Jay Menon:'Through My Eyes"

[daniel.tan]

The overall balance sounds a lot better to me The main balance issues I'm hearing now are with the bass guitar... it's eating up a lot of midrange content that other instruments, particularly the vocal, are wanting to occupy.

For the most part, your reverbs sound a bit better, too, but the ambience on the vocal is comb filtering the original signal, which is why you're having a hard time getting a nice sound. Basically it sounds like he's singing in a locker room or an untreated vocal booth, because the early reflections are almost instantaneous and very tonally similar to the main signal. Turn the reverb down a bit, up the predelay to maybe 50-60 ms, and lengthen the duration... and I'd highpass the reverb channel and give it a gentle high shelving cut.

If you mean the vocal on my mix... I used a gentle low shelving cut and a slight dip around 3000, and used a tape saturation emulator and a little compression to smooth it out a bit. There's a verb effect similar to the one I described to you and a subtle delay... they're both automated so that the levels don't cause frequency buildups when the mix gets busier. All of this is very, very subtle, though... the recording is excellent, so try and take it easy on the processing and I think you'll be surprised.

Much better, you're getting closer

Yup, third try! I fiddled with the reverb and put the voice upfront. I guess there is still a bit too much 200hz to 600 hz. I also added varying amounts of distortion to the guitars to keep their high mids in check and introduced parallel compression to the voice and bass guitar. I think I did it wrong for the bass cz the nuance are still not coming out and it's very unstable. Oya, and what did you do to the bass guitar just before the drums come in?

Oh, and for the kick, I Eq-ed it (using subtractive EQ of course!) to let a bit of the 110ish to come out to differentiate it from the bass and increased attack of the compressor to increase the transient. I sent it to a different reverb unit and adjusted the delay so that it will sound further back. I tweaked the predelay though, so I dont know if the mix is still disjointed.

Just to check, is the bass guitar still masking the voice very badly?

cheero!