A Place For Us

[pauli]

Well in this case you're undercooking them, believe it or not; this is better but, <scottish brogue>"We need more power to the reverbs, sir! We canna get to warp speed without 'em!"</scottish brogue>

Yeah, I'm always tempted to up the ante on verbs and have tried to become more subtle in their usage. I referenced a few additional tracks and dialed it in more appropriately

Actually, the lead vocals don't sound right to me. They sound boxy, like they're coming out of cheap speakers; I think you may have rolled off a little too much on the low end of them.

The low end was part of the culprit, but there wasn't enough high end, either. My speakers tend to lie to me about what the high end sounds like, so I fine tuned it in my reference phones.

The lead vocals are also way too far forward; as a result the music is pushed to the background and is losing a lot of power. You need to bring them down a good 3-4 dB at least.

When I added some of those verbs in the first round of tweaks I didn't put nearly enough effort in rebalancing everything to make room, and it made the problem even worse. This is also related to a monitoring issue I've only become aware of just recently, but headphone use fixed it quite nicely I think

Also, I think the guitars, relative to the rest of the instruments, could be louder. And that Electro Hit hits way too hard relative to the overall volume of the music.

Yeah, I allowed more high end to enhance the definition of the mix and widen the stereo image, but as that made it unacceptably loud I overcompensated. In this mix you'll hear a 50/50 compromise.

On the upside, though, listening to the music itself you've got some impressive definition and detail going on, extremely difficult to do with a 69 track mix. Referring to the music itself, sans vocals, aside from bringing up the guitars a bit I think that part of the mix is working extremely well.

Thank you Clarity is always my top priority... my musical background (before becoming a guitarist) was in classical music, so I tend to "serve the music" on dense pop mixes like this and mix the vocals last... and somehow they always end up too loud. My speakers sit on the desk much to closely together and I think it's skewing my perception of the center of the stereo image, but now that I'm aware of the problem I can be more vigilant and avoiding it

Thanks for your feedback... I'm quite a bit more satisfied with the mix I have now... the original was a sonic version of throwing my hands up in the air in frustration and stepping away until I could renew my perspective. I'll post my thoughts on your mix this evening after work