Piece of me

[pmilani]

Great song! mixed ITB
I struggled to tame the vocals: I like the commitment of the vocal production, though I found the tone was a bit hard to control without sounding harsh.
I got a good sounding balance, did a gross automation pass, parked the mix a few days, and came back to do finer work on EQ, automation, and then I also changed my mix bus processing.

EDIT: ah.. and the bridge was soooo hard to make good!! veeery busy, I spent endless time studying how to create the emotional climax... hopefully it works

I took quite a different road than the ref "My curse", truth be told I downloaded the multitrack and mixed without reading any info.

Hoping for @Blitzzz to chime in with some critique here

https://soundcloud.com/pmilani/dark-ride-piece-of-me

[Blitzzz]

Good mix mate. Enjoyed it. Of course I´m not happy with some of the decision you made (too much reverb on the drums for my taste - i love it very dry and in your face - and i would bring the overheads down by 2-3 db and reduce the "bite") but I´m not you. And on top of that my comments are based on listening to your mix on my Beyerdynamics MMX 300 which are consumer headphones (they still cost 250-300 Euros so they are not THAT shitty though). In the end thats how the "normal listener" would hear your song (they don't have monitors or studio headphones) so there might be some wisdom in my words :-P

One thing: It would be great if you would upload your mp3 directly into this thread. that makes things easier for everyone to check your mix and your chances are better to get more feedback.

To sum things up:
Pros: I had a good time while listening to your mix. It doesn't lack movement and/or emotion which automatically makes it better then most mixes on this forum. Cool!
Cons: It's not my favourite guitar sound - I prefer more crunch, more mids. Cymbals are too loud/bright/aggressive on my consumer headphones. And my ears noticed a hefty amount of reverb in your mix. That's bad because in that moment I stopped feeling your mix and started to listen to the reverb

[pmilani]

Man thanks a lot for your excellent feedback!
In a way I can understand your point about reverb -- but me being on the opposite... I can't stand anything completely dry unless it's as good as a bloody platinum selling record.
I guess pulling the verbs down a couple of dBs could be a compromise and might have done the trick for your ears as well.
About cymbals, it's one of a few things I can't figure out well, I though they need to be pretty aggressive in metal genres, after all is it a coincidence you call "metal" those pieces of the drum kit?

Since I've been mixing (1 month) on Yamaha HS7 I noticed my mixes translate much better then they used to do and the balance is generally much better; but I noticed also that mixes tend to sound slightly better on speakers than on headphones or ear-buds for the matter.
I'm not a good ear for mastering maybe that's what a mastering eng would be able to do fix.

I'm being lazy with mp3 uploads because I prefer to have one single place to worry about. But you might be right on that
Cheers

[Blitzzz]

No prob mate, keep up the good work!