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Hannes Keseberg - "You Know Better" APZX Mix
#1
So, I did everything that you shouldn't do when you go to mix. Step one, change up your room. Step two, change up your monitoring. Step three, change up your monitor controller. That last one isn't such a big deal, but yeah definitely a few changes for me.

My first attempt at the mix. Very vanilla, but I tried to go for an open mix with copious amounts of space because to me nothing says summer more than open space. Plus the general sound of the instruments and the way they're played kind of led me that way.

I'll have a listen to some of the other mixes and give my two cents tomorrow. Too tired tonight.

Best Regards,
-ZX

Edit - So, in the process of me moving everything about I forgot to to the most important bit, which is to ensure that I was listening at a good level. I won't say how bad it was, but it was bad haha. I've uploaded v2 of my mix. Definitely a much more solid track to my ears now.


.mp3    Hannes Keseberg - You Know Better (ZX Mix).mp3 --  (Download: 5.05 MB)


.mp3    Hannes Keseberg - You Know Better (ZX Mix) v2.mp3 --  (Download: 5.05 MB)


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#2
Maybe a bit too much space on the lead guitar figure. Other than that, this is fine considering the wholesale changes you made to your listening environment. Been there, done that,.. went back!

Good work.
PreSonus Studio One DAW
[email protected]
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#3
Hi APZX! The balancing is pretty solid here, and I love what you've done with the effects on the guitar solos. The tempo-related echoes work particularly well with the more rhythmic parts, such as the riff first heard in the Reintro. The overall mix tonality could probably have a little less 130Hz and a little more sub-80Hz, as well as being brighter overall, given that we've got current mainstream sonics in the crosshairs. However, if you do lift the high end, you'll probably want to tame the open hi-hat and cymbals around 4kHz as well as reining in that slightly needling resonance in the rising guitar line that leads into the Outro. The claps will also need rounding off a bit, as they're currently a lot brighter than the rest of the kit.

I like the subtlety of the Hammond during the first chorus, but the higher-register part in Chorus 2 is probably a little too strident around 2kHz, so that it's masking the vocal more than I'd recommend. Although I love the timbres and effects you've used for the solo guitars, they do present a few balance problems, in my view. The Intro guitar sound is quite full-sounding, and I found it distracted attention from the lead vocal during Verse 1, and also when it plays that riff during Chorus 2. The Verse 2 guitar, on the other hand, seems underpowered by comparison, and I'd have liked to hear more of its lower-level details. So those are definitely tracks I'd recommend applying some careful fader automation to.

I like the drum sound on the whole, and the kick and bass guitar share the low end well, I think. Bass small-speaker translation is good too, despite your having a warmer and more rounded tone than mine (in the library preview mix). The snare and side-stick sound fine in combination with the kick, but do feel like they lack some weight and power when heard on their own, which loses the Reintro and Outro some rhythmic momentum and makes some of the drum fills less exciting than they might be.

The rhythm guitars really suffer in mono, and I think that undermines the groove under single-speaker playback conditions. I'm guessing that this might be a result of panning the individual multimics without sufficiently polarity/phase-matching them, so you may be able to address this quite easily with a simple sample-delay or polarity-inversion here and there. Despite this specific mono-incompatibility, though, the overall sense of stereo width in your mix isn't huge, and I'd expect most mainstream music releases to be rather more widescreen than this -- certainly anything with pop pretensions. Maybe just widening some of the reverb returns a little with an MS plug-in might help, for instance. The piano might be an option for widening too, when it comes in, as it's currently a bit too solid-sounding in the mix, given that it's not the most natural-sounding of sampled instruments that's been used here.

The lead vocal feels quite rich in the low midrange, which tends to make the mix sound a little bloated from time to time, especially when the vocal is part of the thicker Chorus or Mid-section textures, or when the variable proximity-effect bass boost inherent in the raw recording is at its strongest -- for example at the end of Verse 1 and the beginning of Verse 2. So I'd first try to even out some of those low-frequency variations with frequency-selective dynamics processing or manual region-specific EQ, and then I'd try to be more cautious about how you allocate the 100-300Hz headroom amongst the available instruments during the different sections of the song. That may mean that you end up wanting to mult the lead vocal, or automate an EQ plug-in for it, to adapt its low-midrange contributions to changes in the arrangement. Whatever you do, though, you'll also need to get into a bit more detail with vocal fader automation, I think, if you're going to maximise the lyric intelligibility here -- the vocal level is currently a little unstable throughout the mix, especially during Chorus 1, for instance.

