Backroom in Tulsa Stanley Red mix

[Stanley Red]

Hi everyone, what a great song, I really enjoyed mixing this and this being my first mix here on this forum, and my first post on ANY forum. I enjoyed the mixes from everyone else too.

I'm new to all of this and pretty EXCITED too!

Red

[n3rd]

Hey REd, welcome to this great site. Nice mix man, keep mixing!

[Stanley Red]

Hey REd, welcome to this great site. Nice mix man, keep mixing!

Hi n3rd, thanks for your warm welcome. I just re-listened to my posted mix and can hear that those last minute decisions I made to bring down the level of drum and harmony groups to tame the track and leave plenty of space for the vocals, have quite literally sucked the life out of the mix! Back to the drawing board!

I read something the other day about some advice that someone wished they had been given when they first started out mixing - That it takes a lot of practice from a large volume of work to close the gap between what you hear in your head and what you produce. Never Give Up!

[Mike Senior]

Quite a stark rendition you've gone for, which makes me think that you've probably treated spill as an evil, rather than embracing its creative potential. Although in technical terms the sounds are all clear enough, and there's impressive clarity on display, I do get the sense that you might have thrown the baby out with the bathwater on a subjective level. Particularly given the provenance of this multitrack, it seems unlikely that the raw tracks would have been captured with this much ambience if that wasn't part of the overall plot, sonically speaking.

That aside, though, I do wonder whether you've given the lead vocal and solos a bit too much prominence level-wise, and you don't appear to have done anything specific to blend these with the backing either, so they feel both a bit undersupported, and a bit dissociated with the backing. Even if you're going to go for a cleaner, more 'studio' vision, I think I'd still consider working with a few short ambiences to see if I could glue things together a bit more in this respect.

[WesleyMorgan]

I agree with Mike's comments. We definitely wanted that "in the room" sound when recording which is why your hear room mics for drums and the lead guitar. I love recordings that have a sense of depth to them.

Overall a very nice mix. It's like the Fleetwood Mac version. In your face.