15-01-2015, 03:24 PM
(This post was last modified: 16-11-2015, 11:44 PM by The_Metallurgist.)
Greetings, gang!
Some mix notes and general observations (only for those who might be interested):
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My vision was primarily directed at several angles. I've explored sonic textures, depth and stereo imagery in an effort to make it more engaging generally. There's a significant amount of mutes, some subtle, some less so, to clear what i felt wasn't contributing to the delivery of the lyric and help make the remaining elements deliver the song with a more concerted focus. I felt the verses were as-originally arranged, more eventful than the chorus sections and I had a need to try and address this in order to make the choruses more embracing as one would expect normally.
The first 10 seconds of a song is crucial....miss this opportunity to engage your audience, and they will disappear most likely never to be seen again. This was my attempt at capturing the audience with the materials and time i had available. It then runs (with a distortion overlay to present the "...colours saturate my mind") into a heavily treated Rhodes. The trick here was to get the audience's ear to adjust to the timbre. As luck would have it, i had the perfect 20 second space to do so, before bringing in the BGtr etc and a fuller, more emotional sound scape. The BGtr had been muted up to this point, for example. The revised sparse arrangement during those 20 seconds also helps to focus attention on the lyrics and to set the scene. The kick and overheads were muted here incidentally, as was the LGtr.
There's a synth running @3:10, but i've applied some gating techniques to give it some rhythmic character and to make a break. It's then fed through a Moog filter, with an LFO to give it some movement and personality. I don't normally talk gear here, but some might find this kind of approach of interest.
The snare tracking suffered timbre contamination from the snare's 'bleed' in the OH's, so i side chained and ducked the OH mid channel at the snare's fundamental frequency to keep it out of the way without interfering with the cymbals in the stereo field. Talking of OH's...there's a horrible ear-bleeding frequency that's buried here (i think it might have been this in Sede's mix which i could hear but couldn't localise at the time of my feedback - sorry mate!). It wasn't possible to remove it entirely because of all it's harmonics, but i managed to clear the worst without losing the treble too much, unfortunately though, i can still hear it AND feel it!!!! The hi-hat got me irritated though (as a listener/audience participant...oh, and as a mixer!). It lacked rhythm, was repetitive, and had a frequency response that bored deep into my psyche - the sort of thing that can drive people insane? I messed with it, but have to admit the drums in the chorus sections were...ummmm.....missing something?
I cut the song short at 3:40 with some edits. I honestly didn't want to hear another burst of "IT'S MUCH TOO BRIGHT", etc etc. and felt the song had delivered it's goods by this point anyway.
The Rhodes was great fun to mess around with because of all the options it offered spectrally. High passing it at around 600Hz gives the blippy stuff and a chance to feed this into some stereo delays for a bit of mischief. They are quite difficult to control dynamically, but i found dynamic EQ to be the only effective solution - static EQ would simply screw up the treble. Low passing it at this value, and brutally shaping the outcome also has some great sonic scope too......
The pitched vocal 'dual tracking' (with it's own bag of FX possibilities, again exploited) was my inner voice telling me to do it, so i went with my intuition - I always go with it, but sometimes my logic wants to argue! Yeah, i know it's a taste thing and you can't please everyone all of the time..but as it was my mix and a playground to explore without a Brief or A&R over my shoulders, then why not, eh?
The benefit of being different is that it makes the song stand out in an over-crowded market - hopefully for the right reasons :/
Last but not least, the vocal. The frequency response was weird, like the guitar amp mic' was pulled in for the role? Given a vocal is THE KEY to a song [in most cases], i'd expect the vocal to be given priority Quality tracking, but if you are a guitarist, then guitars are king right? My approach was a two-way tone, with a fuller delivery in the verses, but allowing a distorted and edgy mix for the chorus with the BV's helping to keep some sonic perspective (i.e. not edgy). The breathers were edited out. I think i remember the vocal tracking had a high noise floor? And best not talk about sibilance (which also impacted the eff's).
Loudness: It was Mastered to -13.4 LUFS integrated. No compression was used in the Master Buss, except for a tape emu running into a limiter. The limiter was soft-knee'd at -5dB and didn't show gain reduction - but i did blink now and again! I did some additional processing (well, it is a Master, right?) but i'll spare you the details...
Thanks for listening and for any comments (i'll take subjective ones too, OK?), and especially to those of you who pulled the wav and gladly suffered the inconvenience for the benefit of hearing 100 percent of my mix instead of only around 25 percent after being mauled by a codec! Thanks for your respect.
