Sea Of Leaves - 1st pass

[Jmaltby]

Hey guys,

I'm a bit new to all of this.
Here is a first pass I did on this song.

I'd love to get some feedback.

Thanks!

[FytaKyte]

Overall, pretty well done - definitely no murkiness or mud i the mix.

The main area I can hear for improvement is the overall spectral balance between the low end & the highs/high mids in the mix. The mix is definitely weighted toward the latter. As a result the high end is quite brash & harsh, so the mix is a little fatiguing to listen to. I'd suggest taming your overheads in particular, as the cymbals really flood the mix during the heavy sections. I think you will find if you tame the OH, you won't need to boost the high mids in the other elements as much to compete, and the result will be a lot more pleasing to listen to.

The low end is also not full sounding enough - The bass and kick need some work to fill out the low end & support the midrange in the mix. I think here is where referencing your mix against similar sounding commercial stuff would be a big advantage in getting things in the ballpark.

On a side note, the mix is pretty loud - I personally haven't got anything against a loud mix that is done well, but I can hear a bit of grittiness & distortion that I think may be the result of the limiter working too hard, so perhaps backing that down some may help too.

If you are new at this, you're doing well - keep it up!

[Jmaltby]

fHumble fHingaz,

Thank you so much for taking the time.
Those are excellent notes.

funny, actually I was mixing it on my laptop with headphones.
I kept pushing the high-end further and further to get add some clarity.
Then after your reply, I heard it though my laptop speakers. Ouch, yea, those cymbals are deafening. I guess my headphones can't reproduce those freqs... oh well.

Thats a good note about he low end too. I'll give it another go.

Yea, I'm really just starting to learn music mixing.
Thanks for helping out a newb! I appreciate you taking the time with such a considered response.

Best,
J

[Jmaltby]

I addressed your notes.
Hopefully this is a bit more on the right track.

Love to get your thoughts. Open to any and all feedback.

Thanks!

[FytaKyte]

Much improved!

The bass is still a little shy - needs more low end extension. The overheads in the prechorus get too harsh still - maybe some automation would help.

A suggestion for the verse vocals - try increasing the pre-delay control on the reverb to about 70-80ms. At present, the vocal reverb is making the vocals sound distant. Pre-delay will separate the vocals from the reverb & bring them forward "in front of" the instruments. Also, try rolling some top end off the reverb - that will give more subjective "depth" to the effect. Reverb is really tricky to judge on headphones, so it might be worth doing a speaker check.

Good progress!

[Jmaltby]

Hey man,
Thanks for all your help.
I'm mixing myself in circles here haha.

I was trying to focus on your consistent note on the low-end.
I think I may have buggered some stuff up in the progress.
That area of the full, tight, low-end w/o mud has been an issue for me in the past. Perhaps you have a technique or approach I should be looking at?

Anyway, I addressed your notes.
The vocal reverb was from the CLA Vocals plugin (no pre delay or eq settings). So I did it a little different, bussing the reverb out and using a sample-delay ahead of it.

The cymbals are... better, I think.
It's really tough. It's not he overheads - its that there's so much bleed of the crash into the outer-kick mic. I don't know how you approached this, but this is quite troublesome for me.

I took a listen to your mix, really awesome dude. Punchy, full, and dynamic. the changes in energy as you go from verse to pre chorus to chorus really makes the chorus seem "earned." Really well done. And the way the bass sits with the kick is rockin! Not to toot, but it seems like a very CLA approach to the song. very cool.

Thanks again.

[pauli]

First thing's first... You should work on your monitoring. Headphones are fine, but most likely the headphone amp in your laptops and your headphones are impedance mismatched, and that can cause even very accurate headphones to distort the tonality. An audio interface would be a good step in the right direction... What kind of headphones are you using?

If cymbal bleed in the outer kick mike is overpowering, you can low pass filter most of it out. The outer kick mike is the oomph and not the click, so you wouldn't be sacrificing anything in doing that. You could try to gate out the cymbals, but they're probably audible in the kicks sustain, so it probably wouldn't sound very good.

