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Good song but really challenging mix
#1
Hi all,

I really like this song and thank goodness for that considering how many times I had to listen to it in the context of getting this mix done!

Sorry in advance for what might be information overload below.

A few things that I want to say up front is that from listening to some of the other mixes here, people are tending to skip the step of listening to the individual tracks and fixing/editing issues that exist. There was a strange sound in one of the vocal takes that sounds like corrupt data rather than a recording issue. I've heard this still present in mixes on this forum. It is in a part with doubled vocals so you can easily remove that tiny section of audio without hampering the sound of the vocals.

Another thing with editing is the clean guitars in the bridge type section (I don't know what it is actually called). Some of the notes are played out of time and needed editing/massaging to get to sound correct.

The truth is that these issues are often hidden when you are listening to the raw tracks all together but as your mix starts making things clearer and more audible, they can really stand out in a bad way. Paying attention to those kinds of details makes a big positive difference.

The "commercial mix" of this song for me was just drenched in way too much reverb. There were elements of it that I liked but it was just swimming in the thing. I wonder whether that was an attempt to try and mask the harshness of the vocals which are really difficult to get to sit in the mix? I know that Blitzzz and a few other people wrote about their frustration at mixing the harsh sounding vocals and I concur.

They also cheated a bit on that commercial mix because there's a part in that bridge section which is very sparse and doesn't sound good with just the bass guitar and drums playing. It needed guitars and whoever mixed it realised that. They obviously had the DI for the distorted guitar part that finishes off the bridge and used that re-amped as a clean guitar to fill the void but we didn't ourselves have access to that from the tracks provided. For this section, I played around with what I did have to try and make something half way interesting and at least not feel empty.

Mix wise, I was really surprised at what was provided for the bass guitar. I've never seen such a massive cut in anything that I've worked on before with almost no frequency information from about 350Hz to around 1kHz. Made it a bit painful to work with.

I've only used 1 sample for the kick and 1 sample for the snare and both were blended in with the live tracks. The rest of the kit was mixed from what was provided except that I created my own room track and blended it in with what was there.

Overheads to me were a real pain and they sounded really harsh in their raw form. The tails on the cymbal hits sounded to me like they were being cut way too short. This was either because of bad mic choice, bad mic placement, bad room or all of those combined. I also felt that the stereo spread was too wide and for the first time in a mix found myself bringing the sides in rather than trying to push them wider. I feel that this really helped the sound of the overall kit to gel better. For the short cymbal tails, I used a transient shaper to try and make it sound more natural by increasing the sustain. I am still not overly keen on the final sound but I feel that I've made it better than it was.

Nothing special to report on guitars and synths really except that one of the synth tracks needed to be gated as there was live noise in it. I believe it was the drum kit (kick?) that was audible. Also, on Synth1, I automated my high pass filter which was used throughout the song to make it cut through but then made the outro piano chords sound way too thin.

Vocals...I don't know where to start. These vocal takes really needed a producer to work out what should be used and what shouldn't and it would have been great it they were comped sensibly. But hey, that makes the challenge more interesting so that's what I did. I split the vocals up into lead, harmony, clean and gang style vocal groups and then did the best I could to reduce the track count by comping parts into single tracks where it made sense to do so. This also meant I could do processing on the same style vocal on a couple of tracks rather than loads of them.

I've purposely automated things so that parts of the song are dynamic where they need to be (like that bridge thing, whatever it is called). When I was doing the limiting at the end to just get a bit of level added to the track, I was very light handed to preserve those dynamics. For giggles, I did a version that I felt was over-compressed and while the integrity of the overall sound was good, the subtlety of volume automation was lost and so I discarded that and stuck with a softer but purer sound in my opinion.

I'm happy with where everything ended up but I will admit to a serious amount of tunnel vision and fatigue at this point for I spent many a late night working on this song trying to get things to work. I don't think that I can bring myself to go back to it.

Hope that it sounds somewhat decent to you guys and also hope that some of the info above has proved useful.

Cheers
-Vinay


.mp3    StillFlyin_Final.mp3 --  (Download: 10.53 MB)


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#2
I feel like the bas guitar is kind of missing, you could probably use some eq and compression to bring up those missing frequencies (you could also check out a pluggin called MaxBass from Waves. Great pluggin that creates upper harmonics from the low end). but besides from that you did a good job. I really like what you did with the screams, they pop and fit like a glove.

