James May: Hold On You - Headphone mix (semi-professional)

[bmanic]

Hi guys,

Here's my mix of Hold On You done on my laptop with AKG K701 headphones for monitoring. No drum sound replacement was used. This is a 100% organic mix using only the supplied material.

As I do this kind of for a living the mix should be pretty solid but I need some feedback because I'm setting up my mobile rig and am trying to transition to mixing on headphones (yeah I know, it's a challenge). Feel free to comment if you think some levels are off or if some frequencies are sticking out.

This was a purely technical exercise for me so don't expect too much "art" from the mix. It's very simple with only the basics. EQ, compression and reverb + chorus/modulation fx for depth placement of the elements. A lot more could be done to the mix in terms of automation and adding feel to the song with additional FX but I wanted to get the basics done. I'm most interested in translation over various playback systems so let me know how it sounds over various speakers.

[Obelix]

This mix sounds great, especially kick drum. It is thight and fat. How did you get this drums to sound that great ? 10/10

[Macknzie]

This mix sounds great! It translates really well to my HS5's and sub so you must be doing something right with the AKG K701's. I don't have any criticism really.. everything sounds very well balanced! It was a little bit of a shock at first because i had just listened to the original and this mix is a decent amount brighter (maybe a result of the headphones?) but it is no way bad! After a minute of listening i liked the brightness. Fantastic job!

[bmanic]

Thanks for the feedback. Good to know it is translating well. It is entirely possible that the mix is a bit too bright.. a common pitfall with these headphones. As long as it doesn't hurt the ears then I guess it's fine. Keep in mind that the track hasn't been mastered so I only threw a basic limiter (Voxengo Elephant in this case) at the end of the chain so any slight excessive brightness could probably be fixed in mastering.

I'll try to post pictures of my mixing session so you can see what I've done. Anybody know if it's possible to upload images directly here on the forum (is it allowed?) or do I need to use an image hosting site like imgur?

The basic trick to getting the drums punchy is to time align everything carefully. I simply zoomed into the waveforms in Reaper and aligned the phases as best as I could. I removed the weird noises and frequencies in the two kick drum tracks and then carefully combined the "best" frequencies from both to get them to play together. Finally I checked the phases of the overall tracks to one another. I ended up flipping the phase of the overhead track and the electric and acoustic guitar (this made them separate slightly from the overall image, giving them some additional breathing space).

The snare track, as you all know, is very weird and goes completely useless in the middle of the song.. probably the engineer toggling the phase reverse switch in the middle of recording or something. So it is almost useless. I ended up Low-pass Filtering pretty much everything above 2kHz so as to only keep the snare and stick thump.