Thread Rating:
  • 1 Vote(s) - 5 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
Diesel13: 'Colour Me Red'
#11
Holy Cow Batman

Dave this rocks through my phones . Awesome guitar sound best I've heard to date. One point only and its minor , I think the lead vocal needs a touch of ambience/reverb/reflection to put it in the same place as the guitars as they are wide and proud. It just sounds a tiny bit dry on the phones to me

time to re-visit my mix

keep Rockin

Memphis
Rock n Roll Man in a Digital Age

Ice-16 Interface/Cubase Artist 8/Lenovo I5 quad/X2442/Fender Telecasters/Fender Hot rod, Champ, Junior/ M-Track Interface/
Reply
#12
Hey Dave.

Great mix.....really enjoyed it! I love your creativity with both intro and outro, which is frankly something i never feel inspired to do.

Really well balanced with a great overall tone. Everything does what its supposed to do, with the resulting mix being better than the sum of its parts. Excellent work!

The only thing that caught my ear was the arpeggio call and chordal return during the chorus.....to my ears the return was too narrow and felt masked on occasion by the vocal...making the centre channel a bit too busy....which kinda broke the spell for me for a moment or two and made me start listening as an engineer again rather than a music fan.

Its only a small thing but for a mix of this quality its worth mentioning I think. I'm sure you have your reasons for doing it that way and probably agonized over it.

Again, fantastic work. Cheers, Simon
Be fierce in your encouragement, kind in your criticism and try and remember that the art of a good critique is not to make someone else's mix sound like yours...but to help the mixer realize their own vision.

https://soundcloud.com/hbguitar
Reply
#13
(10-11-2016, 10:15 PM)IRONWORK Wrote: Wow! Nice one Dangerous Dave! I love this supremely confident mix... Love the intro and the outro! The clarity of all the instruments is superb, making this breathe well... It feels light, open, spacious, bouncy, rockin' !
Just a thought for the intro - would it sound good to remove the last 4 bars (00:13 to 00:19) before the main song comes in? The banjo going up 2 chords sounds odd to me... Or keep the intro the same length but have the banjo stay on the same riff?
In any case, this was an ear-opener! :-)
Cheers, Graham.

Thanks for the kind words Graham. Very encouraging.Smile

Interesting thoughts on the intro. I did try cutting the last 4 bars, but the intro lost it's nice build and motion. It maybe worth trying your second option with keeping the banjo on the same roll pattern though. This could work better. Thanks for the insight

Dave
Reply
#14
(10-11-2016, 10:28 PM)Memphis Black Wrote: Holy Cow Batman

Dave this rocks through my phones . Awesome guitar sound best I've heard to date. One point only and its minor , I think the lead vocal needs a touch of ambience/reverb/reflection to put it in the same place as the guitars as they are wide and proud. It just sounds a tiny bit dry on the phones to me

time to re-visit my mix

keep Rockin

Memphis

Cheers MB, I'm pleased that you like the mixBig Grin. The guitar was the first thing in the mix I nailed down. I was hooked on it's tone from the onset. I guessing it's a single coil. For me I find them easier to tone shape than a HB's and tend to remain more natural sounding with wide eq moves.
I have experimented with the vocal space and ended up with how it is. I felt I was losing it a little when I increased these effects. I wanted it to hold control I guess. I will revist this though and experiment further.

Thanks again

Reply
#15
(11-11-2016, 03:54 AM)HbGuitar Wrote: Hey Dave.

Great mix.....really enjoyed it! I love your creativity with both intro and outro, which is frankly something i never feel inspired to do.

Really well balanced with a great overall tone. Everything does what its supposed to do, with the resulting mix being better than the sum of its parts. Excellent work!

The only thing that caught my ear was the arpeggio call and chordal return during the chorus.....to my ears the return was too narrow and felt masked on occasion by the vocal...making the centre channel a bit too busy....which kinda broke the spell for me for a moment or two and made me start listening as an engineer again rather than a music fan.

