Drag Me Down Rough Mix

[dcp10200]

Hey man good to hear you back here!

I'm not convinced by that cut on those rhythm guitars just to let the acoustic shine more. I feel the mix looses impact.
I really like your rhythm gtrs tone and your bass tone. they work pretty good together.
Vocal is on point on the eq in my opinion.

Awesome rough mix. I'm sure your final will be killer

Thanks Shul!

Vocal wise I didn't really do anything too crazy, pretty much just a cut at 600 Hz, a high pass at 200 Hz with a gentle slope, some leveling with Waves Vocal Rider, and compression with CLA 76 in Blue Stripe mode for some grit and brightness. The backups are unprocessed but the lead vocals have a 1/4 note delay, mono tape echo, and a plate verb with the pre delay set to 156 ms to add some air around them. These were some decently recorded vocals (barring the really obvious pitch correction ) and really didn't need a lot of Eq to fit in aside from some general housekeeping type moves and something around them to hide the tuning.

For me the biggest challenge was trying to make that acoustic rhythm make sense in the track, I really wish that the part was double tracked or was different from what the heavy guitars, I tried some Auto Double Tracking and that seemed to help with the spaciousness of them and make the sound bigger but after having to clear up a lot of low end content in the part and some fairly heavy compression, it just ended up just being a redundant part. I think if the lone acoustic on the first half of the second chorus works but muting it when the electric comes in makes it awkward. I like it on the build before the final chorus as it brings down the intensity of that part and give it a nice contrast to the final chorus, next mix down though I'm going to keep the acoustics in the final chorus .

The rhythm guitars are the stock sounds with a high pass at 100 Hz, a 5 dB cut at 316 Hz to clear up some space in the low end, a 3.75 dB dip at 751 Hz to clear up some honkyness in the mids, a Joey Sturgis cut at 4k (do I even need a reason to justify that ) and a low pass at 11k to clean up some top end fizz. Really the stock tone was what the track needed out of the gate, I've been forcing myself lately to only reamp if the tone is just not working with the track or if the artist tells me to reamp the part, a lot of this comes from being subbed to Nail the Mix for a few months (Febuary - April) and working with tracks that have a signature guitar tone and learning to work with real amps more and not reamping for "reasons".

Bass wise I only used the DI track with TSE B.O.D and Waves CLA bass to lock in the tone, after that I high passed the bass to 80 Hz, cut some 250 out, cut 1.8k to keep it from messing with the guitars, and added some compression with CLA 3a ala Paul Leavitt to colour the tone, and Waves L1 to keep things level.

I've started some work on the second mix now, it shouldn't be too hard to make this sound pretty good, not really into the whole "Post Hardcore" thing but this really reminds me of Doomed by Bring Me The Horizon so maybe referencing that will help.

Cheers and thanks for the points,
Doug