Okay, so here's my mix of this tune, more or less.
First, I admit it... this tune absolutely kicked my butt. This mix was *hard* and I don't mean laborious, I mean *HARD*. There were four major problems that I just had all kinds of trouble dealing with and ultimately was not able to conquer satisfactorily. I've only thrown in the towel on one other mix here and with that one, I knew precisely what the problem was but becasue of the nature of it, wasn't sure how to even begin to approach it. So from that stand point, I wasn't really feeling beaten, just inexperienced. With this one though, everything started combining together to just beat the daylights out of me. So I finally had to throw up the white flag, get elements I had not fully dealt with to a more finished state so it could at least be presented, and just admit defeat.
My big problems:
1) Vocals. The singer, especially in the pre-chorus, was kinda all over the map. I tried to smooth this out a bit in melodyne but it couldn't figure out where to break things properly and I'm not good enough with it to help on this sort of vocal track so I finally ditched that effort and took a cue from Mike's mix and used one of my favorite effects for making boring parts (or in this case unsettled parts) more interesting. A phaser, which I mainly employ for the panner. You can do this with a flanger too in many cases by either turning off the delay or, if it lets you, eliminating that function entirely. I set a rapid back and forth and cut it out for the second half of the questions. The rest of the vocals more or less started to come into place as the rest of the mix developed so I didn't do much more on them other than compression and level automation. Still not happy with the verse/pre-chorus vocals but I can live with it.
2) The bass part. Like Mike, I too found this less than satisfying but so far haven't had much luck doing MIDI conversions with the software at my disposal (or I don't have the know-how to use it properly, maybe) so I'm basically forced to deal with it. First problem was that it was *very* softly recorded. SONAR allows me up to +18dB of gain on my line input and even cranking it, it was not loud enough. So I did a series of compression tweaks to not only try to get it up where it belonged but also to make it more aggressive. The problem with all this is that it brought out too much of the pick and I had a hard time beating that back down. It didn't want to exist in a sing frequency band like I often find but seemed to be in several different places, on top of other much more desireable sounds that I didn't want to notch out.
3) The solo guitars were very hard for me to fit into the mix. At first listen they are just so out of character with the rest of the parts that it required a great deal of care to figure out how to blend them. That second part, when it comes in, is also virtually invisible because it's a near match to the first part. First, I matched as best I could the two guitar sounds. Then deliberately made the second brighter and put about a 35ms delay on it to help it stand out. This wasn't enough so I also panned them each about 20% off center. Adding the space made a big difference. Lastly, that final note is just too abrupt and doesn't really fit the flow so I chose to chop it off and just nudge the solo out slightly early and let the delays take some of the rest of the abruptness off the transition.
4) Part of the reason for having trouble setting the guitar solo into the mix was that at that point in the track, there's a LOT of noise to come over the top of. I did go through and try to notch 4k and 8k out of various parts to remove some of the guitar harshness but also found that I had to bring the overheads down by 4db to keep them from washing the rest of the track away. Trying to overcome this and getting the solos to settle in is pretty much where I threw in the towel and admitted defeat. It didn't occur to me to try to hit this with a deesser to try to smooth some of that out while still letting things be loud but with the way the mix was shaping up, not sure that would have helped, though and I didn't catch the bit Mike observed about transients and groove in the drum tracks which would have helped this, but again, me and MIDI conversions... No easy way to go back in and tweak.
Another issue I ran into was the drum overheads and room mics. Like Mike, I was looking for which to keep and which to get rid of but there was a problem... the overheads have the snare drum off center and having the snare even a little bit out of place, I find to be disconcerting. The room mics were the same with it varying a bit as you went from set to set. So I chose to go mono for the overheads but with the room mics (which I never use a lot of anyway), interestingly, I found that when they were all in, the kit felt centered again so that's the way I left it. Note that my combined signal never peaked at more than -27dB so there's only a hit of these in there after all is said and done and about the same again in verb on the overall kit.
I normally use a good deal of ambient delay processing as well as a healthy amount of verb. Couldn't do that on this track Everything fought back against it so there's only the barest amount in here and I'm not really happy with the results of that, but...
Anyway, ~15 hours of work in, here's the best I could manage with this mix... comments welcome.
