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Four Graham - AZ Mix
#1
Okay, so here's my mix of this tune submitted for your scorn and ridicule... Big Grin

This was not a fun one. The song was well written so that's a good start. It went downhill from there. There were several significant problems that had to be addressed:

First, Herr drummer needs more practice playing with a click and more experience overall. I usually can't notice timing problems when they're minor like other people can but here but the more I went through the mix, the more I found was off. Unfortunately, I forgot to set the session tempo on this one and in SONAR once you get into a mix, don't THINK of changing the tempo because it'll reposition all your markers, edits, and automation. (It's all tied to the grid, not the timeline. Even the timeline, therefore, is relative to the grid.) So if you forget to do that UP FRONT and make sure it's right, you're screwed. Therefore, I couldn't go through and try to quantize the kick and snare like would have wanted to. Instead, I selected the worst deviations and did some selective editing by ear/sight.

It also sounded like he was playing on a rather loose kit. Things sounded a little floppy and it didn't help that the player was playing a bit on the soft side. I went for a complete replacement on the kick, sculpted to fit the overall sound but with more definition, and augmented the snare sound to add snare sounds. I've said it before and I'll say it again, far too many drummers are too used to Mom banging on the walls telling them to play quieter so the end result is that they don't learn how to get good tone from their drums. (This seems to be one of them.) When they finally do figure it out, the tendency then esp in metal bands is to over compensate and just play the hell out of them, making it hard to capture a good sound in less than a cathedral sized room.

There are also hints that some of the sound was mic placement, especially with the kick. The overheads were too close to the cymbals and that left other parts of the kit (yes, there *IS* a hi hat in there) almost completely hidden when he went to them.

There were other performance problems in the guitars and bass related to timing but beyond a few obvious ones, they didn't affect the quality of the sound so I didn't try to correct them. In general, these parts were alright, but they too need a little more practice with a click. (Just to hone things a tad.)

The big one was the lead vocal... The problem here wasn't performance as much as it was the engineering. If you listen to the raw track, you can hear several volume changes and you can occasionally hear a compressor (probably an optical) clamp down hard and sap the upper frequency band. There are also transitions that almost makes it sound like the setup is two guys with similar voices standing opposite sides of like a U87 set bidirectional. (One jumping in the instant the other finishes.)

What actually seems to be going on is a set of inconsistently recorded takes comp'd together haphazardly. If you listen to the second verse, for example, the ambiance of the track changes. Clearly a different take. In the above scenario, this would be as though one guy stepped away from the mic and we started picking up reflections on the back side. ("Two on one" is usually bad practice all around.) Here, though, I think he was just standing farther from the mic such that we picked up more room sound. Not a bad sound, really, but IMO it's gotta be all or nothing or very deliberately different (on a separate track in specific parts of the tune like JUST that verse or just the choruses or on a double track).

And here's where using a windscreen is a help. If you keep your singer up on it, it helps fix the distance from the mic between takes. If you don't want the screen in your specific session, either turn it horizontal and drop it below the singer's chin and ask them to try to keep just in front of it, or when one of your cloth ones gets ripped, cut it all out and keep the empty ring as a vocal spacer.

Anyway, I chose to deal with this by uncomping the track and trying to group similar sounding parts so I could then clip gain adjust the different new tracks and do different dynamic processing on them to match the tone as best I could before routing them all to a common bus for common treatment. (I had to take ~25-30dB off these!)

My biggest problem in this mix was trying to keep the vocal big without making it too present and ending up with it way out front. In the sample mix, he sounds really diminutive next to the guitars and I just didn't want that. The one thing I didn't do with the vocals that I wanted to was to automate the individual words and phrases for intelligibility. I'd go back to it but my day job needs more focus so I need to move on from this.

Anyway, here's my version. Comments are surely welcome.


.mp3    four-graham-mixdown.mp3 --  (Download: 6.39 MB)


Old West Audio
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#2
Hi AZ thanks for the comments on my mix!

This really isn't an easy set of multis to mix and you've done an ok job here, to me though it's very thin sounding and the drums especially have no power to them even with your replacement of the kick and augmentation of the snare. Really the drums need to be scrapped on this and programmed out or get one of your drummer friends to record some live drums to this. The best work you've done here is on the vocals as they really build through out but it seems like it doesn't carry over to the rest of the band, they get loud but don't add anything different or get fatter. With these modern Pop Punk acts drums really play a huge roll in the drive of the track are the backbone of the sound, have a small sounding kit here really will make the band sound lifeless (take a listen to Green Day, especially American Idiot or 21st Century Breakdown and listen to how big and powerful those drums are).

The guitars also sound good, they have a blanket over them in terms of the high end, the vocals have the same thing, I'd recommend boosting the guitars at 2 kHz and a little bit of high shelf boost at 10 kHz on the vocals to get them to give some sheen to them. Try using a clickier sample for the kick and ditch that original snare for something more cracking and powerful in the mix.

Cheers and hope this helps,
Doug
Mixing is way more art and soul than science. We don’t really know what we’re doing. We do it because we love music! It’s the love of music first. Eddie Kramer

Gear list: Focusrite Scarlett 18i20, Mbox Mini w/Pro Tools Express, Reaper, Various plugins, AKG K240 MKii, Audio Technica ATH M50x, Yorkville YSM 6
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#3
Yeah, that was not the best mix I've ever done. Smile
Old West Audio
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