Your effects use in general is one of my favourite parts of your mix, with lots variety, contrast, and general good taste in abundance. This all adds up to a lovely sense of depth between the close vocal, drums ambience, rhythm-guitar reverb, and solo guitar echo tails, for instance. The hi-hat and snare felt a bit stark during the Choruses and Mid-section, so I'd perhaps automate in a bit of extra ambience for those sections, and the congas and timbale feel a little too upfront in general too, compared with the drumkit.

The long-term dynamics are reasonable, although the Verse 2 conundrum (ie. it having the same arrangement as Verse 1) could maybe do with a bit more work to keep the listener's attention all the way up to the first chorus. The Outro arrives nicely, on account of the entry of the Hammond as much as anything, but the similar transition from Chorus 1 into the Reintro doesn't feel nearly as satisfying without that textural change (the Hammond's already in during the Chorus), so maybe you could find some way to 'lift' the energy of that section a touch.

A couple of final guitar-effect minutiae: Could the solo-guitar delay repeats be muted for that pre-Chorus 3 gap in the arrangement? It's not that I dislike the echo effect (on the contrary, in fact), but I think the gap might actually be a more dramatic statement at that point in the arrangement. And I also felt it was a bit of a shame when the end of the mixdown audio file truncated the decay tail of the final guitar line -- last impressions count almost as much as first impressions, where mixing's concerned.

Thanks for uploading your mix and getting involved in the contest! Hope some of the above is useful too!
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#4
Hello Mr. Senior! Thank you for the feedback.

Mike Senior Wrote:Hi APZX! The balancing is pretty solid here, and I love what you've done with the effects on the guitar solos. The tempo-related echoes work particularly well with the more rhythmic parts, such as the riff first heard in the Reintro. The overall mix tonality could probably have a little less 130Hz and a little more sub-80Hz, as well as being brighter overall, given that we've got current mainstream sonics in the crosshairs. However, if you do lift the high end, you'll probably want to tame the open hi-hat and cymbals around 4kHz as well as reining in that slightly needling resonance in the rising guitar line that leads into the Outro. The claps will also need rounding off a bit, as they're currently a lot brighter than the rest of the kit.

So, as I said in my first post I got new monitors and went to a larger room. I changed out my monitor controller and my audio interface too. I was an idiot when I set everything up. Just too excited I guess hehe. I spent basically all of Friday night and Saturday just getting everything back in line. And then I gave a good listen to the track, and I have to agree with what you're saying about the balance of the mix. Though I do have to disagree about the claps needing rounding off. Personally, I love the contrast they bring to the end of the track. They lift up that last section very nicely. The trick I think is figuring out how to add them in such that they don't interfere with what is already there. Personally, I don't like the snare sound that ended up in the track, nor am I a particular fan of the kick sound. But I have to work with what I have.

Mike Senior Wrote:I like the subtlety of the Hammond during the first chorus, but the higher-register part in Chorus 2 is probably a little too strident around 2kHz, so that it's masking the vocal more than I'd recommend. Although I love the timbres and effects you've used for the solo guitars, they do present a few balance problems, in my view. The Intro guitar sound is quite full-sounding, and I found it distracted attention from the lead vocal during Verse 1, and also when it plays that riff during Chorus 2. The Verse 2 guitar, on the other hand, seems underpowered by comparison, and I'd have liked to hear more of its lower-level details. So those are definitely tracks I'd recommend applying some careful fader automation to.

I really liked the hammond in the track. I think I've said this before, but I really hate mixing guitars haha. At any rate, I more or less kept the first hammond about the same, but the second one I ended up adding a bit of distortion to better separate it from the first, but also help better differentiate the two verses. I don't if I eeked out anymore detail from the guitar in that part per se, but I did manage to get better contrast between all the guitars. At least I think I did.

Mike Senior Wrote:I like the drum sound on the whole, and the kick and bass guitar share the low end well, I think. Bass small-speaker translation is good too, despite your having a warmer and more rounded tone than mine (in the library preview mix). The snare and side-stick sound fine in combination with the kick, but do feel like they lack some weight and power when heard on their own, which loses the Reintro and Outro some rhythmic momentum and makes some of the drum fills less exciting than they might be.

