This is an entry level attempt at mixing. Personally, I had a hard time with the bass in this track. I caught the polarity issue early on, but the tone change made for a good chorus and empty verse. I really dislike my snare here, it seems like too much of its sound is tied to the overheads and I can't get a good snare balance AND cymbal balance with my knowledge.
I learning new stuff every day! Any and all feedback is appreciated.
I personally like having the snare in the room and overheads but in this session it's way too loud. The solution is a combination of these things:
1) Gate the snare to get the overheads out of that track. I recommend you use a key input from snare top to snare bottom, since those pesky kicks will mess with you and make your pull your hair out.
2) High pass the overheads. I usually filter out everything below 500 hZ depending on whether I want the kick gone or not. I usually do. The impact of the snare in this song seems to snap around the 1k-2k area. Filtering out the lows and low mids will hide the snare some in the overheads.
3) Lots and lots and lots of notch eq needs to be done to the overheads and room. I don't know what cymbals the drummer used, but he/she bought them from Satan. I found a lot of really ringy frequencies and probably notched out ten to fifteen bands at very tight Qs on each track and brought them down anywhere from five to fifteen dB. But also realize that bringing these resonant frequencies down will remove some of the snare automatically. So we're working toward your goal also. When you start to notch out ringing frequencies you will really start to see how beautiful cymbals can sound and start boosting some upper high frequencies even more. When you get rid of the noise you'll notice a huge difference.
4) Limit or clip the overheads before they hit a compressor (and they do need to hit a compressor, probably very hard). You don't even have to press play on a solo'd overheads track to know the snare in this session is way louder than the cymbals. If you insert a compressor without limiting or clipping, you'll notice that the snare takes over and the cymbals will basically be gone until the snare fades out. Sure, each individual snare track is short, but this can be fatiguing to the listener over the duration of the entire song. Limit or clip out the big hits so that it's a more even volume throughout before you compress.
5) Compress hard. Fast attack, release can vary based on preference and speed of song. High ratio. Whatever you consider high.
6) Use your ears! If you follow these steps and don't get a result you like, to each his own. All along the way you should be making your own decisions based on what you think sounds good. The only thing that matters is that it sounds good.
And here's my mix full with those steps applied. Wasn't surprised to find that the guitars needed a ton of notch eq as well.
The drums in the previous post may seem super roomy but in the context of the song I think they sound great. I never messed with the drums again until mastering and that was tiny 1 or 2 dB tweaks to wiggle things into place.
