Death Of A Romantic: 'The Well' kapu mix

[kapu]

It's a shame I couldn't make out the lyrics even from the isolated tracks, so I hope they're audible. ^_^

[dcp10200]

Hi Kapu, overall you've got a competent sounding mix, the mechanical balance of the instruments is good and nothing is really sticking out as being really disasterous, solid work on that front! Really my points about your mix are slightly nitpicky in nature so take it as you wish.

I noticed that from an Eq perspective that nothing really has alot of top end air going on, everything is quite mid heavy and dull sounding. Those guitars are crying out for that top end snarl and attack and the cymbals hae no shimmer to them, they're in the same spectrum now as the vocals. I would take a look at the guitars, scoop out the mids at the 400-600 Hz range until they hae some separation from the bass and back off on the Low pass filter or use a brighter cab/amp sim if you went the DI reamp route. Djenty sounding guitars are all about the upper mid attack and a tight low end and mid range, this is how low tuned 7 and 8 string guitars stay strong in the mix.

Your overheads (especially if you're using samples) will generally work better if you high pass everything below 600-800 Hz ala Andy Sneap and give a touch of 2-4 kHz scoop to remove the harshness from them and keeping them out of the way of the guitars, compression from an 1176 style compressor can also improve the sustain of the cymbals and keep unwanted snare attack at bay.

I noticed that your bass distortion track starts to spike out of the mix a touch during the slap and more aggressively picked parts, first thing I would do is use a bass amp or Sansamp emulation on the DI track to warm it up and make it closer sounding to the distorted bass. From there compress the bass with an LA 2a emulation or similar compressor and a peak limiter to even it out. Once you've got that settled high pass the bass distortion at 200 Hz and low pass it at 4.5 kHz then throw a peak limiter on that and blend it in to taste. This ensures that the bass has enough growl and punch to gel with the guitars but not get too far out in the mix.

Your drums seem to be lacking the power and grandness in the mix, there's plenty of attack going on here but not enough room to give a sense of space to them. If you did use samples make sure that you have some stereo room mics added in and alittle reverb on the snare and toms can go along way.

Cheers, and hope this helps
Doug

[kapu]

Hi Kapu, overall you've got ...

It's actually quite interesting, because you described almost exactly how I've processed the tracks. Especially the overheads and bass, although I did not add any distortion to the bass as it sounded kind of distorted already. About the bass becoming more audible on sparse parts of the arrangement, I was kind of hoping it would happen, and I've justified it for myself as being 'breath' or 'liveliness' or something like that in the mix. ^_^

After taking a metalcore tour on Spotify I wouldn't dare go any brighter with this, as I think I'm already pushing it slightly brighter than most of the popular recordings there, at least according to my ears and metering. Anyways, I tried bringing up the overheads and sample rooms a bit hoping it would give the mix some extra sizzle and making it better, and updated the file once again. Thanks for comprehensive feedback.