Thread Rating:
  • 1 Vote(s) - 3 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
Hannes Keseberg- You Know Better
#1
Shoot'm up!

v2=Final mix


.mp3    Hannes Keseberg - You Know Better.mp3 --  (Download: 8.46 MB)


.mp3    Hannes Keseberg - You Know Better v2.mp3 --  (Download: 8.39 MB)


Reply
#2
Good energy but it sometimes overwhelms the vocals. Individual tracks sound great. Well done.
PreSonus Studio One DAW
[email protected]
Reply
#3
Hi Houndface! Interesting take on the multitrack: more ambient and jangly, which is kind of cool! Love the panned delay effects on the guitar interjections, as these make great bits of ear-candy. Overall I like your balancing a lot. The kick and snare have a nice degree of punch without their feeling overstated, while the cymbals manage to remain fairly smooth. The bass guitar manages respectable small-speaker translation, although I'd probably give it a bit more sub-80Hz energy to get it to balance more evenly against the kick drum. If that boost makes it feel too tubby, perhaps cut a little around 120Hz to compensate.

In the upper half of the spectrum, I'd suggest trading in a bit of 3kHz edge for more above-5kHz brightness, because the sound is currently a little fatiguing at higher playback volumes. Part of the cause of this is that the vocal is strong in the 2-4kHz range, and that's probably a little risky too, given the smoother, more rounded vocal tones you can hear in the rough mix and the Ben L'oncle Soul reference. (In fact, the vocal tone in my preview mix is already on the bright side, as far as Hannes's preferences are concerned, and you're thinner than that as well.) Your choice of a dense, bright vocal reverb is exacerbating this issue, and is also distancing the vocal more than necessary. A duller patch wouldn't drag his dry sound backwards into the mix as strongly, by virtue of the contrast between the dry and wet signals. The reverb processing doesn't seem to change much, either, through the track, which misses an opportunity for improving the long-term mix dynamics as well as generally making the production feel more like a mainstream single.

The Hammond parts both feel dominant, blanketing the choruses and reintro a little too heavily and undesirably masking the lead vocal with their strong upper midrange energy. The Outro level feels more acceptable, given the general party-atmosphere, but even then it's possibly too much. I just think I'd rather hear more musical detail and less harmonic padding in a general sense, despite the understandable urge to generally fill out and warm up the song's texture at those times when the Hammond plays.

The vocal balancing feels decent to me, and stays pretty solid on my Avantone, which I always think is a good sign. The guitar lines, however, don't fare as well from the Avantone test, and I reckon you could do more work with automation to balance out their accents with their quieter internal details, so that the listener doesn't have to work too hard to hear all those nice melodic moments.

You've explored a number of arrangement avenues similar to those I pursued in the library preview mix, but I nonetheless found your specific variations thought-provoking. I liked the way you were more sparing with the drums and percussion during the little fill leading into Verse 2, for instance, because that refocused my attention more on your lovely guitar delay effect. You've also demonstrated how stripping down the drums to the kick rather than to the snare during the drop-down section at the start of Chorus 3 is a perfectly valid variant. Nice work!

Hopefully some of the above will be useful for you. Thanks for submitting your mix for critique!
Reply
#4
v2 final mix.
Reply