Hannes Keseberg - You Know Better - DaveArrowGtr mix

[davearrowgtr]

Firstly, what a great contest! Thanks for organising it, Mike and to Hannes for the multitracks. Some great mixes and I learnt a lot. Unfortunately I didn't have time to tweak my mix before the deadline, but I've addressed some of the issues now:

• Trimmed out some lower mid in a couple of parts to address the 300Hz problem.
  
• Added some de-essing to the vocal and hi-hat (the latter was tricky because of the overspill in the snare mic)
  
• Re-shaped the lead vocal tone slightly. I didn't want to lose its lovely mellowness, but boosted subtly at at around 1k as Mike suggested. Unfortunately my over-zealous "add air" during pseudo-mastering was partly responsible for the scooped tone, so I removed that too!
  
• Added some weight to the kick drum - hopefully not too much! I wanted the fabulous bass guitar part to own sub-100Hz, but I agree I went too far with this in the first mix.
  
• Fixed the vocal rhythm mistake! I had slightly adjusted vocal rhythm in a couple of places where it didn't sound quite natural to me. Probably an error while I was doing that.
  
• I respectfully disagree with Mike on my intro. I think the 2 bar lead guitar part and the bass guitar give clear indicators on the downbeat. Or maybe that's because I'm so used to it now... if I had time I might edit the drums with a simple fill to make it clearer.
  
• I didn't really like the whistles poking out of verses in others' mixes, but agree they needed to be somewhere before the end. My solution was to put them in the second chorus, and I stand by that! However I did find the quantity a bit annoying, so removed 2 of the 4 I originally had. (To be truthful, I don't really like the whistles at all, but defer to the artist here! I guess it's a personal preference thing)
  

Thanks again!