A good thing to know is where the useful frequencies for certain instruments. On a kick drum, there's usually almost nothing remotely useful over 2k.... And with a bass guitar it's usually even lower than that unless it's a slap bass, so you can often clean the mix up quite a bit with a simple, gentle low pass filter where the nice sounds stop and the noise begins. I almost always low pass distorted electric guitars between 5k and 6k because there's literally nothing but pickup noise up there.

It all seems kinda silly because most of that garbage gets masked anyway, but it's a useful guideline when you need to clear leakage from cymbals or preserve headroom. And think, when you're compressing, you're potentially amplifying that noise/leakage. So it gets compressed once in the mike, quite often a second time on it's way to the mixer, a third time in the mix, a fourth time on the mix buss... And that's all before it gets to the mastering engineer, who may want to compress it a bit more. So depending on the circumstances, you've potentially got a situation where unwanted noise is continually brought up in level, and the mastering engineer might be limited in what he can do to get it ready for the radio. So it's worth a thought. Keep it up and let us know if you need help.

[FytaKyte]

Hey man,
Thanks for all your help.
I'm mixing myself in circles here haha.

I was trying to focus on your consistent note on the low-end.
I think I may have buggered some stuff up in the progress.
That area of the full, tight, low-end w/o mud has been an issue for me in the past. Perhaps you have a technique or approach I should be looking at?

Anyway, I addressed your notes.
The vocal reverb was from the CLA Vocals plugin (no pre delay or eq settings). So I did it a little different, bussing the reverb out and using a sample-delay ahead of it.

The cymbals are... better, I think.
It's really tough. It's not he overheads - its that there's so much bleed of the crash into the outer-kick mic. I don't know how you approached this, but this is quite troublesome for me.

I took a listen to your mix, really awesome dude. Punchy, full, and dynamic. the changes in energy as you go from verse to pre chorus to chorus really makes the chorus seem "earned." Really well done. And the way the bass sits with the kick is rockin! Not to toot, but it seems like a very CLA approach to the song. very cool.

Thanks again.

Glad you liked my mix - thank you for the kind compliment!...

With your new one, I think you've taken a couple of steps forward and maybe one back... but hey, that's progress!

The cymbals sound more controlled, and the bass is definitely fuller. If you can get the kick & bass to compliment one another better via eq (carve out a spot in lows of the bass around 80-100 for the kick to sit in) you might find that the low end will gel together better.

I would venture to say that, although there is better clarity & fullness in your latest mix, the mix previous to this one "glued" together better... Have you done something to the snare in this one? It seems to poke out a bit too much.

The vocals are clearer now, but I think you could just turn the reverb down some to get the vocals to feel more part of the music.

Pauli had some good suggestions on how to deal with the bleed from the outside kick mic....Here's my method - I put a gate on the outside kick, but I triggered the gate from the inside kick mic track via the outside kick's gate's sidechain. That, in combination with low passing it really did the trick.

Hope that helps!

[Jmaltby]

Hey guys.

Thank you so much for all your help.
That last round was really useful!

I think i'm making good progress. (I hope!)
Those "clean up" tips were really helpful.
Definitely cleaning up the kick was big, and I think rolling off some of the highs with the guitars helped too. And I got the reverb down a bit as well.

I think the bass + kick is improved as well.
Yes, ff, the snare got a bit messed in some overfiltering.
Hopefully this is a bit better

--
Pauli,
I'm using EX-29s through an apogee one.
Not great... point well taken.
Thanks!
--

I feel like this is improving - let me know if you think this is going on the right track.
Thanks again for all the help, I really appreciate the time.

Best,
J

[FytaKyte]

Just listening to the new mix on little consumer speakers at work, but I can already hear a big improvement over your last mix. Everything is sitting much better - I'll have to check on my studio monitors to give any more detail.

BTW, I have EX29s also - I use them for tracking. They have a fairly significant high end roll off & a bit of a hyped bass response... Understandable, because they are aimed at tracking. Unfortunately, that makes it super-hard to mix on them.

If you can't afford monitors yet, I would suggest getting some flatter-response headphones. I saw a video recently where live engineer Dave Rat compares a number of headphones - Sennheisser HD25s actually acquitted themselves surprisingly well in terms of an ok flat frequency response at a fairly low cost.

Ultimately though, some decent (not necessarily expensive) monitors in a good room is what you should aim at.