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Dry air, baby, dry air :)
#1
Bolz & Knecht - "Summertime" - JELmaster

This one was actually quite tricky (well, all mixes are in some way I guess) and I kind of ended up deviating from my original plan. So I'm not really sure how it works (I just finished it so I'm still 'snow-blind' (you know, the sensation when you've been listening to the same sound for hours and get acclimatised to it so you lose the ability to hear it neutrally))

Anyway, when I first heard the multi-tracks clean I had a pretty instant feeling that I wanted the sax to sit in the center of it all and be surrounded by the guitar. Kind of like a solo flower in a big green field of grass or something.

However, as the mixing/mastering progressed I couldn't get that to work in a satisfactory way, so I ended up with a bit of a 'both ways' situation. The sax being centered, as my initial goal was, yet at the same time stretched out in both depth and width. I do like it, but it wasn't what I set out to achieve so I'm not sure if I'll feel the same way about it in a few days when my ears get back to neutral.

The guitar was easier to get to where I visualized it from the beginning, although I did actually also change my idea of its placement (although much earlier than with the sax)
The guitar serves as the 'drums' as well, so I ended up focusing more on transients than I had initially planned.

So in a sense I ended up reversing the initial idea (of sax being up close and center and guitar wide and further in the back)

I felt the original multi-tracks had a kind of a closed sound to them, not being very bright and at the same time very loud in the mid-range. This is probably mostly a matter of taste though.
But I did shift the overall spectrum, so some of the guitar-body slapping goes in the sub-woofer area while some of the string-plucking goes into the higher spectrum-area.
I would have liked the sax to be more airy and crisp, but I couldn't really get that. I did try to get it to sound like a big-body sitting very dry in mid-range, but it was a real challenge to get it to feel correctly. A tad to bright or a tad to dark had dramatic changes in how the depth felt of the sax. I'm not sure it's just where it should be, but fresh ears will hear that better I think.

In terms of plugins I used a range of compressors, reverbs and other things (including a plugin of my own design called "Otto" Smile ( http://jelstudio.dk/JELSTUDIO_software.html )

I don't mix jazz often, but when I do I like it to be sleepy, so this song was close up my alley Smile
I do prefer sax (especially tenor-sax) to be played with a bit more of a short-breath or out-of-breath feeling to it though, since it tends to create all kinds of airy artifacts that just please me and which I did miss a little in the very clean and well-played sound in this song Smile (but of course that's just personal taste)


.mp3    Bolz & Knecht - \'Summertime\' - JELmaster.mp3 --  (Download: 6.27 MB)


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