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Worked on this for too long
#1
I stopped caring. There's a version with a pitch corrected vocal which ended up creating a corrupt pro tools session with irreparable amounts of digital distortion clicking and popping noises. After working that out for half a day and then being forced to trash it I expedited the mp3 so I could move on, it is what it is.

I'm stuck on free plug-ins for now so without using a professional quality auto-tuning program I wouldn't be able to get much farther since tuning problems are at times so prevalent that it became difficult to refocus on anything else.


.mp3    Funkkahilo.mp3 --  (Download: 7.78 MB)


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#2
You carry too much Dan. Smile, but i do understand the attitude.
As for mix i like it very much. Sweet sounds, great balance, good drums.
Only thing that bothers me is vocal. So there are moments i feel there is too much deessing. I can even imagine the way how he put his lips together and the inner pressure to send him to logopedist. Lol
Superb work overall!


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#3
(19-05-2018, 09:03 AM)Lethan Wrote: You carry too much Dan. Smile, but i do understand the attitude.
As for mix i like it very much. Sweet sounds, great balance, good drums.
Only thing that bothers me is vocal. So there are moments i feel there is too much deessing. I can even imagine the way how he put his lips together and the inner pressure to send him to logopedist. Lol
Superb work overall!

Yeah I really was just scared by hearing a significant amount of increased sibilance through masterbus limiting plugins and I went back and overcompensated. I should probably listen to some songs for reference next time.

In loo of this mix I'm looking at prices on tuning software and some free options. What really happened with the vocal is I think I used trim plugins to boost the level past the point of distortion, (which I did not notice at the time,) and then I passed it through two pitch shift plug-ins, (one automated, one set at a permenant 20 cent up-shift,) and by the time it hit the LVmix bus, got compressed a little, boosted some more, sent to another bus, slammed there, eq'd more, boosted again, then sidechain dipped by the dry vocal and trimmed back down....

Mistakes were made in the gain staging at a fundamental level which screwed me over before I even got started. Instead of trimming the quiet parts of the vocal up and then automating the loud parts down to match, I should have trimmed the loud parts down and then automated the low parts up. I had no idea that distortion through Trim plugins was a thing but apparently if you use a trim plugin to turn anything up it can clip through the plugin even if it's nowhere near clipping on the track fader. I suppose that's what the +6/+12 button is for, but for now I'm just off trim plugins, going to try to use clip-gain instead, and I'm going to start gain-staging my mixes at -15/-18 dB in Pro Tools rather than -10.

In another attempt I would focus more on tuning the guitars as the first challenge of the mix and then the vocal with them, I almost feel like adding drums in later or even close to last might make this mix easier because they start so small that I did a ton of work to make them bigger but kept readjusting things as I brought other elements in. Maybe that's normal. The drum mix fader and a few snare levels need a little bit of babying, (probably more than I did in this mix,) and they should be treated more like a vocal in a way, so many of the fills are too low, random snare hits are extra loud, and compressor is either enough to handle those hits and too powerful to not change the tone of the rest of the hits or not strong enough to equalize the levels and therefore a waste of time.

The gutars are pre-eq'd so there's only a few ways to go with them anyways, which is why fitting the drums around them while they're already there seems like the way to go. But yeah, tuning those guitars at the beginning of this mix would have made it sooo much better by the end.

Its a learning experience anyways though.
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#4
The quantisation and tuning has certainly given this song a different feel and for the most part it works really well. Overall, a nice mix, pity about the distortion issues you were faced with. Must be demoralising after all the work you've put in.

Well Done.
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#5
Live and learn. I worked on the jazz recordings that just came on the website recently from the abletone big band and it was a nice change to have perfectly in tune, in time band with more frequency information in every mic than I really need.
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