Interesting trick, using a bandwidth limited ducker. Gonna have to remember that one.
I think the bass here has a little mud in it that could stand to go away, but otherwise, I think this is a reasonable mix.
About the mic spill... When I attacked this track, I was in a "let's see if I can make spill work *for* me instead of against me" mode and generally didn't try to do much to reduce spill nearly as much as I would have otherwise. Rather than trying to isolate each sound, I rather tried to bring out what was best about it and let the rest of the sound be. I also left the mix slightly thin in the low-mids to try to keep the live ambiance so I focused. I actually felt like the engineers on this one did a pretty good job of getting good, workable tracks. So it can be done. You just have to approach it from the right perspective.
As I was mixing this, I pictured the band in an outdoor venue sorta half way between a proper festival grounds and one of them terraced amphitheater sort of things that somehow manage to not work for anyone using them and focused on getting that sort of natural concrete echo from behind the band (think of it as if they were perched in a somewhat sunken concrete nook in a roped off section of a shopping mall parking lot) but also with a decent amount of open space. Above all, I wanted it to be clear this was a live track and that's where the spill can really help you by inadvertently capturing a good room sound just by themselves. My main issue with the way it was put together was that I often wanted more of the room sound than I could reasonably get with the room mics and more crowd sounds which simply weren't captured (partly because it sounds like there was less of a crowd than the artist deserved.) By the time I was done mixing, this track had really grown on me. It's just an excellent performance by guys who clearly have far more talent than I do.
I think the bass here has a little mud in it that could stand to go away, but otherwise, I think this is a reasonable mix.
About the mic spill... When I attacked this track, I was in a "let's see if I can make spill work *for* me instead of against me" mode and generally didn't try to do much to reduce spill nearly as much as I would have otherwise. Rather than trying to isolate each sound, I rather tried to bring out what was best about it and let the rest of the sound be. I also left the mix slightly thin in the low-mids to try to keep the live ambiance so I focused. I actually felt like the engineers on this one did a pretty good job of getting good, workable tracks. So it can be done. You just have to approach it from the right perspective.
As I was mixing this, I pictured the band in an outdoor venue sorta half way between a proper festival grounds and one of them terraced amphitheater sort of things that somehow manage to not work for anyone using them and focused on getting that sort of natural concrete echo from behind the band (think of it as if they were perched in a somewhat sunken concrete nook in a roped off section of a shopping mall parking lot) but also with a decent amount of open space. Above all, I wanted it to be clear this was a live track and that's where the spill can really help you by inadvertently capturing a good room sound just by themselves. My main issue with the way it was put together was that I often wanted more of the room sound than I could reasonably get with the room mics and more crowd sounds which simply weren't captured (partly because it sounds like there was less of a crowd than the artist deserved.) By the time I was done mixing, this track had really grown on me. It's just an excellent performance by guys who clearly have far more talent than I do.
Old West Audio