Southern Sirens: 'Rachel'

[pauli]

Hey Juan! This is a late night listen on my reference headphones, so keep that in mind while evaluating/considering my comments.

This is a nice sounding, open mix. Nice spectral separation on the instruments, though I feel the brightness of the violin is slightly masking the air in the lead vocal from time to time. Personally, I think the breathy top end is absolutely essential to a female vocal in this genre and most others, so that's the main thing I'd try to address if you intend to revise. Just on a quick listen, I didn't notice any obvious automation at all... and you say you've used a lot! So you really did well with that and all of the instruments sound great to me.

The other little quibble I think could use another look is that the depth/imaging is a bit unconvincing for me, but that can difficult to assess in cans so I could be overstating this. You've chosen a pretty wide stereo image, which is a bit tricky with such a sparse mix, and I feel like it leaves holes in the spaces between the sides and middle. One remedy for this is to take advantage of the Haas principle... the human brain can't interpret a delayed version of the same sound source as being separate from the original if the delay is around 30 milliseconds or fewer, so you can widen the some of the instruments a bit into the holes with short, panned delays... there are often serious mono compatibility problems with that method though, so with this few instruments it may be better to use perceptibly longer delays to the opposite stereo side to simulate a specular reflection from the other side of the room. Mono compatibility is less of an issue with that trick and most of the time it sounds really, really nice with soft acoustic material.

As far as depth is concerned, sorting out the overall imaging and masking on the vocal will from the outset make a big difference right away. I'd shave a bit of brightness off the very top of just about everything but the vocal, at least while the vocal is active. The transients on the strums are pretty plucky, which can make an instrument sound further forward, so a fast compressor with a low ratio, maybe a db or 2 of reduction, can push it back a bit without serious tonal sacrifices. Unless you have a nice transient designer that you trust... I don't, personally, and compressors are easier to control in my opinion, but with a really uneven performance transient designers can be more manageable. These performances sound absolutely wonderful though.

Now I'm going to get super dense, boring and technical.

Delays mostly represent what are called specular reflections, meaning reflections that occur in a (basically) straight line from the boundary, and reverb mostly represents diffuse reflections, meaning sound that has been scattered and spread throughout the room (basically) randomly, and a good balance of diffuse and specular reflections will help. Usually it sounds nice and very realistic if you feed the output of any delays a bit into the same stereo reverb you use for the vocals... too much in the way of specular reflection and not enough diffusion can make it sound like you're listening to the band perform in a big empty warehouse, which you probably don't want :p so if you try my delay trick it'd be a good idea to dial up the reverb a bit. There's actually a lot of room for nice layered reverbs from what I can tell... I'd go for it, personally.

Anyway, I talk a lot, but those "issues" are very small and didn't really hurt my enjoyment of the mix... they might not be issues for some people at all. This is a really nice mix and it appears your automation efforts have been very successful. Just a little bit of sweetening, probably not an hour of effort, and this will be a winner. Great job... I mean it.