25-07-2014, 05:33 PM
Hey Chris. I love the ambiance you've got going on here, and you've done a commendable job dealing with all of the string noise on the acoustic guitars. There is a very warm quality to your ambiance effects, especially on the vocals, and I think it suits this genre of music very well.
To my ears, there are a few opportunities for improvement here. It sounds to me like you may have mixed the lead vocal close to the end of your early balancing chores, because it sounds a bit underprominent in my opinion. The challenge in this song is that the tracks as presented are very tonally dark, but as this song is so reminiscent of grunge greats like Stone Temple Pilots and Alice in Chains, an -overall- dark tonality is suitable... so should we brighten any of the tracks, and if so, which ones should we brighten?
In my very humble non-expert opinion, this mix would work better if the lead vocal, dulcimer, and drums were brighter in the mix. Now, that's not to say I think they should be tonally bright... a dark tonality is good for music like this, but I think they should be brighter than everything else. The acoustic guitars as well would benefit from a bit more brightness to help them "cut" and allow some more definition.
It's been a few weeks since I completed my first draft on this mix and I haven't yet attempted to work it, but based on my memory and what I'm hearing right now, there are a few fixes that come to mind... you mentioned you were using SRH840s to judge the low end of your mix. This is just my opinion, and I'm sure you have yours... but I really doubt they're giving you an accurate picture of what's going on in the low end, at least anything below 150-200. Very few headphones are going to be able to do that, and the low end is pretty saturated here. In particular, there's quite a bit more low end on the acoustics than you really need giving that the bass for this mix is extremely frequency hungry. Low shelving cuts on the acoustic guitars and electric guitars after any compression you might be using will really clean this up in my opinion, and the mix will sound a lot less congested... and the guitars themselves will have considerably more definition! Another thing to consider about headphones that I've only recently learned myself... if the output impedance of your audio intereface (are amp, or whatever is feeding signal into the headphones) is any more than 1/8 the input impedance of your headphones, you really can't trust anything you're hearing outside of the very center of the frequency spectrum, because this creates potentially serious distortion in frequency output.
This is just based on a quick listen, but it also sounds like any compression you're using on the vocal is responding very powerfully to the 'plosives that result from close miking, which could very well be flattening the frequency reponse and preventing you from getting enough in the all important mids, which is going to damage clarity and intelligibility of the lyrics. And in this case, the vocal isn't cutting through. A few possible fixes come to mind: you can split up the track and use short fades to minimize the impact of the plosives and sibilants, as well as somewhat more aggressively highpass before compression. In my opinion, you should -always- high pass before compression. Post compression low shelving cuts followed by nudging the fader up a bit to compensate for the loss of volume will also help brighten the track up without any phasey tonal coloration you might incur will boosting... although sometimes that coloration sounds quite nice to my ears. Also, there is a very short delay on the vocal however that's causing comb filtering with the dry signal, which may be hurting the cut factor as well. Lengthening the delay time will help, and low-passing the send return will psychoacoustically catapult the vocal up front in the mix.
Final thing I'm hearing is that the mix as a whole sounds too squashed. It's possible that cleaning up the low end will solve this problem right off the bat, since the compressor with it's current settings won't be reacting as strongly when the low frequency content isn't driving it so hard, though I'd recommend turning off any master-bus compression you might be using while making EQ adjustments. Dialing down the gain reduction, as well as aggressively slowing the attack times down, would also be a good idea. If neither of these helps with the congestion, you may have to try the same on compression inserts, especially the buss compressors that are working on big chunks of the mix.
Just my opinions! Enjoyed listening.. I'll check out some of your other stuff soon
To my ears, there are a few opportunities for improvement here. It sounds to me like you may have mixed the lead vocal close to the end of your early balancing chores, because it sounds a bit underprominent in my opinion. The challenge in this song is that the tracks as presented are very tonally dark, but as this song is so reminiscent of grunge greats like Stone Temple Pilots and Alice in Chains, an -overall- dark tonality is suitable... so should we brighten any of the tracks, and if so, which ones should we brighten?
In my very humble non-expert opinion, this mix would work better if the lead vocal, dulcimer, and drums were brighter in the mix. Now, that's not to say I think they should be tonally bright... a dark tonality is good for music like this, but I think they should be brighter than everything else. The acoustic guitars as well would benefit from a bit more brightness to help them "cut" and allow some more definition.
It's been a few weeks since I completed my first draft on this mix and I haven't yet attempted to work it, but based on my memory and what I'm hearing right now, there are a few fixes that come to mind... you mentioned you were using SRH840s to judge the low end of your mix. This is just my opinion, and I'm sure you have yours... but I really doubt they're giving you an accurate picture of what's going on in the low end, at least anything below 150-200. Very few headphones are going to be able to do that, and the low end is pretty saturated here. In particular, there's quite a bit more low end on the acoustics than you really need giving that the bass for this mix is extremely frequency hungry. Low shelving cuts on the acoustic guitars and electric guitars after any compression you might be using will really clean this up in my opinion, and the mix will sound a lot less congested... and the guitars themselves will have considerably more definition! Another thing to consider about headphones that I've only recently learned myself... if the output impedance of your audio intereface (are amp, or whatever is feeding signal into the headphones) is any more than 1/8 the input impedance of your headphones, you really can't trust anything you're hearing outside of the very center of the frequency spectrum, because this creates potentially serious distortion in frequency output.
This is just based on a quick listen, but it also sounds like any compression you're using on the vocal is responding very powerfully to the 'plosives that result from close miking, which could very well be flattening the frequency reponse and preventing you from getting enough in the all important mids, which is going to damage clarity and intelligibility of the lyrics. And in this case, the vocal isn't cutting through. A few possible fixes come to mind: you can split up the track and use short fades to minimize the impact of the plosives and sibilants, as well as somewhat more aggressively highpass before compression. In my opinion, you should -always- high pass before compression. Post compression low shelving cuts followed by nudging the fader up a bit to compensate for the loss of volume will also help brighten the track up without any phasey tonal coloration you might incur will boosting... although sometimes that coloration sounds quite nice to my ears. Also, there is a very short delay on the vocal however that's causing comb filtering with the dry signal, which may be hurting the cut factor as well. Lengthening the delay time will help, and low-passing the send return will psychoacoustically catapult the vocal up front in the mix.
Final thing I'm hearing is that the mix as a whole sounds too squashed. It's possible that cleaning up the low end will solve this problem right off the bat, since the compressor with it's current settings won't be reacting as strongly when the low frequency content isn't driving it so hard, though I'd recommend turning off any master-bus compression you might be using while making EQ adjustments. Dialing down the gain reduction, as well as aggressively slowing the attack times down, would also be a good idea. If neither of these helps with the congestion, you may have to try the same on compression inserts, especially the buss compressors that are working on big chunks of the mix.
Just my opinions! Enjoyed listening.. I'll check out some of your other stuff soon
I'm grateful for comments and suggestions. Thank you for listening!