Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
Our love is here - Matt's mix
#1
Lots to do on this one - autotuned the vocals, did some drum replacement, reamped the guitar and smashed it all into a brickwall limiter...... jokes. Really, really nice to work on a song when your main task as a mixer is not to screw it up i.e. do as little as possible.

Complete channel treatment:

Kick - NLS channel, C1 gate, Pultec EQ to make it just a bit less woolly. Gate became necessary because once it was EQ'd the spill became too prominent.

Snare - NLS channel + reverb send

OH - NLS + Flux Stereotool (it's brilliant and free) to narrow the width - the overheads were wider than the rest of the band otherwise!

Toms - drummer didn't play the toms once. Muted

Bass mic + Bass DI - NLS only

Piano - NLS, hi-pass filter to get rid of the worst of the pedal noise, V-EQ3 to add a little more weight and a definition + reverb send

Elec - NLS + reverb

Sax - NLS + reverb

Vox - NLS, H-EQ with a very narrow notch around 500Hz, a wider cut at 1.5KHz and a slight air lift, CLA-2A just catching the peaks + reverb

Master buss - NLS buss, VBC Mu model with no more than 1-2dB GR just to glue things together, Kramer Tape

Reverb send (just the one) - Quantum Leap Spaces Small Stage + hi-pass filter.


Then at "mastering" (hardly deserves the name) ran everything back through the Kramer Tape with a pinch of added noise, wow and flutter for that "authentic analog vibe" (!!) and used Slate FG-X for another 1/2 dB compression and to bring the peaks up to something close to zero - don't think it even reaches 0dBFS at any point though. Tiny bit of 16KHz added with Pultec as well.

So that's it. Hope that's helpful, any comments or feedback welcomed, cheers, Matt.



** EDIT ** have tweaked the kick drum a little as there were a couple of hits poking out, also de-essed the vocal just a bit as the sibilance was a bit sharp.


.mp3    Our love is here - Matt\'s mix v2.mp3 --  (Download: 10.91 MB)


.mp3    Our love is here - Matt\'s mix v3.mp3 --  (Download: 10.91 MB)


Reply
#2
Nice Wide Sounding mix Matt.
I like it Big Grin !

Please Help Mike Keep This Awesome Educational Site Alive And Become A patron !
https://www.patreon.com/CambridgeMT/posts

Reply
#3
Very nice mix! Every instrument is clear and present, levels, panning and spaces match right. The low end is fine but the kick at times is prominent. By closing my eyes I can clearly see the band playing in front of me in a smokey pub, that´s awesome!

Great Job!
Reply
#4
(15-06-2015, 03:16 PM)acl Wrote: Very nice mix! Every instrument is clear and present, levels, panning and spaces match right. The low end is fine but the kick at times is prominent. By closing my eyes I can clearly see the band playing in front of me in a smokey pub, that´s awesome!

Great Job!

Hey thanks - that was exactly the vibe I was aiming for (bringing back memories of university jazz club in one of the college bars... that was a long time ago!) so great to hear that feedback, cheers! Smile Agree about the kick, if I go back to this I'll tweak it down just a shade, other than that I'm pretty happy with this one - at least, when I listen to it I can listen to the song rather than the mix which I guess is the aim in the end.
Reply
#5
Writing on v3 (latest to date).

This is a great mix, and I took note of your full mix-master tech sheet.
Voice is great, bass balanced as well as snare.

I would point out two options for improvement:
- adjust volume of sax solo at 2:10-2:20 since the sax gets a little lost in relation to the piano chords.
- overall the piano has a nice sound defined "smoky" in the forum. It seems your channel treatment has over emphasised the (pedal?) thumps (132Hz) and the treble shrill resonances (2kHz). In my monitoring and headphone conditions these details disturb the otherwise very pleasant flow.

cheers
"... I'm listening. Yes."
from Switzerland
Reply
#6
Hi Lammy,

Thanks for listening and giving such detailed feedback - completely agree with you on the sax, that does need to come up a bit. Re the piano, I think in Mike's original write-up about the multitrack (I think he recorded this one?) he commented that the piano mic placement wasn't great and picked up a whole heap of pedal noise which I tried to remove with a steep hi-pass filter at about 80Hz - there was a whole lot of junk going on below there. There may well be noises from the pedals higher up as well, but if I'd gone any higher with the filter the piano would have sounded far too thin. I did boost a little around 220Hz with a shelf though so I'll back that off and see if that helps.

