Only listening on (not great) headphones so take this with a pinch of salt. Overall it's a good balance, but the vocal de-essing sounds quite heavy-handed, lots of top-end getting hammered there. Snare sounds a little muffled too, while the hi-hat and tambourine sound quite prominent. Could you try and get those elements sitting together a bit more consistently?
Only listening on (not great) headphones so take this with a pinch of salt. Overall it's a good balance, but the vocal de-essing sounds quite heavy-handed, lots of top-end getting hammered there. Snare sounds a little muffled too, while the hi-hat and tambourine sound quite prominent. Could you try and get those elements sitting together a bit more consistently?
Hope that helps, nice job. Cheers, Matt
Hi Matt! First of all, thanks for your comment.
I heard the song putting emphasis on the things you marked and I think you're right! The de-esser was too hard on the vocals, the tambourine and the hi hat where prominent and the snare sounds boomy.
Here's a new version of the song, putting attention on what you propose.
Took away a lot of de-essing, put down the tambourine and the hi hat, and I try a little different approach on the bass part of the snare.
Hope to hear your opinion! and once again, thanks.
I think the tonal balance of this on the whole isn't quite right - the bass is quite middly, it's a good level but kind of feels it could use some more lower octave. I've just had a go at this one (please do have a listen) and I doubled the bass track putting one through an amp sim which helped add some weight I think.
Vocal sound is better but it sounds quite dry - I reckon you could bring it up in level just a shade and give it a little room or plate reverb to just glue it together with everything else.
One of the things I took on with this was the transients of acoustic 1 - they're very sharp, especially if you add any top-end EQ. I tamed them somewhat with a single-band of compression running between about 3-8kHz which seemed to help, might be worth a try?
I'm being really picky here, overall this is a great balance and the song works well, hope these comments help though. Cheers, Matt