Preach Right Here

[pauli]

Lotsa funky tuning stuff and noise on this track to contend with, but what a great song. Poking my nose around, I think I read this track was recorded in a basement in the late 90s.. that's right around the time I started learning music.

So I did my best to compare my mix to my old Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, and Stone Temple Pilots CDs... some of the first I ever owned. Like a trip down memory lane, this one.

[Voelund]

Hi Pauli
Well separated mix, takes a little to get used to the harder use of compression, but it sounds cool.
Well thought to make 2nd verse guitar have modulation effect on it.
I miss impact when drums hit, maybe intro is too loud ? Drums are mostly kick and snare now ? Perhaps the OH could come up a bit. To my taste kick dont have to poke that much through, its impressive though.
Its not your mastering, lookin at the soundfile :-)
Maybe help first drumhit a dB or 3 ?
Vocal lvl suits m ears !

[HbGuitar]

hey Pauli...Nice job here mate.

Well balanced mix. All the instruments sit well together, as do the vox/bgv and harmonies. Love the use of FX on guitar in middle section.

I'm picking up some hiss in the intro and quiet sections at 1.08, 2.16 & 3.10. Maybe some of the tracks needs to be muted. I had a look in my project and I've chopped out a lot dead space in vox, bgvs and instruments.

from a personal point of view, I'm getting a feeling that the mix could do with being slightly bigger. At first i thought maybe vox, but then i read Voelands comments re OH. Looking at the overall frequency curve, there's a noticeable roll-off from 5-20K. Maybe a small shelving boost around 10K in the master buss EQ...not so much to brighten it unnecessarily but enough to help open things up a bit ----- but you'll need to address the hiss first....

Good work here---lots of positives (too many to mention)

[pauli]

Thanks for the feedback, and you and Niells are right about the OHs.. the mix needs more spread.

The hiss... well... I actually added that I didn't feel the noise could be sufficiently removed without the reverbs and compression I wanted to use acting flaky, so I covered up what I couldn't delete with tape hiss. Maybe turn it down a bit? And perhaps brightening up the reverbs would add to the size and overall mix brightness?

[The_Metallurgist]

The hiss... well... I actually added that I didn't feel the noise could be sufficiently removed....

that's shocking, you need a quality noise reduction processor. Hbguitar's methodology has serious limitations, simply because the noise will come over with the instrument(s), especially when compressed. and it's this that needs nailing. and of course, when you do so, the stuff in between also gets nailed too. but i'd use a gate for that

i'm intellectually guessing that you worked on this source in 16bit without converting it to 32bit during import to your DAW? for the benefit of the audience who wish to shout me down on that....i do know i'm not adding quality by doing this...just a bunch of zeros to the word-length. HOWEVER all processing applied to this converted 32bit file, will be in 32bit, complete with the benefits of added dynamic range! why 32bit? because 24 bit doesn't divide nicely into 16, you get some stuff left over or left out which makes it a quality problem (at least to people like me). this is why music bums should work in the 32 bit domain, NOT 24bit. earlier ProTools was a major constraint in that regard and they've only very recently actually addressed this!! 24bit is only of use to people who don't need to convert the material to 16 bit, like the movie guys for example (24bit audio can fit on a DVD, but only 16bit will fit a CD)....now i'm typically digressing!

sonically, the mix is as flat as a pancake. slapping a decent exciter over the stereo buss would help inject some life and sparkle into it (especially if you're running 32 bit). i'd recommend an outboard rig like the Aphex Aural Exciter (with BIG BOTTOM!!! the older ones didn't have this), but if not tooled up to work out of the box, setting up will lose you a bit of cost/benefit perhaps but corners can be cut if you're motivated. it's fantastic however, and sometimes comes at an affordable price on auction sites if you watch and wait If you listen to a lot of lossy junk (tut, tut), a rig like this can inject some serious business into your listening quality, so it's not a redundant item when you stop mixing. once adding the exciter into the mix, you're views about reverb will likely change. forever. read up about the history of the Aphex rig...it's fascinating; note specifically the era in which it was employed - analogue. be aware that applying it to a single instrument can have it's benefits now and again.

the intro rhythm guitars were masking the solo on occasion.

