Okay, so here is my version of this tune.
It almost certainly needs additional tweaking (always seems to be the case, doesn't it?) but I've been working on this since Dec 27 and I'm tired of it so I'm going to post what I have to at least get some additional ears on it.
This was a hard mix. Two of the biggest problems aside from the sheer number of tracks and the problems that caused my DAW and figuring out ways to get around that, were that 350 Hz problem you always have to watch out for--really bad in this one--and the fact that most of the playing and singing was so reserved except for a few items that you wanted to be reserved which were instead in your face. It made it very hard to get things to separate the way they needed to.
A few other problems I encountered:
Inconsistent snare/kick made getting a good sound difficult. I ended up doing very heavy compression with a very aggressive attack.
The snare down mic was hard to work with because the snare drum itself seems to have had loose a loose snare lever. That little double slap you hear says to me that the snare actually came off the drum head and snapped back giving that double hit sound. I ended up using it anyway since in the mix and with reverb and delay added in, it wasn't really noticable.
The vocals, apart from the lead and the harmony to it, all required significant tuning but you have to be careful since some of the parts were octaves and doubles and getting those too closely aligned sucks tone and energy. While I was there, I also used melodyne to deal with timing problems on the backing vocals as well as sibilance and plossives on the lead lines since I wasn't happy with the way the deesser was working.
Apparently I can only have so many instances of waves plugins (combined among the whole category) before it starts to flip out. So I'd open a window and get just a white box with little or nothing in it. That made doing adjustments rather more difficult and forced me to use some of the bundled plugins where I didn't want to. Oh well.
To deal with the large number of tracks, I chose to process the BVOX into 7 stems in a separate editor session, loaded the basic stems into the main session so I could mix instruments, mixed that minus vocals down to load back into the other session so I could set panning and balance within the stem groups before moving them back into the primary session to do tone and automation. In hindsight, there was probably a better way to go about it but that was the first thing that came to mind. Basically, I thought that I wanted to try to avoid any instances of melodyne in the main session since that's got some serious overhead so I did that and compression in the BVOX session then, as noted, did EQ and everything else once they were imported into the main session. Live and learn...
ANYWAY enough rambling. Let me know what comments you have and I'll probably tweak it a bit over the next two weeks if I have time. (Spring session starts this next week so I'm about to be busy with audio classes again and won't have much time to mix. Another reason why I wanted to just post this and be done with it for a while.)
It almost certainly needs additional tweaking (always seems to be the case, doesn't it?) but I've been working on this since Dec 27 and I'm tired of it so I'm going to post what I have to at least get some additional ears on it.
This was a hard mix. Two of the biggest problems aside from the sheer number of tracks and the problems that caused my DAW and figuring out ways to get around that, were that 350 Hz problem you always have to watch out for--really bad in this one--and the fact that most of the playing and singing was so reserved except for a few items that you wanted to be reserved which were instead in your face. It made it very hard to get things to separate the way they needed to.
A few other problems I encountered:
Inconsistent snare/kick made getting a good sound difficult. I ended up doing very heavy compression with a very aggressive attack.
The snare down mic was hard to work with because the snare drum itself seems to have had loose a loose snare lever. That little double slap you hear says to me that the snare actually came off the drum head and snapped back giving that double hit sound. I ended up using it anyway since in the mix and with reverb and delay added in, it wasn't really noticable.
The vocals, apart from the lead and the harmony to it, all required significant tuning but you have to be careful since some of the parts were octaves and doubles and getting those too closely aligned sucks tone and energy. While I was there, I also used melodyne to deal with timing problems on the backing vocals as well as sibilance and plossives on the lead lines since I wasn't happy with the way the deesser was working.
Apparently I can only have so many instances of waves plugins (combined among the whole category) before it starts to flip out. So I'd open a window and get just a white box with little or nothing in it. That made doing adjustments rather more difficult and forced me to use some of the bundled plugins where I didn't want to. Oh well.
To deal with the large number of tracks, I chose to process the BVOX into 7 stems in a separate editor session, loaded the basic stems into the main session so I could mix instruments, mixed that minus vocals down to load back into the other session so I could set panning and balance within the stem groups before moving them back into the primary session to do tone and automation. In hindsight, there was probably a better way to go about it but that was the first thing that came to mind. Basically, I thought that I wanted to try to avoid any instances of melodyne in the main session since that's got some serious overhead so I did that and compression in the BVOX session then, as noted, did EQ and everything else once they were imported into the main session. Live and learn...
ANYWAY enough rambling. Let me know what comments you have and I'll probably tweak it a bit over the next two weeks if I have time. (Spring session starts this next week so I'm about to be busy with audio classes again and won't have much time to mix. Another reason why I wanted to just post this and be done with it for a while.)
Old West Audio