The Butterfly Effect - 'Preach Right Here'

[juanjose1967]

Here's my mix of this cool song!

Comments and suggestions are welcomed as usual

[takka360]

Cant really hear the kick, the tambo moving around like that I don't like at all and it too loud.
The snare is very lost a lot of the time you cant tell if he is hitting the snare or hh.
The vox don't sound too bad, pretty good level.
Try tucking the tambo in at like 30 .
Also do more cleaning up, it will make the difference

[juanjose1967]

Thank you, Alan

I've improved the kick and the snare. I don't know what you mean about the tambourine moving around because I haven't automated it and it was fixed in the same spot. Maybe it's the shaker that it's panned opposite to the tambourine what you didn't like.

Anyway, I've lowered the tambourine.

I still have to learn more about cleaning up noisy tracks. It's difficult to make them sound good despite how 'easy' all cleaning plugins say to be

[takka360]

Sorry my mistake,i still don't like that that shaker panned that wide and its still too loud tambo better .
Clean up manually not with plugins.
The kick is better maybe a tad too loud now but the snare is still weak.
You could try a little pars comp and add some mid to it to beef it up a bit.

[juanjose1967]

Here's the new version with an improved snare sound, the tambourine and shaker are no longer panned apart and I've got rid of the silent parts of the instrument tracks so there were no noises (I think you meant that by telling me to do it manually)

Is it better now?

[HbGuitar]

I've listened to your last mix...I think you've done a good job overall on this..nicely balanced

from the comments it looks like you've been working on your snare....I think it sounds excellent in [email protected]'...maybe stlll clashing slightly with cymbals/tambourine in choruses

[juanjose1967]

Thank you hbguitar for your comments.

I've tried to fix the snare according to your suggestions. I've used a multiband compressor sidechained to the cymbals, tambourine so they won't interfere with each other.

[Kal]

Hello Juanjose,

I think your mix is overall a good mix, the problems i would fix is the intro that sounds too loud, when the other instruments come at the transition they don't sound loud enough (think you start with an acoustic intro, the amplified instruments and drums should sound louder).

Snare and vocals are maybe a bit too upfront, but this can be a matter of taste.

Good job anyway !

[pauli]

Your best bet cleaning up noisy tracks is to remove all of the noise you can remove without sacrifice by trimming the silences out and re-rendering the edited track... I prefer to re-render tracks when I'm done editing because for one, you have to COMMIT to your editing decisions so you're more determined to get it right and the urge to tweak edits and potentially unbalancing the mix is a moot issue. And for two, in my opinion we have too much to worry about in the mix without having to stare at a bunch of visual clutter (crossfades, etc), so it helps smooth things out and keep you from getting overwhelmed, especially on a tune that needed a lot of edits.

Any noise you can't manually remove without hurting the sound in some other way, well there are a million different things you can try, but denoising plug-ins don't sound musical in my opinion. On duff notes, you can try copying the same note from elsewhere and dropping it in. If there's too much leakage peaking through as sustained notes decay (such as on the dulcimer track) there are several things to consider... 1: does the note need to sustain so long? If not, fade it out before the leakage becomes an issue. 2: Is compression adding to the problem? Parallel compression schemes in particular are notorious for this. If that's the case, automation will help. 3: What else is going on at those points in the mix? If the arrangement is dense enough you can almost certainly mask the issue, because the note will blend into the track as it decays if you balanced it properly. If not, consider other methods of shifting the focus away from the issue, or perhaps disguising it with some form of modulation. As long as you don't draw attention to the things that can't be corrected manually, they won't be an issue. I used a dirty, nasty trick to dodge the noise issue... I just added more noise to the mix (in the form of tape hiss) and it covered it up! And I also like the way tape hiss sounds .

Hope that's helpful