[pauli]

Hey man, thanks for listening.

that's shocking, you need a quality noise reduction processor.

Any recommendations on that score? De-noising is a serious weak link in my audio processing... I've never found a de-noiser that didn't have unacceptably unmusical side effects.

i'm intellectually guessing that you worked on this source in 16bit without converting it to 32bit during import to your DAW?

HOWEVER all processing applied to this converted 32bit file, will be in 32bit, complete with the benefits of added dynamic range! why 32bit? because 24 bit doesn't divide nicely into 16, you get some stuff left over or left out which makes it a quality problem (at least to people like me).

That's a very useful tip. You know, I'm always trying to chew up all the tech stuff I can (or else how can I be a decent technician?) so this is really helpful. Makes sense, too...

sonically, the mix is as flat as a pancake. slapping a decent exciter over the stereo buss would help inject some life and sparkle into it

Yes, I think I abused it a bit with the multiband comp... pretty much flattened out the spectral balance and the dynamics. I'll get to work fixing this... it doesn't help that my references were mid-90s. And I only have the re-mixed version of Pearl Jam's Ten on CD, which tried and failed to copy the sonics from Nevermind in my opinion... the original sound is much closer to what I was hoping for.

Now if I reference Donald Fagen... well. We'll just have to see how that goes.

I'll give this one another look and give you a shout when it's posted. Thanks for the tips

[LSS]

Hey man, thanks for listening.

that's shocking, you need a quality noise reduction processor.

Any recommendations on that score? De-noising is a serious weak link in my audio processing... I've never found a de-noiser that didn't have unacceptably unmusical side effects.

i'm intellectually guessing that you worked on this source in 16bit without converting it to 32bit during import to your DAW?

HOWEVER all processing applied to this converted 32bit file, will be in 32bit, complete with the benefits of added dynamic range! why 32bit? because 24 bit doesn't divide nicely into 16, you get some stuff left over or left out which makes it a quality problem (at least to people like me).

That's a very useful tip. You know, I'm always trying to chew up all the tech stuff I can (or else how can I be a decent technician?) so this is really helpful. Makes sense, too...

I hadn't thought about the bit depth, but that makes sense. I'll bear that in mind for future mixes.

Now onto the noise problem. In a mix session you've got the massive benefit of having everything on separate tracks, which helps a lot. Unfortunately most de-noisers can give very unmusical results, but there are ways around that. I went through all the tracks and checked the noise level: the lead vocals were between -180 and -300, so nothing audible; most were between -110 and -130, so just in the background as long as you've got good speakers; a few were around -100, which is where it starts to become noticeable; the tambourine, shaker, bass1, and the SFX were all between -100 and -85, which is loud for noise. I started off by just muting every track when all it was outputting was noise, which worked quite well, and then I noticed that in almost every case the noise and the instrument in any given track were at different frequencies, so I used PEQs to take care of the remaining noise (although this step was only really necessary on the tracks with the loudest noise). There might be really good noise reduction plugins that can do the job, but I found it quite easy to do like this, and the results are fairly clean.

[pauli]

Thanks for feedback

When I say "noise" I was sorta using the term broadly and liberally... there was some spill on some pretty significant parts that I was calling noise, and EQ's/denoisers won't touch anything like that without pretty serious negative side effects. Main issue is that I was trying for something to which these tracks aren't conducive... and rather than start over with a different plan, I stubbornly let a little hiss through on a tape sim. Tape hiss doesn't bother me and I kinda like it... but that's because I grew up listening to music that was recorded to tape before anyone thought to get rid of it. Sometimes I forget not to mix for myself (lol) but to mix for the market.