Don't Let The Devil Take Your Mind - HB Mix

[HbGuitar]

such a love/hate relationship with these Telefunken sessions. Usually love the songs and live feel.....but find wading though all the mic spill a real struggle.

anyways, here's my mix. I'm exhausted and my ears are completely fatigued so I will hopefully come back and review some mixes later.

[sysrq]

Quite natural sounding mix without too much ear fatiguing high frequencies, only thing is seems like bass guitar is playing underneath the kick drum (slightly clashing at times).
True, there was too much bleed from everything, so I had to abandon a lot of tracks. It's not easy to position microphones to get useful spill which might benefit the song.

[HbGuitar]

Hey sysrq, thanks for listening and your comments. Re bass/kick i hadn't really noticed but i think you could be right. I'll probably duck bass with a kick send - rather than play with eq/levels.

Cheers

[thedon]

I like your mix
With the bass ,I remember having to do a narrow parametric eq dip on the room bass to tame low resonance at around 160-170 ish
Good job !

[HbGuitar]

I like your mix
With the bass ,I remember having to do a narrow parametric eq dip on the room bass to tame low resonance at around 160-170 ish
Good job !

Hey Don...Thanks for listening. Glad you liked it

yeah....i had to pull out resonance in the bass track....and the master!

[Obelix]

Great and natural sounding mix. Only thing I find distracting are backing vocals.

[HbGuitar]

Hey Obelix - thanks for listening. From memory this was a tough mix with lots of bleed from all the live mics so glad you enjoyed it.

Re BGVs - yeah, I tend to go louder rather than quieter as a default, but obviously drop 'em down if client prefers. I think in this mix I was digging the live southern rock vibe

Cheers

Simon

[k14studios]

Very nice mix! This is very clean. I hear what the other members are saying about the bass but I don't see it as a problem for this recording. I do a lot of live recording and mixing live material. Mic bleed is just part of the overall sound. It's part of what makes it sound "live" .Mixing live material is a completely different mindset from mixing studio recorded material. You have to approach it more from the perspective of a live sound engineer than a recording engineer.

My two pieces of advise; First, use a little less compression. Again, this is a live track and you want to preserve as much of that live energy as possible. Second, regarding the bass/kick issue, I use this trick on almost every mix I do. I use an API 2500 plugin on the bass channel side chained to the kick drum. I set the ratio at 6:1 with a fast attack and a hard knee. I then use the HP feature to let the bass guitar ring through except for the low end when the kick is engaged. This allows the kick to be heard over top of the low end of the bass without having to duck the whole instrument.

[HbGuitar]

regarding the bass/kick issue, I use this trick on almost every mix I do. I use an API 2500 plugin on the bass channel side chained to the kick drum. I set the ratio at 6:1 with a fast attack and a hard knee. I then use the HP feature to let the bass guitar ring through except for the low end when the kick is engaged. This allows the kick to be heard over top of the low end of the bass without having to duck the whole instrument.

Hey Kirk

great bit of advice regarding setting up side chain compression. I often use this myself, but only full band compression. Using EQ on sidechain is brilliant!

Thx for listening, cheers, Simon

[azwayne]

Interesting trick, using a bandwidth limited ducker. Gonna have to remember that one.

I think the bass here has a little mud in it that could stand to go away, but otherwise, I think this is a reasonable mix.

About the mic spill... When I attacked this track, I was in a "let's see if I can make spill work *for* me instead of against me" mode and generally didn't try to do much to reduce spill nearly as much as I would have otherwise. Rather than trying to isolate each sound, I rather tried to bring out what was best about it and let the rest of the sound be. I also left the mix slightly thin in the low-mids to try to keep the live ambiance so I focused. I actually felt like the engineers on this one did a pretty good job of getting good, workable tracks. So it can be done. You just have to approach it from the right perspective.

As I was mixing this, I pictured the band in an outdoor venue sorta half way between a proper festival grounds and one of them terraced amphitheater sort of things that somehow manage to not work for anyone using them and focused on getting that sort of natural concrete echo from behind the band (think of it as if they were perched in a somewhat sunken concrete nook in a roped off section of a shopping mall parking lot) but also with a decent amount of open space. Above all, I wanted it to be clear this was a live track and that's where the spill can really help you by inadvertently capturing a good room sound just by themselves. My main issue with the way it was put together was that I often wanted more of the room sound than I could reasonably get with the room mics and more crowd sounds which simply weren't captured (partly because it sounds like there was less of a crowd than the artist deserved.) By the time I was done mixing, this track had really grown on me. It's just an excellent performance by guys who clearly have far more talent than I do.