And since you feel done with this mix as you expressed, I want to ask you, what did you learn from doing this mix that you will take with you to your future mixes? I think that's an important question to ask yourself after each mix.

Have a good one
//Calliii
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#3
(31-03-2017, 01:15 AM)Calliii Wrote: I feel like the bas guitar is kind of missing, you could probably use some eq and compression to bring up those missing frequencies (you could also check out a pluggin called MaxBass from Waves. Great pluggin that creates upper harmonics from the low end). but besides from that you did a good job. I really like what you did with the screams, they pop and fit like a glove.

And since you feel done with this mix as you expressed, I want to ask you, what did you learn from doing this mix that you will take with you to your future mixes? I think that's an important question to ask yourself after each mix.

Have a good one
//Calliii

Hi Calliii,

Thank you very much for your feedback :-)

Regards the bass, I am actually happy with where it sits in the mix as it doesn't cloud either the low end of my kick or my guitars. My personal approach is that the bass guitar for the most part supports the guitars and fills the gap between everything else and the drums. I don't think that I'm lacking any "meat" to the bass sound itself but probably that I've mixed it in at a lower volume than you would have chosen to. I did actually use Waves RBass to help with it and I also did lots of processing to try and bring out that massive missing gap in the frequency curve that I mentioned in my original post.

If you listen to that bridge type section (around 2.50 I think) where the bass guitar is quite dominant, you can hear how full the bass sounds. I actually feel that it sounds fuller than the bass sound in your mix. The difference between our approaches probably has to do with our choice of volume level and also that I prefer not to use as much sub on the bass as you do.

Regards the overall balance of the of the low end, I used "Milestone" by Silverstein as a reference and while not an exact match (nothing ever is), the general balance is in the same ballpark I feel and therefore in keeping with how it is treated in this genre.

Really glad that you like the rest of the mix. I'm probably most proud of how I handled the vocals as this seems to be something that a lot of people were struggling with. The processing that I used is very heavy handed with lots of layers of compression combined with volume automation.

I felt that there were a number of technical challenges to overcome in this mix as well as several creative ones. Choosing the right tones for the lead guitars so that they fit in with what was already provided and deciding how to handle the ridiculous number of vocal tracks supplied were the things that I felt would lead to making or breaking the overall sound.

In terms of what I learnt from this mix, there are a couple things:

The first one is something that I didn't really do consciously or purposely but is something I felt really helped me in the end. I got all the editing done upfront. I did all the drum editing, guitar editing, guitar re-amping, additional guitar parts, fixing of the bass guitar frequencies and comping of the vocals at the point that I was setting up a rough fader and pan mix. By doing this, when I moved on to mixing, I wasn't constantly jumping back and forth fixing things so I could stay focused on the mix itself.

The other things that I learned is that you should never give up on something. There is always some sort of solution out there. You can never completely salvage certain things if they are bad enough but you can, for the most part, at least make it musical and listenable even if you can't get it sounding like a proper studio recording and mix. I took several breaks from this song instead of bashing my head against the wall. If something was holding me back, I'd take a break, think things through far away from the project itself and maybe do some research and assimilate information that was useful for what I wanted to achieve. Then a day or more later, I'd come back to it and try to put into practice anything that I'd discovered or thought to try.

Something to mention that I didn't learn on this mix but that once again proved invaluable to me was referencing. Both types. Referencing by listening and comparing to professional mixes in the same genre as well as referencing my mix on several difference devices, speakers and headphones. Very often I'd think that I had everything balanced only to hear something unbalanced in another environment. I'd note all these things down then go back and adjust appropriately in the mix.

Thank you once again for taking the time to listen and comment.

All the best
-Vinay
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#4
Sorry. Forgot to mention in my previous response that another big thing that I started doing during this mix was using EQ plugins with no visual feedback so finding the right frequencies to work on and how much to boost or cut was completely based on what I was hearing and not influenced by anything I was seeing. My main EQ for this mix didn't even have regular markings on it and no tool tips either so I never knew the exact frequency or amount of boost or cut. I found that after I got used to this concept, I was getting to my final EQ settings much quicker than before and my decisions about what to do were a lot better too.
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