Its only a small thing but for a mix of this quality its worth mentioning I think. I'm sure you have your reasons for doing it that way and probably agonized over it.

Again, fantastic work. Cheers, Simon

Thanks Simon. Valued Comments!

I'm interested in your chorus findings and will explore this further. I am running a cross field type reverb on this guitar part which is pulling it into the centre. Maybe too much so or in the wrong frequencies. Thanks for highlighting this.

My monitoring is fairly mediocre so I can quite often miss these details Big Grin

Dave



Reply
#16
A fun and professional mix. Well done.
PreSonus Studio One DAW
[email protected]
Reply
#17
Before saying anything technical about this mix, I'd just like to say that it has something about it that I associate with all my favourite mixes: namely, that even though I'm already familiar with the multitracks and various other mixes of them, there were numerous moments in this mix where I felt that I was rediscovering elements afresh. The backing vocals stunt is the most obvious thing -- an inspired choice to give us the chance to hear them on their own, because fundamentally they deserve it in terms of pure character. Another place that really opened my ears was Banjo during Outro 2 -- beautifully judged to come through clearly for a last-minute injection of interest, and fitting as if the mix had been just waiting for it to come along, even though it didn't seem as if anything was missing from the texture until then.

Sonically, though, this mix is also pretty impressive. Great sense of frequency bandwidth, with plenty of well-controlled low end to the bass guitar (one of the challenges on this multitrack), and an impressive sense of stereo width by virtue of the LCR panning. Perhaps counterintuitively, I think that the comparatively narrow drum image actually makes the image seem wider, given that it seems to put more horizontal distance between the drums/bass axis and outlying guitars. It also, incidentally, provides a nice little stereo pocket at mid-left and mid-right for those backing vocals to slide into.

Not that I'm implying that this is an overly 'technical' mix, because it still gives an enviable sense of excitement and rawness -- reminds me of some of Randy Staub's mixes, in fact, in that respect. It's a living breathing thing, and gives a powerful psychological impression (by virtue of what I'm assuming is no scarcity of compression!) of straining fiercely at some kind of leash. Not a bad impression to give for a song like this, I reckon!

My only real criticism is that perhaps some of the compression is a touch too fast, particularly on the drums, as the mix as a whole seems to lack some midrange punch. I'd prefer to leave a few more peaks in there to add more of a real 'slam' to the attitude and excitement that's already on offer. That said, as it stands this mix does, by virtue of its well-controlled bass and 'less voltage, more illusion' drum sound, respond ridiculously well to loudness processing, if that happens to be appropriate -- go on, try it for yourself, it's surprising how far you can go without unacceptable processing side-effects.

And if I'm really picking nits: is the vocal a bit too recessed in the Mid-sections? I reckon it might work better to give it a bit of a new effect, something with a tail, to support the more open sound of that section as well as allowing you to pull the vocal a bit up in level without ungluing it. Just a thought. That aside, though, I would agree with the other poster who complimented you on the vocal sound in general -- very commercial and contemporary sounding. We could all learn something if you wanted to go into more detail about your specific settings there, I imagine!

Anyway, as you can probably tell, I like this mix quite a bit. Rolleyes Thanks Dangerous for the masterclass! It might not be everyone's cup of tea in terms of vision, but on its own terms it's pretty hard to fault.
Reply
#18
Thanks Mike,
This was lovely reading indeed and has certainly put me in a good mood over the weekend. I will give your critique some thought over the next few days and try a build on what I have already achieved. I am quite keen to have a play around with the Loudness. Something I've never explored before. For this I think I will rely on listening to similar commercial mixes and see how far I can push the mix towards these levels. All in good fun.