The kick and bass "shared" the low end. It was rather clumsy. If I didn't have a compressor for basic sidechain purposes I'd normally revert to to letting one with over the other. In this case I'd have probably given the bass guitar a bit more low end over the kick, just because that makes more sense to me. However, I managed to get a bigger low end with better kick and bass definition. This was as direct consequence of me monitoring at too low of a level. I just wasn't hearing what was really going on down there.

Mike Senior Wrote:The rhythm guitars really suffer in mono, and I think that undermines the groove under single-speaker playback conditions. I'm guessing that this might be a result of panning the individual multimics without sufficiently polarity/phase-matching them, so you may be able to address this quite easily with a simple sample-delay or polarity-inversion here and there. Despite this specific mono-incompatibility, though, the overall sense of stereo width in your mix isn't huge, and I'd expect most mainstream music releases to be rather more widescreen than this -- certainly anything with pop pretensions. Maybe just widening some of the reverb returns a little with an MS plug-in might help, for instance. The piano might be an option for widening too, when it comes in, as it's currently a bit too solid-sounding in the mix, given that it's not the most natural-sounding of sampled instruments that's been used here.

First, the rhythm guitar wasn't because it was panned, though they are panned now. In fact I used ADT to make it wider with a 10ms delay. Apparently, that doesn't collapse well to mono haha. Anyway, this track to me doesn't sound like it needs to be "super wide". It just needs good control of what is happening in the left and right. And honestly, pushing it super wide like that would make it sound forcefully made that way. Some tracks work that way and others don't. I get that the intention was to make the mix something rather different than what I did, but I'm not going to lie the multis didn't tell me that. And that is how I approach a mix, I listen to the multis and go from there more often than not.

Mike Senior Wrote:The lead vocal feels quite rich in the low midrange, which tends to make the mix sound a little bloated from time to time, especially when the vocal is part of the thicker Chorus or Mid-section textures, or when the variable proximity-effect bass boost inherent in the raw recording is at its strongest -- for example at the end of Verse 1 and the beginning of Verse 2. So I'd first try to even out some of those low-frequency variations with frequency-selective dynamics processing or manual region-specific EQ, and then I'd try to be more cautious about how you allocate the 100-300Hz headroom amongst the available instruments during the different sections of the song. That may mean that you end up wanting to mult the lead vocal, or automate an EQ plug-in for it, to adapt its low-midrange contributions to changes in the arrangement. Whatever you do, though, you'll also need to get into a bit more detail with vocal fader automation, I think, if you're going to maximise the lyric intelligibility here -- the vocal level is currently a little unstable throughout the mix, especially during Chorus 1, for instance.

I guess this is a consequence of my monitoring, but vocal intelligibility wasn't an issue on either of my sets of monitors nor my headphones. I can try making it more "overt", but if I'm being honest, I think the main point of issue was that there wasn't a lot of room for the vocal because I was not really able to hear what was going to cause issues one lesser systems. The vocal level was and still is to a degree an issue. However, I kind of want to avoid just straight leveling the vocal. I want to keep it almost intimate in nature. That will probably still be something I continue to edit. I fight with I did end up doing a lot of extra work to it though. I think I only touched one of my initial volume moves though.

Mike Senior Wrote:Your effects use in general is one of my favourite parts of your mix, with lots variety, contrast, and general good taste in abundance. This all adds up to a lovely sense of depth between the close vocal, drums ambience, rhythm-guitar reverb, and solo guitar echo tails, for instance. The hi-hat and snare felt a bit stark during the Choruses and Mid-section, so I'd perhaps automate in a bit of extra ambience for those sections, and the congas and timbale feel a little too upfront in general too, compared with the drumkit.

I don't think I really fixed the starkness of the kick and snare/sidestick. I did get in and do more fader moves to them though. In fact in general for the drums as a whole I really got in there and moved them around quite a bit in the track to better track what was going in the track (that sentence just sounds odd lol).

