18-01-2019, 11:27 PM
Hi Darek -- and thanks for delivering one of the most creatively rearranged mixes so far! Before I talk any further about that aspect of the production, though, let's get the engineering side out of the way, because there's not too much to say there. Basically I find the overall tonality, balance, and sonics of this mix pretty appealing. There's a satisfying width and space to the sound, and the vocal levels are nice and solid -- although there's still a little scope for improvement there in terms of mitigating some of the tonal variations in his voice, especially where he switches to falsetto in the choruses. The bass guitar and kick seem to share the low end in a friendly way, although I did wonder whether the kick could be a bit louder overall, in order to balance against the bass guitar and snare a little more evenly. The bass comes through reasonably well on small speakers too, which is good. As with many competition entries, the ride-cymbal stick noise is a little overbearing in the Mid-section, and I also wondered whether the hi-hat might be a bit aggressive in the 6-8kHz zone. Overall, though, the engineering side of things is really pretty solid.
The more interesting point of discussion apart from that, though, is your arrangement decisions. On the one hand, I whole-heartedly applaud your willingness to engage so deeply with this element of the production, and I liked a lot of your ideas in their own right. (That hand-drum roll at the end of Verse 1 is fabulous, for instance!) But on the other hand, I have a number of concerns with some of the choices you've made. The main thing for me is that the brief here is to do a mix that will win over Hannes himself -- and by extension his band too, given that he and his band are a pretty close-knit group. Fundamentally, Hannes has given his implicit seal of approval to the performances and sounds on the multitrack by delivering it for mixdown, and I think that puts a certain amount of responsibility on the mix engineer to make the most of those sounds where possible. (Indeed, I often think mixdown is often simply a way of reminding the band what they originally loved about their own recording, when they've long-since forgotten on account of playing their own rough mix to death!) Within this context, I think you have to be prepared to give Hannes a clear rationale for each and every arrangement change that you make, because if you rely on a purely aesthetic justification (ie. 'I just thought it sounded cooler that way') you're effectively implying that you could have composed his music better than him. Now, I don't know whether you actually do feel that way, but when you're mixing to a brief like this, and the artist is the client, then you have to try to view it through the artist's eyes.
Now, I realise this is all a bit abstract, so let me bring it down to a concrete example: your added piano part. When that first arrives, in Verse 1, it's placed much more prominently in the mix than the existing rhythm guitar part. I think it's fair to say, based on many of the other mixes here in the Discussion Zone, that there's no absolute need for an added piano part at that moment in the song -- there's plenty of fresh and appealing musical material in the bass, drums, and guitars to sustain the listener's interest at least until Verse 2. So by adding a completely new (and quite prominent) part which changes the character of that opening verse, you're kind of saying to Hannes that "you should have written your verse like this, not the way you originally wrote it", and also that (since the piano's louder than the existing rhythm guitar) "your idea of what should be accompanying the vocal is less good than mine". As such, I could easily see Hannes (or his guitarist!) being a bit offended on hearing this mix for the first time, and that's not an easy first impression to come back from!
Don't get me wrong, I quite like some aspects of your piano part (particularly the gently understated sonic character of the patch you've dialled up), but I'd have used it in such a way that I could justify its use in more concrete terms. So, for instance, if you'd only brought it in for Verse 2, there would have been a strong reason for it to appear there: namely, that it helps increase the arrangement's performance energy for Verse 2 by expanding the arrangement (which otherwise would be pretty much identical to Verse 1). As long as you'd made Verse 1 sound great using Hannes's existing tracks up to that point, then the addition of the piano in Verse 2 would cast fewer aspersions on the quality of those pre-existing parts. If the piano then audibly succeeds in its job of improving the intensity of the arrangement for Verse 2, and you can say "I'd have used one of your parts to do this job, had there been something in your multitrack that arrived in Verse 2", then it becomes much more likely that Hannes will accept your addition, I think. It's a subtle shift in approach, but can make all the difference in terms of your relationship with the client.
In a similar vein, your piano and brass arrangements are frequently adding quite a lot of new harmony notes and dissonances into the chord sequence that weren't there in the original multitracks, and again I think that risks implying to Hannes that his chords are oversimplistic. Regardless of whether you personally feel that, I think it's pretty slim odds that Hannes will agree with you, and he's the client. In this case, I just think it's giving a real hostage to fortune if you're tampering with the song's harmonic material in this way.