---------------
update:
removed the link to the 16 bit wav.
Some mix notes and general observations (only for those who might be interested):
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My vision was primarily directed at several angles. I've explored sonic textures, depth and stereo imagery in an effort to make it more engaging generally. There's a significant amount of mutes, some subtle, some less so, to clear what i felt wasn't contributing to the delivery of the lyric and help make the remaining elements deliver the song with a more concerted focus. I felt the verses were as-originally arranged, more eventful than the chorus sections and I had a need to try and address this in order to make the choruses more embracing as one would expect normally.
The first 10 seconds of a song is crucial....miss this opportunity to engage your audience, and they will disappear most likely never to be seen again. This was my attempt at capturing the audience with the materials and time i had available. It then runs (with a distortion overlay to present the "...colours saturate my mind") into a heavily treated Rhodes. The trick here was to get the audience's ear to adjust to the timbre. As luck would have it, i had the perfect 20 second space to do so, before bringing in the BGtr etc and a fuller, more emotional sound scape. The BGtr had been muted up to this point, for example. The revised sparse arrangement during those 20 seconds also helps to focus attention on the lyrics and to set the scene. The kick and overheads were muted here incidentally, as was the LGtr.
There's a synth running @3:10, but i've applied some gating techniques to give it some rhythmic character and to make a break. It's then fed through a Moog filter, with an LFO to give it some movement and personality. I don't normally talk gear here, but some might find this kind of approach of interest.
The snare tracking suffered timbre contamination from the snare's 'bleed' in the OH's, so i side chained and ducked the OH mid channel at the snare's fundamental frequency to keep it out of the way without interfering with the cymbals in the stereo field. Talking of OH's...there's a horrible ear-bleeding frequency that's buried here (i think it might have been this in Sede's mix which i could hear but couldn't localise at the time of my feedback - sorry mate!). It wasn't possible to remove it entirely because of all it's harmonics, but i managed to clear the worst without losing the treble too much, unfortunately though, i can still hear it AND feel it!!!! The hi-hat got me irritated though (as a listener/audience participant...oh, and as a mixer!). It lacked rhythm, was repetitive, and had a frequency response that bored deep into my psyche - the sort of thing that can drive people insane? I messed with it, but have to admit the drums in the chorus sections were...ummmm.....missing something?
I cut the song short at 3:40 with some edits. I honestly didn't want to hear another burst of "IT'S MUCH TOO BRIGHT", etc etc. and felt the song had delivered it's goods by this point anyway.
The Rhodes was great fun to mess around with because of all the options it offered spectrally. High passing it at around 600Hz gives the blippy stuff and a chance to feed this into some stereo delays for a bit of mischief. They are quite difficult to control dynamically, but i found dynamic EQ to be the only effective solution - static EQ would simply screw up the treble. Low passing it at this value, and brutally shaping the outcome also has some great sonic scope too......
The pitched vocal 'dual tracking' (with it's own bag of FX possibilities, again exploited) was my inner voice telling me to do it, so i went with my intuition - I always go with it, but sometimes my logic wants to argue! Yeah, i know it's a taste thing and you can't please everyone all of the time..but as it was my mix and a playground to explore without a Brief or A&R over my shoulders, then why not, eh?
The benefit of being different is that it makes the song stand out in an over-crowded market - hopefully for the right reasons :/Last but not least, the vocal. The frequency response was weird, like the guitar amp mic' was pulled in for the role? Given a vocal is THE KEY to a song [in most cases], i'd expect the vocal to be given priority Quality tracking, but if you are a guitarist, then guitars are king right? My approach was a two-way tone, with a fuller delivery in the verses, but allowing a distorted and edgy mix for the chorus with the BV's helping to keep some sonic perspective (i.e. not edgy). The breathers were edited out. I think i remember the vocal tracking had a high noise floor? And best not talk about sibilance (which also impacted the eff's).
Loudness: It was Mastered to -13.4 LUFS integrated. No compression was used in the Master Buss, except for a tape emu running into a limiter. The limiter was soft-knee'd at -5dB and didn't show gain reduction - but i did blink now and again! I did some additional processing (well, it is a Master, right?) but i'll spare you the details...
Thanks for listening and for any comments (i'll take subjective ones too, OK?), and especially to those of you who pulled the wav and gladly suffered the inconvenience for the benefit of hearing 100 percent of my mix instead of only around 25 percent after being mauled by a codec! Thanks for your respect.
---------------
update:
removed the link to the 16 bit wav.
Beware...........Cognitive Dissonance!