!NEW! - Robert Hammon's - The Elephant

[Mixinthecloud]

Hmm, honstly I find the synth quite strident. If you wanna go this route I'd try to balance something against it e.g. a fat deep bass or full kick. The breathes of the vocal in the verse are also very loud, I'd edit that. Other than that I appreciate your different approach and I'm curious how it'll turn out

Andy,
Thanks for the listen and your comments.

Allow me to explain my thinking:

I was going for as much tension in this approach as I could as a reference to the angst the singer is portraying, hence the aggressive synth (to match the timbre and power of the guitars), and the vocals as a statement of tension. In the first verse (as opposed to the second and third) there is a guitar figure behind the vocal. While I did drop that guitar line in the mix to give more room for the vocal to be intelligible, I found I needed to get very bold with the EQ on the vocal to get it to cut against that guitar part. In listening to most other mixes, the vocal in the first verse gets lost to that same guitar part. This was my solution to that. My second and third verses have the lead vocal level reduced since there is no guitar line for it to compete against. Those verses sound a bit more cohesive. The first verse vocal level is meant to grab the ear and drive home the lyric.