Revelations

[thedon]

Hi Pauli
I think you have put together a great mix here I like the nice punchy kick and bass in the intro !
A couple of thoughts if you decide to do another mix, these are personal preferences only ,I like to hear a little more top end of the organ cut through and maybe a bit more top end shine on the entire mix somewhere around 3 k which should also bring out the hi hat and snare rattle but probably will lose the 70's feel you have gone for !
Good Job !

[pauli]

Thanks, Don! I think I could pan the organ off to the side (it's dead center at the moment) and let the upper mids breathe a bit more... the main reason I didn't (and I'd love your opinion on this!) is that I really wanted the organ in the center during certain moments in the song... and I thought it would be kinda bizarre if an organ moved in the stereo picture. Normally I don't really care if a mix sounds naturalistic, because the whole game is smoke and mirrors in the end, but since this song was recorded in a real acoustic space, it made sense to keep the most stationary instruments, well, stationary

Am I maybe overthinking it? Because panning the organ would really help me brighten it up a bit. Thanks again for listening and the support you and the others have given me while I'm learning!

Side note, how in the world did you get your mix of this sounding so polished? It's really clean... did you denoise or dehiss or anything like that?

[pauli]

Hey HB, thanks for listening and thoughtful comments

Jumping into the conversation between you and Takka, I will always look to boost upper harmonics on bass. I use very narrow peaks e.g. if 1st harmonic is around 120hz, I'll boost peaks at 480 & 960 (sometimes 240 and 1920 as well, depending on track). If you scoop out a hole in the kick at around 400Hz, it sits beautifully and will cut through mix. Very important for melodic bass playing styles with lots of 1st and 2nd octave action, less so for chunky open string grinds.

With bass guitars I usually put a high shelf starting around 1 or 2k and boost depending on the situation... on this particular track it's boosted 6 dB starting at 1k. I forget where I got that idea, but I was under the impression it was pretty common practice... maybe narrow peaks instead of high shelves are the way to go. I'll experiment with it, thanks for the idea

Love the sound of your drums....Jealous.

The main difference between the way we treated our drums is that I didn't use a compressor on the bus, I just compressed in parallel. Compression is a natural byproduct of the recording process on tape... signal had to be hot to clear the noise floor, so the drums were pretty compressed to begin with. For that reason parallel compression made more sense, at least in my opinion. Glad you liked the results
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You're right though, the vocal is a serious weak point. There's parallel compression going on, but I was struggling to get it sounding thicker. I was thinking his voice sounded like the guy from Blood, Sweat and Tears, but everything I tried resisted my attempts to replicate that sound. Maybe some distortion in the low mids might help?