Discussion Zone

How has everyone been doing lately? I haven't had much time to contribute to the website in a while, but I got a teeny bit of a break from my day job.

This was a fantastic track to work with. A lot to like about the drum tones (more on the cymbals later) and the bass.

There was obviously a lot to work with on the guitars, but once you organize them appropriately, and figure out what kind of tones you generally want, there is a lot that you can do!

The vocals were clean and very workable!

Now let's get down to the hard parts.

The high hat: Woof. Or should I say warble? It is very hard to get a solid tone from the high hat track. Every track has its limitations, and this is definitely an area that needs extra attention.

The cymbals: Nowhere near as offensive as the high hat, but I did have to work with the highs quite a bit (and ran a deeser on the track) to get them to sit nicely, while making sure they weren't too dark.

The guitars: Okay, I know I said there was a lot to work with, but there is a LOT to work with. For me, I had to high and low pass all of the DI tracks before they hit my amp sims. Otherwise they were very fizzy, and quite woofy.

Those tough parts aside, this was a really fun track to play with. Get to go a little balls to the wall through parts.

Oh, speaking of parts, I doubled the last chorus guitar parts (with different amp sims) to get an extra thick sound. It felt like the energy dipped down and the chorus felt anemic as compared to the section before and the section after. Also, all of my amps sims were freeware plugins (LePou and JS amp sim in reaper).

I hope you like it, and if there are things you don't, please let me know and why!

Draper

******V2******

Brought up a drum fill and brought the background ghosty mmmm's up a bit. Also put a leslie simulator on them.

For better?

Draper

V2...

Hi Draper ,
Welcome back cool mix ,sounds like your monitors are a little brighter than mine therefore you have tamed the top end more than I would have done as missing some top end of the cymbals and snare ,but I guess that's the mastering engineers job to compensate for different monitors ,the one thing that jumps out to me is the panned guitars come in at 1.33 maybe a touch upfront in context of the mix !

Cheers

Hi Draper,

It's nice to see that you've posted a mix,

I can agree with Don and his comments. The top end of the drums does seem to be overly compensated although their darker tone to suit the tone not the song generally.

I must say I love the creative direction you've gone for with this track and the contrasting elements throughout. This keeps the song quite engaging from start to finish. You have given this quite some thought!

Keep working on this Draper, I like where it's heading.

V3

Thank you Don and Dave for your comments, I tried to implement them the best I could when I got back to mixing this.

I made the whole second half more aggressive, to account for the loudness of the guitar in V2 that you were talking about. It makes more sense now, I believe, although I added an intentionally loud hit at the bridge section. . . but I don't know if it is too much?

I also brought up the high end of the drums a bit, and worked some things around, like my reverbs and such.

I hope this is an improvement!

Draper

Sounds better here !

Nice one