Had a go at this over a few days - like others, the track count was a bit overwhelming at first, but I grouped a bunch of them together into similar sounds - it certainly made it a bit easier to attempt after a while!
Looking forward to hearing your constructive criticism or encouragements if there's stuff in there you like!!
Hi Dave
Nice sounding mix ,good balance ,i like it !
listening on headphones at the moment ,and one minor thing is the panned guitar sounds a touch upfront !
will have another listen on monitors later .
Good job !
Nice job! I just finished mixing this one so I know it takes some work with all those tracks. Overall balance sounds pretty good to me with nice choice of space. My only suggestion is that the kick should probably stand out a bit more in this style of music.
(08-02-2014, 12:56 PM)dwilko Wrote: New version with lowered acoustics and improved kick level…
hi Dave, nice to make your acquaintance. thanks for dropping by and inviting me over.
i fully and totally know where you were coming from in your post to me...however, nailing this song is far bigger than meets the ear (i think that's a pun!). i don't agree, however, that a mere 113bpm enables this song to make the category of "dance", especially with an incessant quarter-note drum loop and not a single fill anywhere, on top of an.... er... weak arrangement (but awesome potential). but what do i know?
59 tracks equates to a tonne of frequency, and while at first view our 20-20,000Hz hearing range (more realistically 16,000Hz) may seem fairly generous, it's not when there's 59 tracks banging away, many seemingly at the same time . be mindful of the technical issues this presents, even before you push a fader!
[downloaded your v1 and v2, monitored with Sennheiser OvationII HD560's, which, incidentally, i've owned for 21 years]
my prime concern is in the HMF, and HF zones right now, because until you fix this, all other comments above are basically irrelevant. why am i saying this?
many (all?), in order to find clarity, have pushed this zone beyond excess and i feel my ears burning here too - that's the consequences of hearing/listening fatigue in excess. it's a mighty challenge to address effectively, and i''ve yet to hear anyone mix this song without issues in this regard. you will no doubt have read the personal problems i had in just trying to mix it without this problem inflicting me - i suffered! there is one track that was highly problematic, but it was by no means on it's own! beware.
there's stuff here that is horrendously distorted and brittle, (have a read up about Nyquist). i've no idea what everyone else is listening to, but they really need to calibrate their hearing to something reliable! if i've offended anyone, tuff! fix it. i get really irritated when people say..."great mix"...when my ears are on fire and i'm listening to distortion by the boatload! i don't wish to offend anyone, but if people have a poor Terms of Reference, then you are going to get the appropriate misleading feedback and it's not going to help anyone, especially you.
if you listen to distorted mp3 music and have done for some time, then you will mix to this standard because it forms your own Terms of Reference (i.e. brain programming/conditioning), so be mindful of this pitfall if you are not already.
a couple of other points:
- why are you only encoding this at 192kbps?
- what was your brickwall limiter set to?
- what resolution did you mix at...given the samples were 16bit?
i'm looking forward to hearing v3. if i can help, let me know, hey.
I mixed this one myself not that long ago, faced brutal criticisms, and before having critically listened to my mix again, I thought "christ, what are these guys talking about? it sounds great!"
Then I listened to it and realized it had more sizzle than a hot pan covered with bacon (and not in the good way.)
I had to start from scratch, and listen to every single track in isolation several times, and still couldn't figure out where all the brittle nastiness was coming from. Then I had a rather long in coming lightbulb moment and checked out a spectral analysis of the entire mix and compared it to the spectral analysis of the instruments in isolation...
There are a LOT of tracks... I painfully remember... and almost all of them have printed effects and filters, all of which are introducing a huge deal of high mid and treble distortion. When that sort of thing is going on, you'll have to take breaks constantly or your sensitivity to the high frequencies is going to disappear before you even realize its gone, and that's what plagued me and led to REALLY bad decisions later on.
My advice... High pass almost everything except the bass and the kick, but go with a really light highpass around 80-100 for the loops so some of that low-end energy can come through... right now, even in version two, your low end is lacking and unfocused, and it's not driving the song. Take a coffee break and then hit the other instruments with as much highpass as you can get away with. Take a coffee break...
And if I'm remembering correctly, almost everything needs either a low pass around 10khz or a 3db shelving cut at 4khz. The loops, vocals, acoustics and pads are particularly egregious in this respect. That'll contain some of the brittleness... the good news is that your mix decisions didn't introduce that garbage... it's mostly from the way all of the tracks are processed and chorused. Once you get everything cleaned up, it comes together much more easily.
No sweat though... this one is a booger and I wasn't ready for it... but I think I advanced 5 years in 1 week trying to figure out what was going on.
I'm grateful for comments and suggestions. Thank you for listening!
Thanks for your comments and reply… I've had another listen in light of your suggestions… I think I'm happy with most of the vocals and perhaps the more peripheral/rhythmic instruments could be less toppy in general?? I think I hear what you're talking about - at least that's what I'll try to attend to next!
Not sure about distortions… I've got some deliberate distortion effects - are those what you're referring to? They're on strings, some of the vox, bass and a couple electric guitars which i felt needed a bit more attitude… Can you give me some more direction in my listening here?
Or is it something about the mp3 conversion process itself - is there a conversion process that you think is better than others?
Can you give me some more direction regarding reading up on Nyquist too? I think I'm across the basics as far as I know...
I only encoded at 192kbps as I'd been getting annoyed at having to wait so long for other peoples tracks to download when I was listening… I am a newbie to this whole game… but given what little I know of the limitations of mp3, didn't consider that listeners where getting that much more for their extra kbps to make it worth it!! Is it standard to do 320 on this forum? I'm happy to be corrected!