Mike Senior Wrote:The long-term dynamics are reasonable, although the Verse 2 conundrum (ie. it having the same arrangement as Verse 1) could maybe do with a bit more work to keep the listener's attention all the way up to the first chorus. The Outro arrives nicely, on account of the entry of the Hammond as much as anything, but the similar transition from Chorus 1 into the Reintro doesn't feel nearly as satisfying without that textural change (the Hammond's already in during the Chorus), so maybe you could find some way to 'lift' the energy of that section a touch.

This was actually really helpful! Helped me to remember to look at things from a slightly different perspective. At least I think I think I did much better job of "sonically" separating out the parts with what was already there. I often don't feel comfortable shifting things around in a track that I did not originally compose nor help produce. I'm not saying it is right or wrong, just what it is.

Mike Senior Wrote:A couple of final guitar-effect minutiae: Could the solo-guitar delay repeats be muted for that pre-Chorus 3 gap in the arrangement? It's not that I dislike the echo effect (on the contrary, in fact), but I think the gap might actually be a more dramatic statement at that point in the arrangement. And I also felt it was a bit of a shame when the end of the mixdown audio file truncated the decay tail of the final guitar line -- last impressions count almost as much as first impressions, where mixing's concerned.

I forgot to fade out the track on v2 of the mix, but v3 I'll sort that out. Silly mistakes happen from time to time. I've definitely forgotten to bring up a couple of instruments in a mix before too haha. So, I removed the echo and I do agree with you on that. However, I opted to automate the panning on the guitar such that it sort of bends not only in pitch, but panning. I dunno if it actually works any better, but it definitely makes the build up that much more satisfying IMO.

Mike Senior Wrote:Thanks for uploading your mix and getting involved in the contest! Hope some of the above is useful too!

Thank you for taking the time to leave some feedback.

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#5
Hi APZX -- glad the feedback was useful!

(28-01-2019, 04:12 AM)APZX Wrote: Though I do have to disagree about the claps needing rounding off. Personally, I love the contrast they bring to the end of the track. They lift up that last section very nicely. The trick I think is figuring out how to add them in such that they don't interfere with what is already there.

Fair enough -- there's always going to be a lot of personal taste in this! I just thought that, as they were, they might make it difficult for you to brighten the mix as a whole enough.

(28-01-2019, 04:12 AM)APZX Wrote: First, the rhythm guitar wasn't because it was panned, though they are panned now. In fact I used ADT to make it wider with a 10ms delay. Apparently, that doesn't collapse well to mono haha.


Yeah -- I'm always a bit cagey of those kinds of widening patches for that reason. You might be able to improve things slightly by small increments to the delay time, or by filtering or phase-shifting the delay return.

(28-01-2019, 04:12 AM)APZX Wrote: I get that the intention was to make the mix something rather different than what I did, but I'm not going to lie the multis didn't tell me that. And that is how I approach a mix, I listen to the multis and go from there more often than not.

A very sensible approach on the whole, I agree. I do something very similar myself a lot of the time. Sometimes, though, the bands don't really record the tracks in a way that indicates how they want the final mix to sound, which I think is partially the case here.

(28-01-2019, 04:12 AM)APZX Wrote: I kind of want to avoid just straight leveling the vocal. I want to keep it almost intimate in nature. That will probably still be something I continue to edit.

For me this is one of the things that takes most work on any mix, and in this particular case there were technical issues with the capture that complicated it further. Not an easy one, by any means.

(28-01-2019, 04:12 AM)APZX Wrote: In fact in general for the drums as a whole I really got in there and moved them around quite a bit in the track to better track what was going in the track (that sentence just sounds odd lol).

It's so easy to get tangled up with words when trying to write about this stuff! Smile

(28-01-2019, 04:12 AM)APZX Wrote: I often don't feel comfortable shifting things around in a track that I did not originally compose nor help produce. I'm not saying it is right or wrong, just what it is.

I know what you mean -- it's such a fine line to tread. These days, though, because so few productions actually have a dedicated 'producer', most mix jobs I encounter seem to demand the odd arrangement tweak (if only muting a few things) to get the best out of the music.

Mike S.

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#6
Very nice sense of space you've created in the mix and the tempo sync'd delays on the guitars are awesome. The hard snare in the second chorus certainly made itself known, but perhaps a little too abrupt? Vocals sounded for level but could perhaps be a tad brighter. Cheers, Jeff
All sound is a distortion of silence / soundcloud.com/jeffd42
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