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You Know Better: Mellow Mix
#11
Hello Jeffd42, Nice balance in general, the colour of the guitars and the clarity of the drums and congas is amazing. However, the Bass and the vocals feel a little bit hidden by the other instruments, lacking of clarity and definition. Maybe the EQ in the bass is making the area between 250Hz and 500Hz predominant and thats why in the mastered version I can even heard some distortion. I reckon a multi band compression will help you. Cheers!
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#12
(28-01-2019, 01:01 PM)JuanCManosalva Wrote: ... the Bass and the vocals feel a little bit hidden by the other instruments, lacking of clarity and definition...

Thank you JuanCMansolva for listening and your notes.

The reference is pop so certainly the vocal intelligibility is the #1 priority. I think that's achieved (I played it to a few others and they seem to be able to pick out all the words). Relative balance then becomes more a matter of taste: too low and the vocal sounds small, too high and it sounds pasted onto the song.

On the bass, the reference had a lot of sub-80Hz and a chorused widener. The baseline is very important to this song (both rhythmically and when it doubles the melody), so I wasn't prepared to have the level become wildly inconsistent on smaller playback systems (i.e. on my Adam A5X the 4th and 5th are audible but the tonic just disappears, robbing the song of impact where it needs it). I pushed more energy into the 100-150Hz band there. It still sits a little below the low end on the vocal and blends only in the places where the baseline doubles the vocals.

The tradeoffs is that it sounds slightly less impactful on headphones (where you can get down to 30Hz) but is much stronger on typical playback systems and, particularly, in mono. There's a saying that if the mix translates well when played at the (p)(cl)ub -- be it rock or dance, respectively -- then the mix is right!
All sound is a distortion of silence / soundcloud.com/jeffd42
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