08-01-2019, 04:28 PM (This post was last modified: 08-01-2019, 05:04 PM by Judders.)
Okay, so my bug omission was drum editing, but I'm working from home under a tight deadline and looking after a 3 month old baby at the moment, so I didn't have much time to spend on this. When solo'd the drums irked me in places, but in the context of the mix nothing jumped out at me that killed the groove.
Given more time I would have done more EQ automation on the vocals too, rather than leaning so heavily on dynamic EQ.
This also means that I might not find time to listen to many other submissions, so sorry about that!
Oh, and this is a mix at mix levels, I've made no attempts at mastering, so it will be a lot quieter than most submissions.
Not bad, especially considering the sleep deprivation you must surely be fighting with a 3 month old. My biggest worry is the vocals. There is a strident nature to it which is fighting against the guitar leads and backing vocals.
Sleep... sleep... rings a bell but I don't know what that is.
Strident vocal might be partly because most of it was mixed at whisper-quiet levels so as not to wake a sleeping baby. Also, I was going for an FM radio voice kinda sound (minus the extreme bass) and I wanted it to absolutely dominate the mix. The guitars and BV's happening at the same time as the lead vocal I wanted to just add flavour to the vocal, rather than be made distinct from it, if you get what I mean.
Hi Judders! Firstly: congratulations on the new addition to your family! This is an engaging mix with a good sense of cohesion and lots of decent balancing decisions. Here are a few things I noticed:
The widening effect on the vocal is a little overdone, I think, and distances the singer emotionally. It has a hint of 'singing down a drainpipe' about it too, which I reckon is unlikely to endear you to the singer. It's also quite a strong effect to have going the whole way through the mix without any variation.
The drums sound a bit narrow, which makes me think you might be using a little too much of the room mic.
I like the way the guitar and hammond sounds work in the mix, and the long-term dynamics of the mix as a whole work well. The transition to the Reintro is great, for instance, as is the transition to the Outro, where those ambient mob vocals and claps come in.
I like your side-stick and snare sounds. They're both punchy without being overly bright.
The distorted bass tone is fine when everything's in the mix, but is it maybe overkill during the sparser sections? If so, you could perhaps automate the amount of distortion per section. On the plus side, the tone isn't too bright, and the small-speaker translation is great.
There's a tendency to harshness around 2-3kHz from time to time, particularly when the vocal hits the chorus. You may want to cut a few other parts to reduce the build-up -- guitars and hammond for instance. You could probably give the mix as a whole more sub-80Hz energy too, given the references.
Hope that feedback's useful -- and thanks for entering the competition!
Hi Mike, thanks for the feedback, and thank for the congratulations!
I'm not surprised that I overdid the vocal widening. I recently bought the Eventide H910 plugin, and I'm still very much in the honeymoon period with it.
I did automate the distortion on the bass, but obviously was a bit heavy-handed with it. Maybe mixing at such low levels made me want to get more upper harmonics out of it. Cutting out the bass intro was entirely a mistake!
(16-01-2019, 03:46 PM)Judders Wrote: Cutting out the bass intro was entirely a mistake!
D'oh! No that was actually my mistake. You've actually used it as on the multitrack. I was just remembering the edited version I used in my version of the mix. So basically disregard that -- I've deleted that comment from the feedback to avoid confusing anyone else with it!
(16-01-2019, 03:46 PM)Judders Wrote: Cutting out the bass intro was entirely a mistake!
D'oh! No that was actually my mistake. You've actually used it as on the multitrack. I was just remembering the edited version I used in my version of the mix. So basically disregard that -- I've deleted that comment from the feedback to avoid confusing anyone else with it!
Haha!
I was thinking it was the sleep deprivation getting to me!
