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Latest In Progress Mix
#1
Edited to add Heartbeats F 10, which I consider to be better than the original file I uploaded.

Hello everyone,

I've been working on this track for a few days now. The rough mix was already pretty good sounding with just slapping CLA Vocals with the Start Me Up preset on and doing nothing else to the track. But given how much there is to work with, why stop there?

This is the first 40+ track song I've worked with. The contrast between soft and loud is a challenge to get right. Balancing all the percussion tracks was not all that easy either. Then there's all the synths that need to be blended. And this is just the technical stuff. The creative decisions were a bit easier, but I'm sure with more experience I could come up with a lot of other options.

My main goal here was to make it balanced and dynamic. The vocals are so powerful and emotive that I didn't feel a need to put a ton of fx on them. Usually I love to load up on reverbs, delays, and other stuff, but here it just seemed to work without much. In this mix the vocals are a bit louder than other things, I'm not sure if I'd leave them that way in the future or not. There's probably other tracks I could change automation and compression on to tighten.

I considered using revoice pro 3 to align vocals tighter or generate backing vocals I could add, but this seemed more like a luxury than a necessity.

Originally I was just turning down the master fader, but I went back and reautomated everything, turned down plugin volumes, and added the trim plugin on every track to get the levels more dynamic without turning down the master fader.

The vocal tracks are very hissy and have a lot of breaths in them. There seems to be slight clicky noises after some of the phrases in lead vox 2 at the end of the song. Dessing the vocals didn't do much and Izotope Breath Control introduces way too much latency in PT 11 that I just manually chopped out breaths and hisses where I could.

It took a lot of time to try and make the choruses more dynamic and exciting than the verses. Not just level-wise, but eqing guitars 7 and 8. There's a lot of potential frequency clashes in this mix. Pro Q2 was used on most every track. Mainly in spectrum grab mode where I was mostly bringing peaks down.

Using Mdrumleveler on the drums seemed to help a bit. I used a lot of other stuff there too. Originally I automated the lead vocal tracks, but no matter how I set wave rider, the shifts were just too blatant. It was easier to slap either CLA2A or White2A on them and let that take care of levels. I suppose I could go back and automate some stuff by hand if I wanted to make it more exacting. On the synths I used mainly CLA3As. There were a couple tracks I moved to track #32 temporarily so I could run waverider on them, but I found the 3A to pretty much do the job. Really wish PT wasn't limited to 32 tracks of HUI.

I did listen to the full preview here as well as the band's mix on youtube and neither really seemed to be as dynamic as what I was going for. So I didn't really have a reference track. This song is pretty unique and I really couldn't think of something similar, especially a ref track that wasn't loudness war maximized. There's strong elements of modern pop coupled with hard rock guitars and dance synths. Anyone know if these drums are all sampled?

Thanks for any feedback and I'll keep tweaking this as I get more experienced.


.mp3    Heartbeats_F_6.mp3 --  (Download: 11.64 MB)


.mp3    Heartbeats_F_10.mp3 --  (Download: 11.64 MB)


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