Atrophy mixed by pmilani

[pmilani]

Nice song, enjoyed mixing, which presented a few challenges
here is the result

UPDATED BELOW V2

[The_Metallurgist]

it's a challenging mix, especially in bringing the energy of the guitars into the chorus....they seem to put up a fight when i mixed this recently. the lyrics of the song and hence the concept is pretty heavy going and this needs to be expressed in the changing dynamics to help drive the essence of the material, which i think you've done very well.

one thing i'd flag up which i note from my own experiences, is the cymbals...there's one mother of a ringing problem which causes discomfort. it seems to smother itself across quite a large part of the treble range and doesn't respond well to fixing, but you will need to fix it as best you can without losing too much from the top of the drums.

i'd also try and bring the melody out more (during the early part of the song especially) and try and let the percussive elements relax a bit during the verses so you have somewhere to take them into the choruses to support the full-on emotional delivery of the vocal.

i think you can afford to back off on the compressors and let the dynamics out more; you have a lot of downward compression taking place which is stifling the mix. i'd also recommend not brickwall limiting to 0dB; -1.0 should be the absolute max - you are simply distorting my DAC otherwise.

youi've put in a good effort here, especially considering the many challenges we were confronted with.

BigDave

[pmilani]

Thanks for taking the time to elaborate the feedback, much appreciated!
I will listen back to it in a couple of days try with fresh ears. The mix was done kind of quickly, about 2.5 hours so I didn't get to check and fix all the details.
But I agree I could ride down a bit the drums on verses, I noticed they were carrying a little bit too much energy so I was already thinking to try that.
I never limit to 0db, usually set it to -0.3dB, but I didn't double check for clipped samples after AAC encoding so I will have a look at that as well.
cheers

[The_Metallurgist]

I never limit to 0db, usually set it to -0.3dB, but I didn't double check for clipped samples after AAC encoding so I will have a look at that as well.
cheers

there are genuine reasons for restricting your limiter to no more than -1.0dB; -0.3 isn't enough headroom for converters. At the end of the song, the climax, the limiter is working especially hard. in a non-loudness war scenario, your limiter doesn't need to be limiting but to act simply as a safety measure. the problem we are confronted with here, is being able to tell the difference between distortion from the DAC compared with the distortion from the hot compression. so i put it thru the meters and this came out: (attached)

laters,,,

[pmilani]

Reviewed the mix this is the 2nd version