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Entwine (Sano mix)
#1
Tried to make those drums hit hard !!!


.m4a    Entwine (Sano mix).m4a --  (Download: 10.12 MB)


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#2
I think you've done a very good job here. I like the idea of panning the lead melody at 0:50 to the right. I think it helps to catch the listener's attention.

I would work a little bit more on the drums. In this kind of music I expect a big kick and probably the snare a little bit more aggressive.
mixing since April 2013
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#3
Hey Sano,

Great to see you with another mix! I like your trail of thoughts to go more aggressive with the drums! This track, in fact, is not pure Drum & Bass but a softer and more relaxed subgenre of it ( Liquid Funk / Liquid DNB ), which is why the drums are rather hard to make aggressive sounding.

Now, the only thing that is a bit bugging me is that the kick has a bit too much emphasis on the highs - it gets very tiring after a few beats and heavy on the ears - try balancing the kicks highs with about the same as the snares highs, I think that would work out better.

Apart from this, I see no big problems here, great job!
I agree with juanjose, panning the two lead-tracks is a very creative idea! I personally find it a bit empty without some delay / reverb on the lead-synth, but again, that's just my nitpicking at its finest, hahaha! Smile

Well done Sano!
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#4
I had never heard of liquid funk. I have to find music in that style so I can mix the song properly! thanks for pointing it out Skelpolu!
mixing since April 2013
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#5
(03-05-2015, 10:35 AM)Skelpolu Wrote: Hey Sano,

Great to see you with another mix! I like your trail of thoughts to go more aggressive with the drums! This track, in fact, is not pure Drum & Bass but a softer and more relaxed subgenre of it ( Liquid Funk / Liquid DNB ), which is why the drums are rather hard to make aggressive sounding.

Now, the only thing that is a bit bugging me is that the kick has a bit too much emphasis on the highs - it gets very tiring after a few beats and heavy on the ears - try balancing the kicks highs with about the same as the snares highs, I think that would work out better.

Apart from this, I see no big problems here, great job!
I agree with juanjose, panning the two lead-tracks is a very creative idea! I personally find it a bit empty without some delay / reverb on the lead-synth, but again, that's just my nitpicking at its finest, hahaha! Smile

Well done Sano!

Thanks for your comments, I'm pleased that you and Juanjose liked the panned leads, To me it seemed natural to pan them like that as they seemed to play off each other and helped create movement across the mix.

I corrected the highs on the kick and I've got to agree it sounds better now! I think I got carried away with trying to make it punchy !!


.m4a    Entwine 2 (Sano mix).m4a --  (Download: 10.11 MB)


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#6
Yo,

I think there's way too much treble here (both v1 and v2), i'm feeling fatigue off the HF zone....like you have an abundance around the 10kHz and that last octave right up to the Nyquist frequency; did you high cut this? I think your drums are the major source, but i'm hearing stuff on some of the synths too. What worries me, is that you have gone back into the mix and you've missed this issue. I'm wondering what's preventing you from hearing it.....any ideas?

This composer uses far too much treble in his tracking for my liking (I say this with some respect), and if you are not careful, it will quickly throw your perspectives of spectral balance out the window, along with your ears for the rest of the mix. Just sweeping for a resonance with any amount of gain is enough to throw a lot of people off the scent (me included, so i'll apply a cut instead while sweeping), so I can imagine the mischief trebles of this guy's magnitude can get up to. Perhaps this has prevailed herein? Can you shed some light on it? When confronted with a rich treble, i'll quickly bang a generous amount of high-cut filter until I can get to it in the mix proper. I have used ear plugs before now while previewing the raw goods at the time of setting up a project in the DAW. I've extensively remixed Resurrection so i speak with experience of the problem and challenges!

At the other end of the spectrum, I think the bass synth is nailing the headroom here, and it's taken all the space which I think should contain a lot more of the song's melodic content. Perhaps adding some even-harmonic distortion (odd harmonics are brittle, eh?) and working these will help take some of the fat out of it but still keep it's contribution in the mix. Furthermore, i'd suggest it will give you valuable space for the kick's fundamental, which i'm missing.....there's no weight here at all, but I am getting the kick's harmonics. Perhaps it's the harmonics you are hearing when you mix it, and this is doing some psychoacoustic shenanigans leading your brain to believe the fundamental is present?

I also felt the song was “flat” in the sense that it wasn't offering any musical dynamic at all (promotes boredom and hitting the skip button), other than the intro and outro. This made it difficult for me to stay in touch with the material (not helped by the fatigue from the highs and the heavy low bass synth which was overpowering). Perhaps look for some ways to change this, vary it somehow to get some synergy going here. This is a long mix at 5:20 so it needs working. If a song just rants along without any changes, why listen? This also brings me to the drums. While the treble from them is wearing after a short while, I think your vision of having them “hit” and punchy is great. But if you keep it great all the time, i'm going to think that great is simply more of the same....and lose interest. Perhaps bringing them in more present (when it's pertinent), then dropping them back will help keep me interested and engaged as a listener. Working the synths around this idea will change the delivery of the mix for the better, at least from my perspective.

I was pleased you kept the bass out of the side channel. I also liked the fact that this wasn't “loud”.

Previewed over a bookshelf rig, nothing special, at a level just above conversation.

Hope there's something here which helps dude....
Dave
Beware...........Cognitive Dissonance!
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#7
Hey Sano. This isn't a genre that gets a lot of exposure where I live so consider that when reading my thoughts... I'll try to combine my technical thoughts with my opinions in a helpful way here, but our approaches to this tune were pretty dissimilar so that might limit my contribution to the discussion.

I'd echo the comments by Skelly and Dave on the high frequency abundance, particularly the drum transients. The sharp transients are also pulling the drums a bit forward in the mix... admittedly that could be your intention, but it makes it difficult as a listener to lock into the melody. However, I believe in your vision on this one and some ideas come to mind on how you might approach working the aggressive sounding drums (which I love) into the mix without fatigue, especially on headphones/earbuds.

During the chorus(?) sections where the melody doesn't vary much, it makes a lot of sense from a musical perspective to give the drums a little more space in the mix-- the chorus is the emotional payoff and this is arguably a beat driven genre, so letting the drums come through with more HF energy in those short sections and taming the treble elsewhere seems an appropriate and effective solution. Another thought that comes to mind on instinct is that lightning fast compressors on the kick and snare channels, something like a fairchild or 1176, could be finessed to catch the transients and smooth them out a bit, making the physical sound a little less harsh on the ear and psycho-acoustically massaging the drums back into the mix a bit. In this instance I'd personally combine both the compression and treble roll-off in smaller amounts than would be necessary by themselves... and then I'd have two sonic elements to manipulate over the course of the song for contrast.

All that sort of goes hand in hand with Dave's comments about the general flatness of the mix, but that's largely due to the static dynamics during tracking. Seems to me like most producers who work with virtual instruments entirely in the box prefer to leave the dynamics flat while tracking and automate the long-term dynamics in the mixing phase... makes sense to me since it allows you to really predictably shape the sounds with compressors, but I guess it all depends on how the music is meant to be enjoyed. Listening casually at home or in a club, I'd want more sonic variation over the course of the song, but the overall dynamics would probably succeed quite well as they are if the music were playing a supporting role in other media, like in a video game or film score.

Last thing I'll mention is that panning the leads synths as you have is really cool and refreshing after hearing my version over and over... I'd personally narrow the stereo width a little bit on each track because the overall image feels a bit smeared out for me, but that could very well be my opinion.
I'm grateful for comments and suggestions. Thank you for listening!
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