Discussion Zone

So here's my go at this one.

I admit that I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to handle the vocals on this one. I think I have something acceptable but it was a challenge. Oh, note that while they're not in tune with each other, I *did* go through Melodyne to get rid of the worst differences. This is punk. If it's perfect, it's wrong!

Drums didn't sound that great up front but once I had them in context, I was much happer. Still think I should go back and redo the toms. They actually clipped during recording a couple of times and I didn't take time to try to clean that up as I would otherwise have tried to.

I did have to go in and carve out a tight notch at 4 and 8kHz on the guitars. Just a little too trebly inbound so I needed to keep the upper level noise down to keep everything listenable but didn't do anything else on the guitars, really.

The downbeats were a little variable but a dB or so of bus compression on the dry signal cleared that right up. (I was actually pretty impressed with how effective just that little bit was.)

Precious little verb or delays here. Just didn't seem to fit. I used just enough to keep it from being sterile.

Comments most welcome!

Okay, so after listening to the preview mix, it immediately became clear to me what my problems with the vocals were. The reverb was all wrong (RT60 too long and room too small) and the level adjustments 1 voice to 2 weren't as precise as they should have been. I also decided I didn't have enough low end on the guitar tracks.

These changes have made me far more stisfied with the resultant mix and taught me a few things in the process (and that's the neat part of all this!)

Anyway, here's version 2. Should be a great improvement.

(Oh, I also learned that these are apparently some local guys and that's always cool to discover too. )

I'm not a huge punk music fan, but I think you have achieved a sound that was typical of the punk scene of the late 70's, hopefully that's what you were after! At first I thought the vocals may have been a bit buried, but if you listen to tracks from that period by The Saints or Radio Birdman for example, some tracks have the vocals out front and prominent whist others are pushed back. Well Done!!!

When I think "punk", I think '70s and much angst (even to the point of yelling into the mic in some cases), so yeah that's where I was headed.

Getting the vocals to the right level was indeed challenging. Very tricky to get them to come through without being "in your face" up front. They probably could use another half a dB but no more than that, I think.