"Blue"

[davemcg61]

After listening to Deliza's and Kirk's mixes, I think I found a better balance. Last night, all the drum track compression was removed and I put it all back to unity. I put FF MB compressor on the drum buss, and set the low end to mid only, and the high end was pushed to the sides. It was better, coming close to what I was hearing from the previous mixes, but still not good enough. So I muted that drum bus and sent all the tracks to another buss with a VC76 compressor barely brushing 2dB GR and started sliding up the dry signal. Again I liked what I heard, but it didn't match the dynamics I heard. I tempered the kick drum tracks a bit and brought the snare and toms up. When I woke this morning, I tried mixing the two drums busses to a third buss without any plug-ins on it. That's where I found Nirvana; the tones fit the song and didn't seem exaggerated. I then took notice of the high end sizzle on the hi-hat and cymbals. A tiny boost at 12kHz brought that forward. I checked the bass against the kick drum and made them fit together a bit better. The guitar bus compressor was removed, instead compressing each guitar track. The song is a dad singing to and about his daughter, a little girl's "fantasy world". The last change was to the reverb used and I bounced it. In mastering, I changed from the SSL compressor to the C4. The Multi Opto preset had a range of 5.1dB by default, but that's been backed off to 3.3dB, and the various band thresholds were adjusted to compress only the peaks. This is the result.