Leaving those more philosophical discussions aside, though, there are also several practical problems you've made for yourself with your arrangement changes. The first is simply that there's so much going on at some points in the song (at the end of Verse 2, for example, or during Chorus 3) that the mix gets rather cluttered. This has two potentially undesirable consequences: firstly, that the singer gets rather overwhelmed, and the singer is the client; and secondly that you can't really appreciate many of the internal details of Hannes's pre-existing parts. As I said above, the easiest way to win over a band is by helping them to fall back in love with their own recordings, and it's the fills and expressive nuances that are usually the key to achieving this. If you overlay those details with other parts, then it not only loses you that opportunity to bring out such details, but also implies that those pre-existing parts aren't good enough to be foregrounded, and have to be concealed behind your new parts. (I realise I'm exaggerating this implication for the sake of explanation, but hopefully it's clear roughly what I'm getting at here.) Furthermore, in this specific production, the 'holes' in the bass part are such an important part of the rhythm groove, and your added layers are inevitably lessening the impact of those.
One of the reasons I think the arrangement is getting overloaded like this, is just that you're more inclined to add things to the arrangement than take them away, so the instruments tend to keep piling up until there's not enough room for them all to fit. For example, you could easily have stripped back the beginning of Verse 3 much further, because that musical material doesn't actually need too much arrangement development relative to Verse 2 -- the intervening Chorus and Reintro have already cleansed the listener's musical palette, so that the return of the Verse's musical material itself is arguably novelty enough. That would mean that you could be much more restrained with your brass arrangement, perhaps only bringing in the horns for that rather lovely swell you have transitioning into Chorus 2. (It's worth mentioning, though, that the horn patches you're using sound quite artificial, so I'd guess that whatever you do with those will struggle to find favour with Hannes. Although you couldn't know this, of course, he took the trouble to overdub live horns on several of the other songs I mixed for him, so he clearly cares about the realism of those kinds of sounds.)
Apologies for my rambling on for so long, but these less tangible issues of 'client psychology' are often the hardest things to explain in writing. Furthermore, I don't want the length of my response to imply that I hate what you've done. Far from it, in fact, because I'm delighted that you've given us all the opportunity to ponder so many new and inventive arrangement ideas. Indeed, I'm sure I won't be the only person listening to your mix who thinks "I wish I'd done that!" on at least a couple of occasions! Thanks for all your great work on this!
The more interesting point of discussion apart from that, though, is your arrangement decisions. On the one hand, I whole-heartedly applaud your willingness to engage so deeply with this element of the production, and I liked a lot of your ideas in their own right. (That hand-drum roll at the end of Verse 1 is fabulous, for instance!) But on the other hand, I have a number of concerns with some of the choices you've made. The main thing for me is that the brief here is to do a mix that will win over Hannes himself -- and by extension his band too, given that he and his band are a pretty close-knit group. Fundamentally, Hannes has given his implicit seal of approval to the performances and sounds on the multitrack by delivering it for mixdown, and I think that puts a certain amount of responsibility on the mix engineer to make the most of those sounds where possible. (Indeed, I often think mixdown is often simply a way of reminding the band what they originally loved about their own recording, when they've long-since forgotten on account of playing their own rough mix to death!) Within this context, I think you have to be prepared to give Hannes a clear rationale for each and every arrangement change that you make, because if you rely on a purely aesthetic justification (ie. 'I just thought it sounded cooler that way') you're effectively implying that you could have composed his music better than him. Now, I don't know whether you actually do feel that way, but when you're mixing to a brief like this, and the artist is the client, then you have to try to view it through the artist's eyes.
