My, "Hold On You" (is tenuous)

[James May]

OK,
Considering the limited number of tracks involved here, this popular gem was more complicated than it appeared.

I took my primary key on this from the compression of the slide guitar, which for me, held the most flavor in the song. Since it had a a lot of delay with either a gate or a heavy handed razor blade at the end of the envelope, I ended up compressing the hell out of almost every other instrument. To my surprise, it seemed to work making it easier to place everything against the slide. I added very limited EQ to things to either bring out tone or to make the ensemble parts work tighter together. I buss'd the acoustic and electric guitars together and compressed the buss, placed the drums and the bass together in a buss and compressed that, and Glued the vocals down. The slide needed no more compression so I placed it into a big room so it would lay behind the vocals. In the mastering stage I added even more compression and gain with broad swipes of EQ to make it listen better at various levels.

Like I said, more complicated than it appeared.

I hope you enjoy it and will add your comments.

From your description, I was predisposed to thinking I wasn't going to like it due to all the compression. Instead, I feel that, for the most part, it works pretty well. The exception being the amount of compression on bass and drums, which seems to weaken their impact. I wonder how it would sound if you left everything else as is but made the bass and drums considerably more dynamic?