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Diesel13: 'Colour Me Red' (Roddy Mix)
#1
Hi all, this is my version of mix, I mix it with reference of some country song but towards a little more dry direction.


.mp3    color_me_red_20161109.mp3 --  (Download: 7.86 MB)


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#2
(09-11-2016, 03:44 PM)yuen_roddy Wrote: Hi all, this is my version of mix, I mix it with reference of some country song but towards a little more dry direction.

Took a listen. The base (and possibly the low end of one of the guitars) is very high in the mix. Bass frequencies also seems to clash a little with the kick. Due to those points, it's hard to get a sense of what's happening elsewhere in the mix. I suspect if you tamed the bass a little, the rest of the mix would open up.

Hope this helps! Cheers, Jeff
All sound is a distortion of silence / soundcloud.com/jeffd42
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#3
Which country song did you reference? I would like to hear both and then comment. I think using references are a great way to go in a direction for mixing a song.
~~ Here to learn and help ~~

Marty
Mixer/Engineer/Producer
Austin, Texas, USA
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#4
(10-11-2016, 06:17 PM)Marty Wrote: Which country song did you reference? I would like to hear both and then comment. I think using references are a great way to go in a direction for mixing a song.

Fur sure, and not only for that, reference tracks should be used in every mix (unless your name is Dave Pensado - and i guess even he is referencing, still...). Helped me so much to improve my mixes...
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#5
Nice and punchy mix, I love your bass tone!
Here are some points that could (hopefully) help to improve some other things:

As far as the overall sound is concerned the mix could open up more in all directions, if that makes sense. Feels a bit cluttered in the low mids, so doing some EQ cuts here and there would really help to clean that up. Also a bit more panning work could be good, as well as adding some 3D qualities, meaning some instruments could be placed further back in the mix with ambience/reverb, doesn´t have to be much.

Right now, there´s only the snare with a bit of effect on it, all the other tracks are very dry and upfront. Especially all of the vocals suffer from that dryness in my opinion, but that could be easily fixed

For me the kick is sounding quite boxy and thin, which of course makes it earsier for the bass sounding so big, but you could try cutting the kick around 400 to 500 Hz and boost a little 60 Hz instead for more low end punch, provided that doesn´t interfere with the bass too much.

Also finding some resonaces and notching them out could clear up the overall tonality, for example at the very end of the song there´s some heavy ringing going on around 300 Hz, pull that out and the mix will open up quite a bit.

Overall good work, would be worth to hone in a bit more, hope that helps! Cheers!
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#6
The basic balancing makes a lot of sense here, and I like the emphasis on the vocal, since that's the star turn, after all. However, there's a bit of a mismatch between the tonality of your backing track (which is rather heavy on the 100-200Hz region and generally lacking high end) and that of the lead vocal (which, while far from bright, still has considerably more energy in the upper octaves of the spectrum). While a bit of master-buss EQ can help redress the backing track's tonality, it also overbrightens the vocal, so you'll need to do some work with at least the vocal channel EQ as well to find a more convincingly balanced spectrum overall. I realise that keeping the backing track less bright makes the vocal less masked, but if this was the thinking then I think you've perhaps pursued that goal too far in this case.

One side-effect of the aforementioned mismatch is that the lead vocal never really sits well with the rest of the backing track (which otherwise isn't at all badly blended), but rather seems to float over it. You seem to have added some kind of subtle stereo ambience to help glue it in there, but it's not doing the whole job yet, for me. That said, I reckon that if you deal with the EQ issue, it may actually end up being enough.

As with many other mixes in this sub-forum, I think you've let the kick-drum dominate unduly below 100Hz. Try giving the bass a little support in this area instead, and I think the mix as a whole will see more wide-bandwidth -- it'll also mean you don't have to rely as much on the 150Hz zone to hold the bass's place in the mix. Another thing that might also help open up the sound subjectively is if you widened the stereo picture for the main riff a bit. The drums are wide enough, admittedly, but the guitars all seem rather narrow. Although this does give you some extra contrast for the Mid-section when the wide-panned clean guitars arrive, I think there's enough opportunity for timbral/effect changes there that you don't really need to rely on the stereo change that heavily.

The backing vocals have caused problems for some people, but I like what you've done with them. they're a little bit more upfront than the band, but less so than the lead vocal and not seriously endangering the apparent power of the backing track.

Hope some of that makes sense and is helpful -- and thanks for posting!
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