Patrick T - Blue (Metallurgist)

[ptalbot]

So I've spent some time listening to this mix again and again, trying to make up my mind about it and trying to listen to it as objectively as I could (which of course is impossible, but the exercise was interesting anyway!).
As I said, I'm dead impressed by it and have great admiration for what you did.

I've come to the conclusion that I love it - with a few objections that I will list below.

Of course all of these objections are only artistic, there's no doubt to me that you know your stuff and that the tone, balance and levels all make sense as a mix, so I will not even discuss that (I would be very hard pressed to find any fault anyway, it's well known that I don't have golden ears! )

I should cite first all the things that are so right about this mix, like the great tones of the guitar, the vocal treatment in general, the great drum sound, all the little ear candies that work so well, but the list would be too long and I know you're confident enough not to need any praise from me!

Here are the things that don't work for me:

- the radio announcement at the beginning. Honestly, I hate it, it's spoiling the song for me in a cheap way.
I can understand that you want to advertise your work but I really wonder how this sounds without it...

- the delays in the verses are overbearing. You said not to judge on that, but it's hard to make abstraction of them. They are rather distracting at times. IMHO they change the mood of the song from dreamy to trippy, which is a valid mood in itself but possibly not the one that the song was meant to convey?
A musician friend of mine who listened to your mix reflected that it was a bit like "taking a boeuf bourguignon and making a curry with it" (sic). - I think it's pretty apt, and as much as I love curry, being French, what I did cook was a boeuf bourguignon, so I do think there's too much spices in your remix: too much delays, or rather too distracting delays. I do think that they could work very well with lighter touches, like adding only a pinch of curcuma and a few leaves of coriander would give some exotic flavours without overpowering the dish... (sorry about the culinary metaphor but I think it gives a good sense of what I mean)

- I really love the suspense on the "I see her in..... blue" (your middle 8! )
The only problem I have with it is that the timing of the "blue" word is slightly wrong, it's falling in between beats in a weird way, and if that's the surprise you were after, I think it falls short, being clunky because of that timing issue. Ideally I would have placed it on a beat, possibly on the drums fill that starts the song back... Right now there is something musically incorrect in its placement IMHO, and that's bothering me.

- I like the organ addition, that's a cool idea, but I think the distortion on it is overcooked and not welcomed. I would have tried a softer sound, perhaps something like a circus organ, one of those old organs that you can hear in fairs on a roundabout, this would have gone a lot better with the theme as well...

- The ending is fantastic, truly, I love how the bgvs swirl and how everything kind of melts into reverb and modulated delays, and the transformation of the drum into that effected rhythmic pattern in the background, all of that is clever and sounds amazing! The only issue I have is of timing/lost opportunity: the last "my little girl's blue" from the lead would have been perfect if it had coincided with the last repeat of the swirling bgvs of "my little, my little, my little"... on that last "my little", it would have felt perfect to my ears.

So overall, these are the kind of things I would have objected to, if I was 'the client'...
Of course this is not the case, and the fact that you have made this song yours, in such a way, kind of invalidates my objections anyway... But I needed to express them nonetheless, perhaps you will want to take some of them into account?

In any case, you did a master job, and I thank you again for this great version that showed me some aspects of the song and of the mixing process that didn't occurred to me before.

Cheers,
-Patrick