Now, I realise this is all a bit abstract, so let me bring it down to a concrete example: your added piano part. When that first arrives, in Verse 1, it's placed much more prominently in the mix than the existing rhythm guitar part. I think it's fair to say, based on many of the other mixes here in the Discussion Zone, that there's no absolute need for an added piano part at that moment in the song -- there's plenty of fresh and appealing musical material in the bass, drums, and guitars to sustain the listener's interest at least until Verse 2. So by adding a completely new (and quite prominent) part which changes the character of that opening verse, you're kind of saying to Hannes that "you should have written your verse like this, not the way you originally wrote it", and also that (since the piano's louder than the existing rhythm guitar) "your idea of what should be accompanying the vocal is less good than mine". As such, I could easily see Hannes (or his guitarist!) being a bit offended on hearing this mix for the first time, and that's not an easy first impression to come back from!
Don't get me wrong, I quite like some aspects of your piano part (particularly the gently understated sonic character of the patch you've dialled up), but I'd have used it in such a way that I could justify its use in more concrete terms. So, for instance, if you'd only brought it in for Verse 2, there would have been a strong reason for it to appear there: namely, that it helps increase the arrangement's performance energy for Verse 2 by expanding the arrangement (which otherwise would be pretty much identical to Verse 1). As long as you'd made Verse 1 sound great using Hannes's existing tracks up to that point, then the addition of the piano in Verse 2 would cast fewer aspersions on the quality of those pre-existing parts. If the piano then audibly succeeds in its job of improving the intensity of the arrangement for Verse 2, and you can say "I'd have used one of your parts to do this job, had there been something in your multitrack that arrived in Verse 2", then it becomes much more likely that Hannes will accept your addition, I think. It's a subtle shift in approach, but can make all the difference in terms of your relationship with the client.
In a similar vein, your piano and brass arrangements are frequently adding quite a lot of new harmony notes and dissonances into the chord sequence that weren't there in the original multitracks, and again I think that risks implying to Hannes that his chords are oversimplistic. Regardless of whether you personally feel that, I think it's pretty slim odds that Hannes will agree with you, and he's the client. In this case, I just think it's giving a real hostage to fortune if you're tampering with the song's harmonic material in this way.
Leaving those more philosophical discussions aside, though, there are also several practical problems you've made for yourself with your arrangement changes. The first is simply that there's so much going on at some points in the song (at the end of Verse 2, for example, or during Chorus 3) that the mix gets rather cluttered. This has two potentially undesirable consequences: firstly, that the singer gets rather overwhelmed, and the singer is the client; and secondly that you can't really appreciate many of the internal details of Hannes's pre-existing parts. As I said above, the easiest way to win over a band is by helping them to fall back in love with their own recordings, and it's the fills and expressive nuances that are usually the key to achieving this. If you overlay those details with other parts, then it not only loses you that opportunity to bring out such details, but also implies that those pre-existing parts aren't good enough to be foregrounded, and have to be concealed behind your new parts. (I realise I'm exaggerating this implication for the sake of explanation, but hopefully it's clear roughly what I'm getting at here.) Furthermore, in this specific production, the 'holes' in the bass part are such an important part of the rhythm groove, and your added layers are inevitably lessening the impact of those.
One of the reasons I think the arrangement is getting overloaded like this, is just that you're more inclined to add things to the arrangement than take them away, so the instruments tend to keep piling up until there's not enough room for them all to fit. For example, you could easily have stripped back the beginning of Verse 3 much further, because that musical material doesn't actually need too much arrangement development relative to Verse 2 -- the intervening Chorus and Reintro have already cleansed the listener's musical palette, so that the return of the Verse's musical material itself is arguably novelty enough. That would mean that you could be much more restrained with your brass arrangement, perhaps only bringing in the horns for that rather lovely swell you have transitioning into Chorus 2. (It's worth mentioning, though, that the horn patches you're using sound quite artificial, so I'd guess that whatever you do with those will struggle to find favour with Hannes. Although you couldn't know this, of course, he took the trouble to overdub live horns on several of the other songs I mixed for him, so he clearly cares about the realism of those kinds of sounds.)
Apologies for my rambling on for so long, but these less tangible issues of 'client psychology' are often the hardest things to explain in writing. Furthermore, I don't want the length of my response to imply that I hate what you've done. Far from it, in fact, because I'm delighted that you've given us all the opportunity to ponder so many new and inventive arrangement ideas. Indeed, I'm sure I won't be the only person listening to your mix who thinks "I wish I'd done that!" on at least a couple of occasions! Thanks for all your great work on this!