It's in These Times Mix

[j_ohnny]

Like others have noted, this one seemed straight forward enough but gave me all kinds of trouble. The mix below is kind of my "I give up" mix as I started to feel lost and my ability to judge things had gone away. I had trouble with the acoustic guitar not being in time with everything else. Mainly just in the beginning. I nudged the bass around as well to lock it in more with the drums. I killed the sleigh bells after the intro because they clashed with the strumming acoustic guitar. I used the Pogues song A Pair of Brown Eyes as a reference but fell way short of it. Oh I also took the stereo miked acoustic guitars and made them mono. Well that's that. Any suggestions for improvement are always welcome and I know this mix needs it!

Tim

[azwayne]

I'll note that a couple of mixes here dropped the sleigh bells on the intro entirely.

That banjo is tough to handle, ain't it?
I had to dig into an EQ and knock that upper note down a tad to get it to stop stabbing at me every time he hit it and that helped it blend with the mandolin a bit better.

Sounds like you too had trouble figuring out what to do with the tin whistle. It's a nice addition but it's sort of uninteresting most of the time and doesn't make you want to bring it up too high. Shame too because it's reasonably well played and a nice sound.

Overall, I don't think this is a bad mix. Might bring up the lead vocal a little bit towards the end to help him stay over the background vocals. I also notice you did fairly wide panning on them. I debated that but don't like to pan vocals past about a third either way but I guess that can work for background, especially if they're supposed to be more "crowd" type sounds. Man, every time I feel like I'm doing reasonably well and getting pretty decent sounding mixes, I get a multi-track like this one and just think to myself, "Who am I trying to kid? I have absolutely no idea what the hell I'm doing." I'm sure others have felt the same.