Colour Me Red @ The Wild-Eyed Sinner's Ball

[Mixinthecloud]

Just had a listen to your v4 mix -- originally downloaded the v3 one, but just saw you had a new version posted so checked the latest version out instead! Another nice alternative perspective here, focusing more on rich-sounding guitars and deep LF power from the kick. Actually, I wondered whether you might be a guitarist yourself, because you've brought out such a lot of nice tones from those instruments here. For the most part I like your balance decisions too (especially during the main riff), although I do wonder whether the clean guitars in the Mid-section are too loud and full-sounding in context -- I kind of lose focus on the vocal as a listener, and it also slightly undermines the illusion of power and rhythmic energy in the rest of the band. Another couple of things that also feel a bit far forward for me are the banjo transients in Verse 3/4 and the overall level of the backing vocals -- again both tend to make the rest of the backing parts sound subjectively less impressive by contrast for me.

The drum sound has a nice blend to it, which I like, but I'd maybe query the snare sound, which seems very dependent on the instrument's sustain, with very little front-end on the hits. My problem's less a pure sonic thing, it's more that it seems to make the groove lag, to my ears. The bass guitar recordings on the multitrack are quite light on the subs, so I also can see why you decided to let the kick-drum dominate that realm in your mix, but again this seems to slow things down somehow. Personally, I think a little EQ on the bass to give it more fundamental would have allowed you to keep the kick a touch more perky in terms of groove. (In fact, speaking of groove: has your vocal part shifted a fraction early on the timeline? Again, there's just something that feels a little shaky about the groove in your version compared with the others I've heard.)

Your arrangement changes are bold (which is always an endearing quality in my eyes!), and I like the way you shorten the intro to get to the lyrics more quickly, as this is often a canny move on a commercial level. I also like the way the band entry isn't exactly in tempo with the opening SFX section -- it leaves that moment of feeling like I'm 'holding my breath' just before the band arrives, which I often like. My only concern about the intro is that it's such a statement sonically that the actually band entry ends up sounding almost a bit of a let-down! If that's also a concern for you, then maybe you could try limiting the bandwidth and/or the stereo picture of the initial modulation effect? The outro is also a cool innovation, although from a musical perspective I did ask myself whether it might not be overkill to repeat the riff section further, given how often it appears in the rest of the song anyway. I agree it's a cool riff, though, and I could certainly listen to it all day myself -- but I'm a mix engineer, so I'm not sure how well I represent the regular punter in that respect!

Thanks for presenting another thought-provoking vision -- it's a mind-expanding business this mix critiquing!

How embarrassing. Mike, you were spot on. My vocal track was just slightly offset after my arrangement hacks. How embarrassing! Your other thoughts are excellent as well. I will address (or attempt to address them) in Version 5. Again, thanks so much for your input. One note on your comment about the bass guitar content. So many of the tracks needed content filtered in the fundamental area of the bass in the song. Not sure if that is an artifact of the recording space, or the actual content of the instruments. Regardless of the cause, that range needed some heavy dealing. When it was sucked out of the rest of the instruments, that part of the bass just stood out way to predominantly. Looking at the spectral content of the bass showed some serious combing which was dealt with by two hi-q filters to clean up. I may have over-reacted to this resonant range and once I backed it out a bit after your suggestion, the bass lived much happier ever-after.