21-11-2016, 10:55 PM
Listened to you version three mix and you're got a nice cohesion on the drums here, plus I like the way they fit together with the electric guitars in particular. Certainly, the groove skips along very nicely, which is a good sign in terms of the balance of the rhythm section, and I like the gutsy attitude of the mix as a whole. Careful with the low end of the toms, though, which seems to boom out on that big fill at the end of Verse 4. As with a lot of the mixes for this multitrack, I reckon you might get a fuller low-end sound by adding more fundamental to the bass guitar, and I'd probably also cut a bit of 150-200Hz on the kick, bass, and/or electric guitars, where you're getting a frequency build-up that's making things seem a bit muddy.
The other culprit in terms of subjective muddiness, though, is the lead vocal, which seems very veiled tonally, especially by contrast with things like the cymbals, acoustic guitars, and banjo. A 2-3dB of EQ cut around 250Hz on the lead vocal would probably help straight away, I reckon, allowing you to pull the track up further in the balance for a more upfront overall effect. I also wonder whether some slightly more stereo effects might help glue it in with the wide drums/guitars better, as well as giving it a bit more of a sense of 'air'. A bit of a boost to the mix overall in the top octave of the spectrum might also open it up in general (I'd try at least 3-4dB up above 10 kHz, although you might want to rein in the acoustic guitar transients a little in that case, to avoid them sounding too plasticky.
I wonder whether you could make more of the clean guitar parts that arrive in the Mid-sections. At the moment they seem a little bit apologetic, where I think they could be a much more active source of arrangement variation and section definition. There also seems to be something slightly dissonant going on in this section too, and I wonder whether it's related to some processing on those parts or the Rhodes. Listen at 2:16, under "...taste, and everything's the..." -- it's like there's an E natural pitched resonance being added to that Cm chord somewhere, which feels odd. (I've quickly bounced this out for illustration, and I've also bounced out a version with a 656Hz notch that removes it, again just to illustrate what I'm hearing -- see the attachments to this post.)
Hope some of that's helpful, and thanks for posting!
The other culprit in terms of subjective muddiness, though, is the lead vocal, which seems very veiled tonally, especially by contrast with things like the cymbals, acoustic guitars, and banjo. A 2-3dB of EQ cut around 250Hz on the lead vocal would probably help straight away, I reckon, allowing you to pull the track up further in the balance for a more upfront overall effect. I also wonder whether some slightly more stereo effects might help glue it in with the wide drums/guitars better, as well as giving it a bit more of a sense of 'air'. A bit of a boost to the mix overall in the top octave of the spectrum might also open it up in general (I'd try at least 3-4dB up above 10 kHz, although you might want to rein in the acoustic guitar transients a little in that case, to avoid them sounding too plasticky.
I wonder whether you could make more of the clean guitar parts that arrive in the Mid-sections. At the moment they seem a little bit apologetic, where I think they could be a much more active source of arrangement variation and section definition. There also seems to be something slightly dissonant going on in this section too, and I wonder whether it's related to some processing on those parts or the Rhodes. Listen at 2:16, under "...taste, and everything's the..." -- it's like there's an E natural pitched resonance being added to that Cm chord somewhere, which feels odd. (I've quickly bounced this out for illustration, and I've also bounced out a version with a 656Hz notch that removes it, again just to illustrate what I'm hearing -- see the attachments to this post.)
Hope some of that's helpful, and thanks for posting!