(17-11-2016, 05:28 PM)Mike Senior Wrote: My only real criticism is that perhaps some of the compression is a touch too fast, particularly on the drums, as the mix as a whole seems to lack some midrange punch. I'd prefer to leave a few more peaks in there to add more of a real 'slam' to the attitude and excitement that's already on offer. That said, as it stands this mix does, by virtue of its well-controlled bass and 'less voltage, more illusion' drum sound, respond ridiculously well to loudness processing, if that happens to be appropriate -- go on, try it for yourself, it's surprising how far you can go without unacceptable processing side-effects.

I think this is an issue with most of the mixes I've completed. It's an area of judgement that I struggle with and need to improve on. Referencing closely to similar sounding drums on commercial mixes is probably my best bet. See how I go.

(17-11-2016, 05:28 PM)Mike Senior Wrote: And if I'm really picking nits: is the vocal a bit too recessed in the Mid-sections? I reckon it might work better to give it a bit of a new effect, something with a tail, to support the more open sound of that section as well as allowing you to pull the vocal a bit up in level without ungluing it. Just a thought.

Interesting point Mike, something to explore for sure.

(17-11-2016, 05:28 PM)Mike Senior Wrote: That aside, though, I would agree with the other poster who complimented you on the vocal sound in general -- very commercial and contemporary sounding. We could all learn something if you wanted to go into more detail about your specific settings there, I imagine!

No problems Mike, although I'm not sure this is the best way to explain it, but here we go.

I start by treating the Vox track with the basic eq clean up, high pass etc. Also there is the Sound Brigade plugin inserted first, which I used to tame some harshness that I was hearing and then on this occasion I've compressed with 2 compressors in series, both with light gain reduction just to even things up sonically. I then send this track to no less than 6 aux tracks. A parallel comp, small reverb, large reverb, stereo widening and a delay. There are other sends also to the global reverbs and a parallel comp bus, although these would have a smaller effect on the vox sound, they do contribute especially the // comp bus.

Now for the processing within these aux tracks I think the parallel comp track and the small reverb are the most significant for me in getting that "vocal sound" The small reverb is a glass or tiled room type reflective reverb. A little bit of this goes a long way, but it's great at bringing the vocal to the forefront. (try singing in front of a mirror or even in the car with the windscreen in front of you) it's the same effect. I tend to run this reverb as a mono track only, it does seem to work better that way.

The parallel comp track is for me where some of the magic happens. Apart for running a compressor (high ratio fast attack and 10-12dB gain reduction), I like to add distortion or saturation depending on the vocal performance. This is great for adding colour and body. I also usually run a dynamic eq to control some of the nasties and I find it quite useful controlling the sibilances here also. These rouge frequencies that I'm listening for are more in the overall Vox sound, not just the compression track that I'm processing them in. The Overall vox generally gets a good dose of this //compression aux track and therefore is quite significant in the overall vocal sound.

There are also 2 stereo widening tracks, nothing fancy just delay and pitch plugins (Straight out of the "Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio" book). I find these help flatten the "straight up the middle" vox a little. Once again a small dose goes a long way.

I have added a screenshot of these tracks to help visualise the process. I find working with aux tracks like this keeps the original track intact and the overall performance more natural sounding.

Also final fader riding of the vocal track is also beneficial, especially at bringing out those lost syllables and making the phrasing cleaner and well defined overall.

I hope all of that made some sense and is of some help to someone. If only I had your writing skills MikeSmile

Thanks again for taking the time to complete this critique. You have certainly got your work cut out.

Dave
[/quote]



Thumbnail(s)
   
Reply
#19
(17-11-2016, 04:20 PM)Mixinthecloud Wrote: A fun and professional mix. Well done.

Cheers Mixinthecloud,

Thanks for stopping by and checking it out.

Dave
Reply
#20
I like what you did with the intro and the clarity of your mix really stands out. Bravo!

I think its great that many people took an artistic license to really make their mixes unique. Good job.
My Original Music

"One often learns more from ten days of agony than ten years of contentment."

Pro Tools 12.6/Studio One 3 Pro
Studiolive 16 Series III
Yamaha HS5/HS8
Console 1
Reply