24-03-2019, 10:14 PM
I enjoy this song. There's a wonderful amount of contrasting instrumentation from the artist between the different sections of the song. I've taken a somewhat conservative approach to mixing it - I'm not smashing everything with a hammer, and I'm not trying to force the song to be something it's not. There's some great tracks recorded, and I wanted to flesh them out and enhance what's there. I wanted to make something balanced well enough to be played on the radio, but to also give it a little tasteful embellishment here and there that draws in the listener's attention, and rewards repeat listening. I really like the verses; I was hoping to give them enough gloss to make them feel magical. I wanted to give them nuance, and a space and texture you could feel... to take you away to another place, inside the music. Hopefully I've created that magic for you as well.
Technical details: There's so many wonderful options to choose from with all the extra tracks that were recorded. There was no sound replacement. No reamping. No vocal tuning. There's a healthy amount of compression on many tracks and busses to glue things together. There's some expansion to clean out the dirt on a couple of troublesome tracks. There's a lot of automation on the guitars and vocals. I'm weaving back and forth the balance between guitars quite heavily. Almost everything was done in the box. There's a little bit of outboard: KickMic1 through a DBX 160X, and the stereo overheads have parallel compression via a Valley People (International) Dynamite. There's keyed expansion from the snare on the room mics as well as the Dynamite. In total, I'd estimate I've spent 20 - 25 hours on this. I do wonder what the artist was doing when recording ElecGtr03, as while everything else is great, this track is pretty poorly recorded. Since the track is soloed at the beginning of the first verse, it's a challenge to push it (and the song) to where it needs to go.
To be honest, I'm not 100% happy with version of my mix (only 95%), but a waterline broke in my house last week and I will be dealing with the demolition and reconstruction for next month or two, so I won't have much more time to work on this. The remaining 5% of changes I want to make probably aren't of much substance anyway.
I haven't made any attempt at mastering this, so you may want to apply your choice of multiband compression etc. when listening.
How do you like this? Anyone have suggestions about how I can take this to the next level?
Thanks for taking the time to listen.
Chris
Technical details: There's so many wonderful options to choose from with all the extra tracks that were recorded. There was no sound replacement. No reamping. No vocal tuning. There's a healthy amount of compression on many tracks and busses to glue things together. There's some expansion to clean out the dirt on a couple of troublesome tracks. There's a lot of automation on the guitars and vocals. I'm weaving back and forth the balance between guitars quite heavily. Almost everything was done in the box. There's a little bit of outboard: KickMic1 through a DBX 160X, and the stereo overheads have parallel compression via a Valley People (International) Dynamite. There's keyed expansion from the snare on the room mics as well as the Dynamite. In total, I'd estimate I've spent 20 - 25 hours on this. I do wonder what the artist was doing when recording ElecGtr03, as while everything else is great, this track is pretty poorly recorded. Since the track is soloed at the beginning of the first verse, it's a challenge to push it (and the song) to where it needs to go.
To be honest, I'm not 100% happy with version of my mix (only 95%), but a waterline broke in my house last week and I will be dealing with the demolition and reconstruction for next month or two, so I won't have much more time to work on this. The remaining 5% of changes I want to make probably aren't of much substance anyway.
I haven't made any attempt at mastering this, so you may want to apply your choice of multiband compression etc. when listening.
How do you like this? Anyone have suggestions about how I can take this to the next level?
Thanks for taking the time to listen.
Chris