The only other thing I did with the piano was a gentle boost around 10kHz so that certainly didn't create any resonances around 2-3kHz, though they may well have been there in the recording. Fact is, piano is just such a hard instrument to record well because the soundboard is massive and the frequency range is enormous compared with something like a sax - even with quality mics in an ideal room it can be difficult to get a solo pianist sounding good, let alone someone playing as part of an ensemble. Anyway, that's enough of me blaming the original recording Wink I quite agree the piano sound isn't perfect by any means, I was just wary of making it worse by trying to get too surgical on it. Glad you enjoyed listening anyway, thanks again for the feedback.
Reply
#7
just to keep you on your toes Wink ......

v3

there's some distortion coming thru the vocal, is it in the tracking? she's also still too sibilant, but you need to be careful how you work this, it needs to be crisp but without the attendant sibilance....kind of ribbon mic to get the feel of the genre, and more warmth is needed too - this sounds like a cheap China condenser - thin and sparkly. even if it is, you need to try and aim for a warmer delivery while retaining presence, something akin to the Coles 4038. her vocal is too narrow, it needs widening a little; you seem to be relying on the verb here and it's not working [in that respect]. the vocal needs to be REALLY nice in this song if it's going to connect because it's so exposed and wants to be delivered with a good degree of proximity(?).

NB: mp3 won't help your case with the sibilance...it will tend to expose it more - psychoacoustics stuff.

the upright is lumpy....one minute it's banging, the next it drops right out.

the upright is too forward in the depth field, IMO, for this genre.

the big challenge will be to keep the guitar clear in the mix and balanced nicely with the piano. the piano's sustain coupled with it's verb in the stereo domain will necessitate some careful control.

that was with the bookshelf rig...now the Ovation II's then i'm off to bed:

i'm missing the binaural experience, which is positively essential in this genre. if you want a reference, i'd strongly recommend adding some Diane Krall (married to Elvis Costello) to your CD arsenal, she's a stunning vocalist and awesome pianist too, for that matter. any of the sloppy jazz numbers would do you well for that personal, up-front vocal and it will help you hunt for the vibe in this sort of material. check how the piano is worked into the sound stage too....it's a great lesson in the art of mixing [this genre]. she was on Jools' a few weeks ago, such a treat. the guitar, and indeed the piano, don't sound placed for the right illusion that i'd expect. letting the stereo reverb do the job won't cut it i'm afraid.

i think you need to hunt for some better separation between the bass drum and the upright; i won't call it a kick, because it's not kicked...more caressed on to the skin with unadulterated smoothness and decorum. this is why it's going to be difficult to get it working with the upright. however, once you get the upright behaving itself and better balanced, it should enable the bass drum to be shaped together and fine tuned. the problem is, that down in this neck of the woods there's so little room to flex EQ so a decent compression strategy will be called for along with it.

but you are dead right.....for this genre the mix should be wholly transparent and i think you were well on the way to achieving that.

Boinggggg...."Time for bed", said Zebedee.

PS: FWIW, I think you are having difficulty judging treble for some reason, there appears to be a common denominator across your mixes i've so far auditioned? if your monitoring environment is soaking up the treble (most domestic environments are heavily skewed this way), it will tend to encourage brighter mixes....and you will miss other's bright mixes also. or another problem could be the tweeter's lack of headroom or low grade crossover filters, assuming your monitors have a tweeter....but i think you need to explore it. must mention though, SPL will severely affect our perception of bass and treble relative to the mid range, so this needs to be taken into account. anyone listening at a higher SPL than you originally mixed at will experience a subjective change in bass timbre and the treble will appear subjectively brighter [relative to the mid range]. i was auditioning at a modest level.....about conversation and fairly low on the cans....any lower and i'd have struggled, sort of thing.

hope it helps..
Beware...........Cognitive Dissonance!
Reply
#8
(15-06-2015, 10:51 PM)londonmatt Wrote: Fact is, piano is just such a hard instrument to record well because the soundboard is massive and the frequency range is enormous compared with something like a sax - even with quality mics in an ideal room it can be difficult to get a solo pianist sounding good, let alone someone playing as part of an ensemble. Anyway, that's enough of me blaming the original recording Wink I quite agree the piano sound isn't perfect by any means, I was just wary of making it worse by trying to get too surgical on it. Glad you enjoyed listening anyway, thanks again for the feedback.

I cannot agree more... reminds me of the 8 hours spent one Sunday last month trying to place (if I remember well) 9 microphones on a Yamaha C7 with poor results. Tongue

To be honest:
- I don't read much BEFORE mixing. I need to feel the mix going its own way. I just saw the setup picture on SOS. Mattresses and all the stuff.
- I looove clean. Cleaning up surgically is one of my fixations. That's why my comment.

cheers
"... I'm listening. Yes."
from Switzerland
Reply