06-06-2017, 01:24 PM
This is such a fantastic song. Really well arranged and catchy as all hell. I found that the recordings for the drums, bass, guitars, synths and keys were very clean and usable. What a shame then that there were so many problems with the vocal recording including unpleasant distortion and clipping. There were also really ugly frequencies resonating in the mids and they were note dependent so you couldn't simply just notch EQ them out. Eventually I resorted to using a dynamic EQ to tame regions of the frequency spectrum which helped a lot. However, all the surgical work left me with 2 problems:
1) The vocal became thin sounding.
2) They exposed the distortion in the recording even more.
I solved the first issue by using parallel processing on the vocals (I'd never done this before) and it really worked a treat to help sit that vocal better. For the second issue, I was not entirely successful but I tamed it a lot by using layers of saturation to smooth it out (which sounds counter-intuitive and is only something I stumbled upon by experimentation).
For the vibe of the song in general, from the first time I heard it I felt that it was all about the bass guitar and the vocals. I wanted to create a really full sounding mix with a lot of depth and I made sure to maintain the dynamics throughout the process.
All the sounds you hear in this mix are only from the stems provided. There are no drum samples used and no re-amping of any sort.
I found the reference mix provided to be very thin and very harsh up top. They seem to have dealt with the vocal issues in the reference mix by adding more distortion to make it sounds intentional but I don't think that it works for the type of music surrounding it. I also found that the reference mix had all the life squeezed out of it by whatever master limiting was applied. The transitions into what should be the soft, intimate parts of the song do the opposite as the sparse sections have their volumes boosted even more than the dense sections and this makes what should be the big, impactful parts of the song sound small. This was something that I was careful not to end up doing in my mix and I feel that I was successful in delivering something that was both dynamic and hard hitting.
Cheers
-Vinay
1) The vocal became thin sounding.
2) They exposed the distortion in the recording even more.
I solved the first issue by using parallel processing on the vocals (I'd never done this before) and it really worked a treat to help sit that vocal better. For the second issue, I was not entirely successful but I tamed it a lot by using layers of saturation to smooth it out (which sounds counter-intuitive and is only something I stumbled upon by experimentation).
For the vibe of the song in general, from the first time I heard it I felt that it was all about the bass guitar and the vocals. I wanted to create a really full sounding mix with a lot of depth and I made sure to maintain the dynamics throughout the process.
All the sounds you hear in this mix are only from the stems provided. There are no drum samples used and no re-amping of any sort.
I found the reference mix provided to be very thin and very harsh up top. They seem to have dealt with the vocal issues in the reference mix by adding more distortion to make it sounds intentional but I don't think that it works for the type of music surrounding it. I also found that the reference mix had all the life squeezed out of it by whatever master limiting was applied. The transitions into what should be the soft, intimate parts of the song do the opposite as the sparse sections have their volumes boosted even more than the dense sections and this makes what should be the big, impactful parts of the song sound small. This was something that I was careful not to end up doing in my mix and I feel that I was successful in delivering something that was both dynamic and hard hitting.
Cheers
-Vinay