Heartbeats - AZ Mix

[azwayne]

Well, here's my take on this tune. This represents my 40th mix since I started posting here. Been good practice.

First, I wanna say that this was one well assembled tune! Rare to see this sort of care and handling with the writing and chosen instruments.

When it came to mixing, though, I got a little confused on this one because I'm not familiar enough with the type of music so it took me a while to figure out where to take it. The vocals were the hardest because of the way they're tracked. Once I chopped them up into related bits, things made a little more sense. Corrected a few bad edits, adjusted a little timing, and that as all I had to do before bringing up the compressor. I also used a fair amount of stereo delays with this just to try to give it a better sense of width. Quite possible I overdid it but I figured if something that sounded a little artificial would fit anywhere, it'd be here. Anyway, It's a decent mix but I'm not convinced I got everything right here so feel free to make suggestions.

[Bedrock Studios]

Hey I have some feedback for you - the mix as a whole sounds a little boxy or 'thin' somehow. I'm no expert but could be either the amount of (around 450hz) muddy frequencies or too much low-end eating up the mix and masking the sounds? Ah - I think I know, it could be too much verb/delays, which put things 'back' in the mix and make them blurred in sound? I would go for clarity over width, but that's just my personal taste. I like the way you did the chorus section, with the overdriven guitars - nice and powerful, as a lot of the mixes on here lost energy at that point because of lack of control over the distortion sounds. Sometimes the verb is robbing the space in the mix - you can hear it at the beginning, also I might either up the volume of the vocal, or bring out the high end either with some low-mid reduction on the EQ, or some banded tape/tube distortion on the upper mids. I like the effect you used on some of the backing vocals - have you considered applying that effect to the main vocal and then mixing it with a dry track of the same? It could give you some extra presence/clarity if you felt it needed it.

Ben

[The_Metallurgist]

nice punchy, exciting vibe az'.

with a genre like this i always check my stuff in mono - that's 'mono' as in downmixed and put through one speaker only of course, and preferably bass shy too. it's great for a reality check by revealing phase issues and lost energy like the vocal here during the chorus, as well as some balance issues which can be fine tuned eg lead guitar vs vocal spectrally. if you put a really clean (not all filters are equal, hey) and steep Low cut in the sub region on your stereo buss, it will give a bit more headroom by helping to reduce the risk of low-end congestion.

thanks for the listen, while hacking my way through brunch!

regards