Discussion Zone

cool arrangement, loving the outro

all comments are welcome

Hi vovolan, you missed the first words of the song "well I...". Apart from general the balances between the elements seem pretty good.

However, the micro-dynamics of the song are getting lost, and as a result, it gives the impression of being over-compressed. It might not actually have a lot of compression happening, but because the compression seems to have too fast an attack and too slow release, all the transient punch and "up-frontness" of the mix is being lost and everything sounds "compacted".

The guitars also seem to have additional distortion added to them, which seems surplus to requirements, as they were recorded with the intended amount. This further gives the impression of dynamic "flatness".

I would suggest looking at the time-constant controls on your compressors to see if you can retain more of the micro-dynamics of the track.

Now that I'm listening to it again after some time I think it's an ok-mediocre mix. I kinda killed the drums in this one, it's too midrangy and overall the dynamics feel weird so I need to agree with your here. 

Not trying to defend myself here as I said I agree but just wanted to refer to what you said

Quote:because the compression seems to have too fast an attack and too slow release

Interesting insight; To be honest I'm a fan of 1176 set to 1-7 doing about 2-3db for pretty much everything and then using the compressor on ssl channel which I believe doesn't go lower than 100ms release time; So I definitely will try messing around with some other options in my future mixes

Quote:The guitars also seem to have additional distortion added to them, which seems surplus to requirements

Nothing on them really, they're getting a tiny bit of saturation on the master along with everything else but that's about it. I think maybe it's the aggressive midrange that gives that impression

Thanks for listening and taking the time to leave a comment

Hi,

A few possible ideas for compression options -

I find 1176 style comp can sometimes work really well on drums, and is great on rock vocals. It's pretty fast though, and can sometimes kill too much of the transients, which might be happening if you are putting it before the channel comp. I find the 1176 perhaps works better on a parallel bus. The SSL channel 100ms release time is pretty much ideal for adding punch to drums though. I think the 'slow' attack time is 30ms, ideal for letting the transient through. Although I no longer use an SSL channel plugin, I found the thing to watch is the compressor autogain. Also sometimes the threshold doesn't go quite as low as you want, depending on gainstaging. I prefer either using an SSL bus style comp set to 30ms attack / 100ms release, or pretty much any general compressor set to 30ms attack / 100ms release. DBX style compression can sometimes work well on bass, or kick parallel. As ever, YMMV.

Cheers!