Never stop dancing EJ :)

[JEL]

James May - "Eliza Jane" - JELmaster

This is a wonderful song. Recorded beautifully

I did first think about tuning the vox but decided against it. There is something human that goes away when tuning a vocal, especially in indie/alternative styles such as this one (I guess in pop it fits well enough, but I think indie/alternative sounds better when it doesn't sound machine-perfect )

I don't mix vocals much. You have to be super-delicate with vocals (probably because vocals are inherent to being human and therefore have a narrower range it must fit into to sound correct) and I find it more forgiving to mix instrumental music (I just think there's a lot more room to play with when mixing instruments. Maybe because it's not 'hard-wired' into our minds what they should sound like, as vocals are)

Anyway, I ended up deciding I wanted the vox to be quite close up front and dry, without separating it too much from the music.
I actually made the vocals as the last thing, after having done the instrumental version first.

The song is overall quite bright. I do have a level of tinnitus, but I'm not sure if it's just my personal taste (I like bright music) or if it's a degree of actual hearing-damage that makes me opt for bright spectra in most of what I mix/master.
But it might not fit the taste of everybody (I generally aim for a 3-degree spectrum overall, although I've noticed that jazz typically sits around a 6-degree spectrum (which just sounds very dark to my ears))

The bass-guitar may be a bit too 'boomy'. I'm not too sure though, it could just be my sound-setup that exaggerates some frequencies and/or creates resonances.

The drums are quite punchy, but that's a deliberate choice. I find that often when playing music loud, if it's quite heavily compressed, the drums tend to lose their punch (even though it may be there at low volumes)

So to make sure they 'oomph' even when the song is played at high volume, I kept the bass-guitar on the low side. This may not really be to everybody's taste. I know a lot of indie/alternative have low-level drums, or kind of un-defined drums, to create these typical big-reverb sound-scapes, or psychedelic sound-scapes, that signifies some indie/alternative styles.

On the other hand, I didn't want the overly dry rock-drums that is used in some rock-styles, where the sound tend to be more snappy but without body.

I electrified the acoustic guitar-tracks, but not too much, just to give them some indie/alternative-crunch (I actually learned that trick from an 'unplugged' concert Hole did in the 90s, which wasn't really very unplugged at all haha (they did use acoustic guitars, but with built-in pickups (and therefore plugged) rather than mic's set up on stage, and therefore had a sound much closer to typical distorted guitars))

I didn't do anything to the Hammond, but runs that one clean through the mix (I mean, it's a Hammond, nothing I can do to it would make it better )

I compressed the vox a bit and eq'ed it to try and get it crisp and airy. I find for some songs the vox sounds great when drowned in reverb and coming from behind the instruments, but in this one I really liked the sound and felt it sounded best when kind of leading the instruments, sitting in front of them. So I kept it fairly dry, but not completely.

I cut off the deep end (to kill the low-end rumble) but tried to keep the vox from getting to 'phone' like (It can sound great for fx, but generally I don't like a full song to have a 'phone'-like vocal-track)
I wanted the vox to remain full (to keep that fully human sound )

It's a really good sounding vocal track clean actually, so I didn't really want to mess too much with it but just keep it flat in terms of spectrum (although I did brighten it up to get it to pierce through the mix a bit more)

I noticed the song shifts tempo quite a bit halfway through (speeds up), but I didn't change that in any way.

In terms of plugins I used a range of compressors, reverbs, EQs and other things.

(Speaking of plugins, I hope it's ok I just plug a plugin of my own design called "Otto" http://jelstudio.dk/JELSTUDIO_software.html I didn't use it in this particular mix, but have used it in other mixes I posted on this site)