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We Feel Alright - AZ Mix
#1
Okay, so here's my attempt at this and oh my, it was a challenge. It's really great that Mike is able to post these mix rescue subjects for us to work on while having a guide to what he did but man, they can be tricky!

I haven't done any dance music before but more or less knew what to expect. It was obvious from the outset that the biggest problem was going to be finding room for everything. I tried to do this by figuring out what was important in each part and then make sure there were no overlaps. Didn't really go as well as I hoped.

The delays/reverb on the guitar parts were also challenging but not unexpected. All these synth parts are loaded with effects so why not the guitar part you laid down and then chopped up?

When it came to the kick drum, I noticed the same problem Mike did but chose to go about it a little differently. I bumped the track ahead by about 6-7ms, trying to split the difference without getting a flam attack. That got things to line up much better. To add a little punch, I dropped an API bus compressor on the drums and that made me hear and feel the kick more. I then thought there wasn't enough attack for the kick sort of sounds from at least one of various loops so put MaxxBass on the drum buss as well. Soloing my sub, I was also concerned there wasn't enough of the sub tones in the drums either (and not enough rumble in the bass) so I got a little help from LowEnder on the dry mix. If you've got a good subwoofer (or speakers that go down to ~25Hz), you'll notice this right off. Smile

The biggest problem I had here was trying to get the bass to be distinct but not overpower the rest of the mix. Like I said, hard to find room for everything. Part of the problem is that when the upper end goes up that fifth, it changes volume too but if I brought it down, I'd cheat the low end. I ended up putting a multiband compressor on it to try to deal with that as well as tighten the lower end a little more.

As for the vocals, I actually felt like they should not be "in your face" up front so I allowed them to settle into the mix a little more and stuck a good amount of long reverb (but no predelay) on them as well as a touch of quarter and half note delay. Aside from a light touch of verb on the drums, that's all the ambience I used for this.

Anyway, it's not quite what I invisioned when I started but it's still at least a passable mix, to me. Comments welcome.


.mp3    we-feel-alright-mixdown.mp3 --  (Download: 12.1 MB)


Old West Audio
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#2
Hi Azwayne
I like your mix ,probably a taste thing i love deep tight bottom end ,maybe just a touch too much my room is shaking lol
To give the bass some room and the mix some more headroom ,I Think i ended rolling off everything below 60hz on the kick and done a slight boost at 125 and stacked a couple of limiters to thicken it up.
Good job Big Grin!

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#3
Okay, so I've been playing around with this a bit and I think I've made some improvements. Figured out that the bass was a bit out of balance (but I still like rumble!) so brought that back a bit. Tried to make the guitars easier to hear as well as one of the synth parts. Also tried to make some things go away from time to time to clear up realestate. Then I got creative after listening to the original mix (pre-Mike) and mucked about with my delays a bit but not to the same extreme.

Anyway, I think this is an improvement over the original but them guitars are still problematic. I feel I've gotten this as far as I can take it however so I'll call it a mix and move on to the next project...


.mp3    we-feel-alright-mixdown-v2.mp3 --  (Download: 12.05 MB)


Old West Audio
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