration at mixing the harsh sounding vocals and I concur.
They also cheated a bit on that commercial mix because there's a part in that bridge section which is very sparse and doesn't sound good with just the bass guitar and drums playing. It needed guitars and whoever mixed it realised that. They obviously had the DI for the distorted guitar part that finishes off the bridge and used that re-amped as a clean guitar to fill the void but we didn't ourselves have access to that from the tracks provided. For this section, I played around with what I did have to try and make something half way interesting and at least not feel empty.
Mix wise, I was really surprised at what was provided for the bass guitar. I've never seen such a massive cut in anything that I've worked on before with almost no frequency information from about 350Hz to around 1kHz. Made it a bit painful to work with.
I've only used 1 sample for the kick and 1 sample for the snare and both were blended in with the live tracks. The rest of the kit was mixed from what was provided except that I created my own room track and blended it in with what was there.
Overheads to me were a real pain and they sounded really harsh in their raw form. The tails on the cymbal hits sounded to me like they were being cut way too short. This was either because of bad mic choice, bad mic placement, bad room or all of those combined. I also felt that the stereo spread was too wide and for the first time in a mix found myself bringing the sides in rather than trying to push them wider. I feel that this really helped the sound of the overall kit to gel better. For the short cymbal tails, I used a transient shaper to try and make it sound more natural by increasing the sustain. I am still not overly keen on the final sound but I feel that I've made it better than it was.
Nothing special to report on guitars and synths really except that one of the synth tracks needed to be gated as there was live noise in it. I believe it was the drum kit (kick?) that was audible. Also, on Synth1, I automated my high pass filter which was used throughout the song to make it cut through but then made the outro piano chords sound way too thin.
Vocals...I don't know where to start. These vocal takes really needed a producer to work out what should be used and what shouldn't and it would have been great it they were comped sensibly. But hey, that makes the challenge more interesting so that's what I did. I split the vocals up into lead, harmony, clean and gang style vocal groups and then did the best I could to reduce the track count by comping parts into single tracks where it made sense to do so. This also meant I could do processing on the same style vocal on a couple of tracks rather than loads of them.
I've purposely automated things so that parts of the song are dynamic where they need to be (like that bridge thing, whatever it is called). When I was doing the limiting at the end to just get a bit of level added to the track, I was very light handed to preserve those dynamics. For giggles, I did a version that I felt was over-compressed and while the integrity of the overall sound was good, the subtlety of volume automation was lost and so I discarded that and stuck with a softer but purer sound in my opinion.
I'm happy with where everything ended up but I will admit to a serious amount of tunnel vision and fatigue at this point for I spent many a late night working on this song trying to get things to work. I don't think that I can bring myself to go back to it.
Hope that it sounds somewhat decent to you guys and also hope that some of the info above has proved useful.
Cheers
-Vinay
I really like this song and thank goodness for that considering how many times I had to listen to it in the context of getting this mix done!
Sorry in advance for what might be information overload below.
A few things that I want to say up front is that from listening to some of the other mixes here, people are tending to skip the step of listening to the individual tracks and fixing/editing issues that exist. There was a strange sound in one of the vocal takes that sounds like corrupt data rather than a recording issue. I've heard this still present in mixes on this forum. It is in a part with doubled vocals so you can easily remove that tiny section of audio without hampering the sound of the vocals.
Another thing with editing is the clean guitars in the bridge type section (I don't know what it is actually called). Some of the notes are played out of time and needed editing/massaging to get to sound correct.
The truth is that these issues are often hidden when you are listening to the raw tracks all together but as your mix starts making things clearer and more audible, they can really stand out in a bad way. Paying attention to those kinds of details makes a big positive difference.
The "commercial mix" of this song for me was just drenched in way too much reverb. There were elements of it that I liked but it was just swimming in the thing. I wonder whether that was an attempt to try and mask the harshness of the vocals which are really difficult to get to sit in the mix? I know that Blitzzz and a few other people wrote about their frustration at mixing the harsh sounding vocals and I concur.
They also cheated a bit on that commercial mix because there's a part in that bridge section which is very sparse and doesn't sound good with just the bass guitar and drums playing. It needed guitars and whoever mixed it realised that. They obviously had the DI for the distorted guitar part that finishes off the bridge and used that re-amped as a clean guitar to fill the void but we didn't ourselves have access to that from the tracks provided. For this section, I played around with what I did have to try and make something half way interesting and at least not feel empty.
Mix wise, I was really surprised at what was provided for the bass guitar. I've never seen such a massive cut in anything that I've worked on before with almost no frequency information from about 350Hz to around 1kHz. Made it a bit painful to work with.
I've only used 1 sample for the kick and 1 sample for the snare and both were blended in with the live tracks. The rest of the kit was mixed from what was provided except that I created my own room track and blended it in with what was there.
Overheads to me were a real pain and they sounded really harsh in their raw form. The tails on the cymbal hits sounded to me like they were being cut way too short. This was either because of bad mic choice, bad mic placement, bad room or all of those combined. I also felt that the stereo spread was too wide and for the first time in a mix found myself bringing the sides in rather than trying to push them wider. I feel that this really helped the sound of the overall kit to gel better. For the short cymbal tails, I used a transient shaper to try and make it sound more natural by increasing the sustain. I am still not overly keen on the final sound but I feel that I've made it better than it was.
Nothing special to report on guitars and synths really except that one of the synth tracks needed to be gated as there was live noise in it. I believe it was the drum kit (kick?) that was audible. Also, on Synth1, I automated my high pass filter which was used throughout the song to make it cut through but then made the outro piano chords sound way too thin.
Vocals...I don't know where to start. These vocal takes really needed a producer to work out what should be used and what shouldn't and it would have been great it they were comped sensibly. But hey, that makes the challenge more interesting so that's what I did. I split the vocals up into lead, harmony, clean and gang style vocal groups and then did the best I could to reduce the track count by comping parts into single tracks where it made sense to do so. This also meant I could do processing on the same style vocal on a couple of tracks rather than loads of them.
I've purposely automated things so that parts of the song are dynamic where they need to be (like that bridge thing, whatever it is called). When I was doing the limiting at the end to just get a bit of level added to the track, I was very light handed to preserve those dynamics. For giggles, I did a version that I felt was over-compressed and while the integrity of the overall sound was good, the subtlety of volume automation was lost and so I discarded that and stuck with a softer but purer sound in my opinion.
I'm happy with where everything ended up but I will admit to a serious amount of tunnel vision and fatigue at this point for I spent many a late night working on this song trying to get things to work. I don't think that I can bring myself to go back to it.
Hope that it sounds somewhat decent to you guys and also hope that some of the info above has proved useful.
Cheers
-Vinay