Preach Right Here - HB Mix

[HbGuitar]

Hey HB, nice and clean and the degree of separation of instruments is really nice. The vocal sound is also good, but for much of the mix it's losing a lot of it's definition to electricguitar1, which would make it kinda tough to understand the lyrics if you hadn't heard them before... very forgivably easy oversight, though. I do it all the time, in fact, and probably always do it on a guitar heavy mix.

Some of my comments may be subjective, so take them as such if you disagree, though there are a few purely technical things that stand out enough to warrant a mention: Electric 1 is really... really... REALLY out of tune, and unless you have a good polyphonic tuning corrector, your options for dealing with it are limited. My advice? Leave it muted for most of the song... there's plenty of drone on that G coming from the rest of the instruments to maintain that effect. Unfortunately, the tuning is out of whack with itself, so for the parts where you let this part play, try and use a pitch shifter to tune that all important G, and try to keep it in places where few pitched instruments are playing... it won't sound so out of place and you'll be able to tweak the pitch of the Lead Vocal in context... nobody'll notice . In this particular case, that guitar is also quite a bit too aggressive from 2k to 5k in your mix, which is where our ears naturally listen for speech intelligibility, so it draws a lot of focus away from the vocal and toward the dodgy intonation.

You mentioned that you intentionally mixed this one pretty bright, which isn't necessarily inappropriate for the genre, but this song I think does better when it's a little darker. An unintended side effect here is that the acoustic guitars, dulcimer and cymbals are all brighter than the lead vocal, which from my perspective would make it hard to play the song at higher volumes without the brightness getting too uncomfortable. To me it sounds like you added brightness rather than subtracted darkness... it's easy for a mix to get harsh in that manner, especially when that same G note is banging away throughout the entire song. Perhaps a little less brightness would also enhance the hypnotic effect you mentioned

Good work though, dude. Sounds like you managed the plosives on the lead vocal pretty well, and your reverb/delay choices are a lot more consistent with the genre/era than my version. If you want to do a revision, start by giving the vocal more room for air from 2k to 5k and I think your other ideas will fall right into place.

Hey Pauli - Thanks for your feedback. I haven't listened to this mix for a while. I was sort of exhausted by it originally.

re vox - I agree. Needs to be up a smidge plus a nudge with EQ would be nice. I never really got the timbre that I was hearing in my head.

re ElecGtr1 - I never noticed (LOL)! I think instinctively i assumed the dischord in the playing style was down to an open G tuning, which can yield a lot more tonal variation if banged hard, and fitted nicely into my drone heavy mix. Bit of a feedback loop--what i heard made sense to me given what i wanted to achieve.

I think time has come for slight re-mix...having listened again with fresh ears. I've got a couple of ideas I want to try now plus address some of the comments.

Cheers buddy