First, I admit it... this tune absolutely kicked my butt. This mix was *hard* and I don't mean laborious, I mean *HARD*. There were four major problems that I just had all kinds of trouble dealing with and ultimately was not able to conquer satisfactorily. I've only thrown in the towel on one other mix here and with that one, I knew precisely what the problem was but becasue of the nature of it, wasn't sure how to even begin to approach it. So from that stand point, I wasn't really feeling beaten, just inexperienced. With this one though, everything started combining together to just beat the daylights out of me. So I finally had to throw up the white flag, get elements I had not fully dealt with to a more finished state so it could at least be presented, and just admit defeat.
My big problems:
1) Vocals. The singer, especially in the pre-chorus, was kinda all over the map. I tried to smooth this out a bit in melodyne but it couldn't figure out where to break things properly and I'm not good enough with it to help on this sort of vocal track so I finally ditched that effort and took a cue from Mike's mix and used one of my favorite effects for making boring parts (or in this case unsettled parts) more interesting. A phaser, which I mainly employ for the panner. You can do this with a flanger too in many cases by either turning off the delay or, if it lets you, eliminating that function entirely. I set a rapid back and forth and cut it out for the second half of the questions. The rest of the vocals more or less started to come into place as the rest of the mix developed so I didn't do much more on them other than compression and level automation. Still not happy with the verse/pre-chorus vocals but I can live with it.
2) The bass part. Like Mike, I too found this less than satisfying but so far haven't had much luck doing MIDI conversions with the software at my disposal (or I don't have the know-how to use it properly, maybe) so I'm basically forced to deal with it. First problem was that it was *very* softly recorded. SONAR allows me up to +18dB of gain on my line input and even cranking it, it was not loud enough. So I did a series of compression tweaks to not only try to get it up where it belonged but also to make it more aggressive. The problem with all this is that it brought out too much of the pick and I had a hard time beating that back down. It didn't want to exist in a sing frequency band like I often find but seemed to be in several different places, on top of other much more desireable sounds that I didn't want to notch out.
3) The solo guitars were very hard for me to fit into the mix. At first listen they are just so out of character with the rest of the parts that it required a great deal of care to figure out how to blend them. That second part, when it comes in, is also virtually invisible because it's a near match to the first part. First, I matched as best I could the two guitar sounds. Then deliberately made the second brighter and put about a 35ms delay on it to help it stand out. This wasn't enough so I also panned them each about 20% off center. Adding the space made a big difference. Lastly, that final note is just too abrupt and doesn't really fit the flow so I chose to chop it off and just nudge the solo out slightly early and let the delays take some of the rest of the abruptness off the transition.
4) Part of the reason for having trouble setting the guitar solo into the mix was that at that point in the track, there's a LOT of noise to come over the top of. I did go through and try to notch 4k and 8k out of various parts to remove some of the guitar harshness but also found that I had to bring the overheads down by 4db to keep them from washing the rest of the track away. Trying to overcome this and getting the solos to settle in is pretty much where I threw in the towel and admitted defeat. It didn't occur to me to try to hit this with a deesser to try to smooth some of that out while still letting things be loud but with the way the mix was shaping up, not sure that would have helped, though and I didn't catch the bit Mike observed about transients and groove in the drum tracks which would have helped this, but again, me and MIDI conversions... No easy way to go back in and tweak.
Another issue I ran into was the drum overheads and room mics. Like Mike, I was looking for which to keep and which to get rid of but there was a problem... the overheads have the snare drum off center and having the snare even a little bit out of place, I find to be disconcerting. The room mics were the same with it varying a bit as you went from set to set. So I chose to go mono for the overheads but with the room mics (which I never use a lot of anyway), interestingly, I found that when they were all in, the kit felt centered again so that's the way I left it. Note that my combined signal never peaked at more than -27dB so there's only a hit of these in there after all is said and done and about the same again in verb on the overall kit.
I normally use a good deal of ambient delay processing as well as a healthy amount of verb. Couldn't do that on this track Everything fought back against it so there's only the barest amount in here and I'm not really happy with the results of that, but...
Anyway, ~15 hours of work in, here's the best I could manage with this mix... comments welcome.
Old West Audio
