Way of Life Mixed by Dcp

[dcp10200]

I have to say that these tracks from Lead Inc are at first challenging to mix, but I found sitting down and listening to the different tracks and finding out what each part is doing helped me out abit. These tracks are a great exercise in preping your tracks before mixing. Anywho, on to the mix.

This mix here is based off of a rough mix I made a couple of days ago, after leaving it for a couple of days I made some adjustments to the kick, snare, and toms and added some automation to the vocals and dirty rhythm guitars. Even with this version there are still somethings I need to work on but overall this is the kind of sound I'm going for.

The 2 buss for this mix is calibrated with a -18 dBfS test tone generated by the tone generator in Reaper (similar to what I did for my remix of Good Time). This time I used The Variety of Sound Density MKIII Compressor, Waves NLS Neve Emulation, Waves Kramer Tape, and Waves CLA 2a compressor (not really doing any compression, moreso adding colour). I mixed through this chain of plugins and went on from there.

The drums are much the same as my mix for The Dice except I didn't use the Rough Rider Compressor on them this time around, I used Klanghelm IVGI saturation, Waves CLA 3a, and a soft clipper. The kick has a more rounded sound this time and the drums overall have a more vibey sound.

The bass is run through an Ampeg emulation in Guitar rig 5 and uses a crossover built in to the plugin to run the lowend of the bass through a 8x10 ampeg cab emulation and the high end through a RedWirez Marshall 1960a cab ir miced with a modded sm57.

Guitars are treated much the same as The Dice, the clean guitar has a doubler and octaver to make it stereo and the dirty guitars have some eq and a TDR Nova dynamic eq sidechained to the bass to remove some low end mud when the bass plays.

Vocals are run through a Destressor emulation with some eq tweaks.

Mastering was some minimal compression and eq.

Please leave you comments and critiques below and enjoy.

[Shul]

Mix is sounding pretty good.

*kick is getting masked big time in the chorus.
*vocals are nicely treated
*bass has a pretty cool edge to it.
*toms are poking out a bit. Also they sound a bit dry to me.
*would have liked more bottom end energy in your mix.. But that's just my taste.

Sounds really good. I would definitely boost the kick.
Good mix.

[dcp10200]

Mix is sounding pretty good.

*kick is getting masked big time in the chorus.
*vocals are nicely treated
*bass has a pretty cool edge to it.
*toms are poking out a bit. Also they sound a bit dry to me.
*would have liked more bottom end energy in your mix.. But that's just my taste.

Sounds really good. I would definitely boost the kick.
Good mix.

Thanks Shul for the critique.

I agree with you on the kick and toms and I'm going to do another ground up remix of the track along with some more tweaks with this mix here.

In going for that more vibey sound on the drums I got alittle carried away with making the kick less beater heavy. The toms are probably going to need some automation to keep them consistent in the mix and some more verb.

Low end in the mix I'm fairly happy overall but I think my problem is more the low mids and the relationship between the kick and bass, another thing to address in my new mix.

Thanks again for the critique,
Dcp

[Dangerous]

Really Solid mix Dcp, Well Done.
Dave

[The_Metallurgist]

one of the challenges i've had with this mix, is getting the vocal right. she's missing treble in the tracking and it greatly affects her diction and probably doesn't help with the nasality problem which predominates. i found the UAD precision enhancer kHz helpful, for example. but we also need to watch out for the room she's been tracked in, it's far less than ideal. because of the extreme dynamic in her vocal, the room starts to come out strongly under compression, countering/contradicting the ambiance and placement of the other instruments. if i recall, i ended up using 3 different compressors on her (and a limiter!), but each contributed something individually to the task of control and sound shaping which i felt was needed.

[dcp10200]

one of the challenges i've had with this mix, is getting the vocal right. she's missing treble in the tracking and it greatly affects her diction and probably doesn't help with the nasality problem which predominates. i found the UAD precision enhancer kHz helpful, for example. but we also need to watch out for the room she's been tracked in, it's far less than ideal. because of the extreme dynamic in her vocal, the room starts to come out strongly under compression, countering/contradicting the ambiance and placement of the other instruments. if i recall, i ended up using 3 different compressors on her (and a limiter!), but each contributed something individually to the task of control and sound shaping which i felt was needed.

I can't argue with you there, the vocals are somewhat of a challenge here. Besides the compressor I used some soft clipping and a limiter (I do alot of heavier rock and metal with growled vocals so that combo isn't too strange for me) but I also found myself using a de esser, something I find that I don't use so much. Alot of times I find that the CLA 76 Bluey plugin does the job but for some reason a freeware emulation of a destressor seemed to work better for this track.

[dcp10200]

Really Solid mix Dcp, Well Done.
Dave

Thanks Dave, glad you liked the mix.

[Dangerous]

one of the challenges i've had with this mix, is getting the vocal right. she's missing treble in the tracking and it greatly affects her diction and probably doesn't help with the nasality problem which predominates. i found the UAD precision enhancer kHz helpful, for example. but we also need to watch out for the room she's been tracked in, it's far less than ideal. because of the extreme dynamic in her vocal, the room starts to come out strongly under compression, countering/contradicting the ambiance and placement of the other instruments. if i recall, i ended up using 3 different compressors on her (and a limiter!), but each contributed something individually to the task of control and sound shaping which i felt was needed.

I can't argue with you there, the vocals are somewhat of a challenge here. Besides the compressor I used some soft clipping and a limiter (I do alot of heavier rock and metal with growled vocals so that combo isn't too strange for me) but I also found myself using a de esser, something I find that I don't use so much. Alot of times I find that the CLA 76 Bluey plugin does the job but for some reason a freeware emulation of a destressor seemed to work better for this track.

Interesting reading with the use of clipping and limiting on the vocals. Something I wouldn't have ever considered. I will have to keep this in mind especially with this style of music.

[dcp10200]

one of the challenges i've had with this mix, is getting the vocal right. she's missing treble in the tracking and it greatly affects her diction and probably doesn't help with the nasality problem which predominates. i found the UAD precision enhancer kHz helpful, for example. but we also need to watch out for the room she's been tracked in, it's far less than ideal. because of the extreme dynamic in her vocal, the room starts to come out strongly under compression, countering/contradicting the ambiance and placement of the other instruments. if i recall, i ended up using 3 different compressors on her (and a limiter!), but each contributed something individually to the task of control and sound shaping which i felt was needed.

I can't argue with you there, the vocals are somewhat of a challenge here. Besides the compressor I used some soft clipping and a limiter (I do alot of heavier rock and metal with growled vocals so that combo isn't too strange for me) but I also found myself using a de esser, something I find that I don't use so much. Alot of times I find that the CLA 76 Bluey plugin does the job but for some reason a freeware emulation of a destressor seemed to work better for this track.

Interesting reading with the use of clipping and limiting on the vocals. Something I wouldn't have ever considered. I will have to keep this in mind especially with this style of music.

The clipping is to add some grit to the vocals but also even out the transients of the vocals. It's more so a thing in music that uses more gutteral and growled vocals to help them cut through a mix and then applying a limiter (my goto is the waves l1) evens out the volume changes.