Limiter question… I used a waves L1 with everything set to 0.3 and release at 1.0… was catching the snare mostly by the looks… which probably means I could have done something extra to my snare track…
Mix resolution question… just as they came… 44.1/16… is that good? What do you do?
Looking forward to your reply… although it could be a little while before I'm back on here again to repost a revision… my holidays are unfortunately over!!
Thanks again,
Dave
(08-02-2014, 04:57 PM)The_Metallurgist Wrote:
(08-02-2014, 12:56 PM)dwilko Wrote: New version with lowered acoustics and improved kick level…
hi Dave, nice to make your acquaintance. thanks for dropping by and inviting me over.
i fully and totally know where you were coming from in your post to me...however, nailing this song is far bigger than meets the ear (i think that's a pun!). i don't agree, however, that a mere 113bpm enables this song to make the category of "dance", especially with an incessant quarter-note drum loop and not a single fill anywhere, on top of an.... er... weak arrangement (but awesome potential). but what do i know?
59 tracks equates to a tonne of frequency, and while at first view our 20-20,000Hz hearing range (more realistically 16,000Hz) may seem fairly generous, it's not when there's 59 tracks banging away, many seemingly at the same time . be mindful of the technical issues this presents, even before you push a fader!
[downloaded your v1 and v2, monitored with Sennheiser OvationII HD560's, which, incidentally, i've owned for 21 years]
my prime concern is in the HMF, and HF zones right now, because until you fix this, all other comments above are basically irrelevant. why am i saying this?
many (all?), in order to find clarity, have pushed this zone beyond excess and i feel my ears burning here too - that's the consequences of hearing/listening fatigue in excess. it's a mighty challenge to address effectively, and i''ve yet to hear anyone mix this song without issues in this regard. you will no doubt have read the personal problems i had in just trying to mix it without this problem inflicting me - i suffered! there is one track that was highly problematic, but it was by no means on it's own! beware.
there's stuff here that is horrendously distorted and brittle, (have a read up about Nyquist). i've no idea what everyone else is listening to, but they really need to calibrate their hearing to something reliable! if i've offended anyone, tuff! fix it. i get really irritated when people say..."great mix"...when my ears are on fire and i'm listening to distortion by the boatload! i don't wish to offend anyone, but if people have a poor Terms of Reference, then you are going to get the appropriate misleading feedback and it's not going to help anyone, especially you.
if you listen to distorted mp3 music and have done for some time, then you will mix to this standard because it forms your own Terms of Reference (i.e. brain programming/conditioning), so be mindful of this pitfall if you are not already.
a couple of other points:
- why are you only encoding this at 192kbps?
- what was your brickwall limiter set to?
- what resolution did you mix at...given the samples were 16bit?
i'm looking forward to hearing v3. if i can help, let me know, hey.
Thanks for your thoughts here… although I must admit that I do love actual bacon… and probably also in the not good way - at least for my waistline!! And coffee… it sounds like I need to drink coffee more regularly - for the sake of my mixing quality of course!!
I replied to Dave's comments on the distortion thing too - I'm struggling to hear it! None of my plugins are distorting unless I've specifically put in a distortion effect... but I can certainly hear the harshness that is the "over-sizzling" of the top end that you've both referred to and I can see how it's built up through my mix process as you've outlined it with printed fx and processing… Can you help direct my listening here too perhaps?
I'm definitely going to try the HF shelving thing - this seems like a good place to start with my remix...
Most of my low end is filtered… so perhaps I need to filter even higher? I found only a few of those weird vocal upward rises that I hadn't filtered… but I'll experiment with this on the next revision! If you've got any specific stuff you'd try here I'd be interested in your direction...
Thanks very much for your advice! I'll look forward to posting a remix in a little while when I can and getting your thoughts again...
Dave
(08-02-2014, 08:11 PM)pauli Wrote: hey guy.
I mixed this one myself not that long ago, faced brutal criticisms, and before having critically listened to my mix again, I thought "christ, what are these guys talking about? it sounds great!"
Then I listened to it and realized it had more sizzle than a hot pan covered with bacon (and not in the good way.)
I had to start from scratch, and listen to every single track in isolation several times, and still couldn't figure out where all the brittle nastiness was coming from. Then I had a rather long in coming lightbulb moment and checked out a spectral analysis of the entire mix and compared it to the spectral analysis of the instruments in isolation...
There are a LOT of tracks... I painfully remember... and almost all of them have printed effects and filters, all of which are introducing a huge deal of high mid and treble distortion. When that sort of thing is going on, you'll have to take breaks constantly or your sensitivity to the high frequencies is going to disappear before you even realize its gone, and that's what plagued me and led to REALLY bad decisions later on.
My advice... High pass almost everything except the bass and the kick, but go with a really light highpass around 80-100 for the loops so some of that low-end energy can come through... right now, even in version two, your low end is lacking and unfocused, and it's not driving the song. Take a coffee break and then hit the other instruments with as much highpass as you can get away with. Take a coffee break...
And if I'm remembering correctly, almost everything needs either a low pass around 10khz or a 3db shelving cut at 4khz. The loops, vocals, acoustics and pads are particularly egregious in this respect. That'll contain some of the brittleness... the good news is that your mix decisions didn't introduce that garbage... it's mostly from the way all of the tracks are processed and chorused. Once you get everything cleaned up, it comes together much more easily.
No sweat though... this one is a booger and I wasn't ready for it... but I think I advanced 5 years in 1 week trying to figure out what was going on.
!
. be mindful of the technical issues this presents, even before you push a fader!