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#44 GOOB - Magician Like You - Printable Version

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#44 GOOB - Magician Like You - Deliza - 01-06-2019

Pretty conventional, people’d call this “vanilla mix”?. Already some impressive and release-ready mixes of this tune here, so I won't be the wiser but it was a pleasure to work with these tracks, these guys can play!

(100% reverb free by the way, that’s like moon landing for me) Yay or nay?



RE: #44 GOOB - Magician Like You - Dangerous - 01-06-2019

Sounds great Deliza! Love the bass sound, works in well with the guitar overtones. Well Done.


RE: #44 GOOB - Magician Like You - Deliza - 01-06-2019

Thanks, Dave. After a semi automated first balance (just to keep sections coherent with each other), I put my go-to tape plugin on every track and drove bass really hard with tape saturation. That was like 70% of the mix.


RE: #44 GOOB - Magician Like You - FytaKyte - 01-06-2019

Cool mix! In particular, I love the rhythm guitar sounds you got here - they way the high end and the mids are judged in them is really elegant.

The mix in general is very well balanced, with good control demonstrated all the way across the frequency spectrum.

I like the way you took Mike S's mix strategy with the distorted bass and made it your own. I'm a BIG fan of parallel distorted bass, but TBH I wasn't super-keen on how it was implemented in the preview mix (Sorry Mike! Smile). However, you've really managed to get a great tone in your mix, which I think works really well.

To answer your question about reverb (or lack thereof) - I think it works without it quite well, but personally, I think I would prefer to hear some, and I think the mix would benefit from some sort of ambient effects. In a punchy, raw song like this, sometimes the temptation to go too heavy handed on reverb and make it too "pretty" is an issue. If that's the case, sometimes delays can be a cool substitute. I like to think of delays as "excitement enhancers" rather than ambient effects, because they seem to really fill that role well. When automated strategically, I find they can almost subliminally inject excitement into key moments of the song without washing out the mix.

The only aspect of the mix that fell a bit flat for me was the guitar solo. Rather than taking over where the vocal left off as the main focus of the song, it tends to sound a little uneven and apologetic. I think impression might be exacerbated by the fact that it is panned too one side.

I like the way you handled the "busy-ness" of the outro by keeping the focus on the vocal by not overwhelming them with the improvisation.

Top stuff!


RE: #44 GOOB - Magician Like You - Deliza - 02-06-2019


(01-06-2019, 11:30 PM)FytaKyte Wrote: ...love the rhythm guitar sounds you got here - they way the high end and the mids are judged in them is really elegant.

80% was just panning, I'd say. There's very little EQ on those guitars, thou the mentioned tape simulation did some pretty difference. I guess the producer here tracked for the mix and I ain't got a problem with it!

(01-06-2019, 11:30 PM)FytaKyte Wrote: I like the way you took Mike S's mix strategy with the distorted bass and made it your own. I'm a BIG fan of parallel distorted bass, but...

Again, that came from pretty affordable but great ToneBoosters' ReelBus 4 tape emulator. So I wouldn't call it parallel distortion, just direct saturation, but I guessed it does the trick! A shame it's so CPU hungry for my humble i5.

Btw, was the preview mix Mike's, how'd you know? As a general suggestion, it'd be cool if Mike could say where the preview mix comes from, when he knows, obviously. I get the previews for the Telefunken multitracks come from the site itself but there are other times when I can't tell if it's just a rough mix or Mike's or maybe even the artist's "finished" product... it'd be nice to know.

(01-06-2019, 11:30 PM)FytaKyte Wrote: The only aspect of the mix that fell a bit flat for me was the guitar solo. Rather than taking over where the vocal left off as the main focus of the song, it tends to sound a little uneven and apologetic. I think impression might be exacerbated by the fact that it is panned too one side.

Yep, my first instinct was that (it's the most natural thing to do, after all) but there are times when I just wanna do the kind of things I hear in some of my favourite records even thou I'm not sure why would they do that! You know, like that too soft solo at the end of Wuthering Heights even the producer says he regrets and I've just come to love thru the years. Still, reasonably satisfied with that solo, I think it's the little riff panned center the weakest part, sounds like it's in a pipe or something and for some reason there was no DI track for it, curiously.

Thanks so much for the thougtful feedback, gracias!


RE: #44 GOOB - Magician Like You - FytaKyte - 02-06-2019

Quote:80% was just panning, I'd say. There's very little EQ on those guitars, thou the mentioned tape simulation did some pretty difference. I guess the producer here tracked for the mix and I ain't got a problem with it!

Knowing when to leave things alone is just as important as knowing how to "cleverly" fiddle with them!

Quote:So I wouldn't call it parallel distortion, just direct saturation, but I guessed it does the trick!


Ah, I was referring to how I approach bass distortion, which is almost always in parallel... And I think Mike did it that way too.

Quote:Btw, was the preview mix Mike's, how'd you know?

He did a feature article in it in Sound On Sound a while ago: https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/session-notes-magicians-nephew-big-drum-sound

Quote:Yep, my first instinct was that (it's the most natural thing to do, after all) but there are times when I just wanna do the kind of things I hear in some of my favourite records even thou I'm not sure why would they do that! You know, like that too soft solo at the end of Wuthering Heights even the producer says he regrets and I've just come to love thru the years. Still, reasonably satisfied with that solo, I think it's the little riff panned center the weakest part, sounds like it's in a pipe or something and for some reason there was no DI track for it, curiously

Yeah that guitar riff sound was weird - It sounded like a "big lead guitar" preset from an old digital multi fx pedal - I think I ended up high passing it pretty savagely and to get rid of the muddy verb, and then added even more delay to try to make it a bit more "epic".