Allright! Here's a little mix from this song. Took about 4 hours to do. Incredible drum tracks this song had; I'm really happy how they turned out. The vocals (especially the lead) on the other hand were really hard thing to get under control. Uncompressed (unintentionally) distorted vocals are the worst to deal with. I probably spent time with the vocals more than with anything else combined. Many of the melodic backing tracks (guitars, bass), kinda fell into place very easily, they needed only minimal riding.
I like how you balanced and processed the electric guitars. I am mixing this right now and i dont like how the rythm guitars blend, i would have liked less distorted guitars. the lead sounds nice.
Have you used the guitar tracks as they were provided? because the stereo tracks have some phase issues. i splitted them into L and R and choose the best sounding side.
Please comment on others mixes, this site is all about feedback.
02-05-2013, 04:19 AM (This post was last modified: 02-05-2013, 04:19 AM by Dags.)
That was a quick mix Spede! ...heh - I just unintentionally made a joke there
I'm looking at this song (well, haven't had time over the last few nights) and wringing my hands as to what I'm going to do about the snare, guitars, vocals, l-r drum tracks (which have the kick prominently in one side and the snare in the other!)........
So cool to listen to another vesion of this mix ! I've been working too much on this (these... some more songs to come soon!) and it's good to hear fresh things !
Didn't mix it, but mastered the entire album for the soon to be released record.
What i really like : the depth you created with the backing vocals, which was, to my taste, cruely missing in the original mix.
The work you did on lead vocals, which, as you said, should have take you some extra time. I admit it's not that easy to treat a track like this, distorted (intentionally or not? i still don't know, even if the mixer is a friend ).
What i find disturbing : maybe the kit is a little too upfront in the mix for such a pop song. The snare above all, is, for me, a little too much present . It's obvious when you listen to it on small speakers at low volume. Maybe, if you have Auratone or equivalent, you'll notice it after a few days resting your hears...
For the rest, well, as you said, it's an easy song to mix as the performance, especially of the drummer (this guy's a metronome ! his name is Julien "Peter Puke" Rousset, playing in many bands and especially one which nams is "Gnô", you should look for it in youtube, it's amazing...), and the two lead singers, who are more than good friends : brilliant performers and songwriters.
Good job Spede ! So nice to hear it "fresh". And Dags, i'm dying to hear what you'll do of this song.
Well guys, i'll post a new song to Mike soon, so you'll be able to remix the entire album month by month.
(01-05-2013, 11:12 PM)jeremias666 Wrote: Great mix.
I like how you cleaned and polished the vocal.
I like how you balanced and processed the electric guitars. I am mixing this right now and i dont like how the rythm guitars blend, i would have liked less distorted guitars. the lead sounds nice.
Have you used the guitar tracks as they were provided? because the stereo tracks have some phase issues. i splitted them into L and R and choose the best sounding side.
The El guitars needed some taming from the upper mid resonance. I cut some 2,5-4 kHz in every single EG stem (dependable of the stem, I checked the actual resonance of each one with a RTA), and added some shelf boosting above it (close mics, no boosting in room mics). I also kept the low mids (200-400 Hz, once again depended on the stem) at bay with some dynamic EQs. Taming the upper mid resonance helps the EG to blend in much better.
I used the all the room mics (stereo configuration), panned fully to edges. They were about 15 dBs quieter than the close mic. All the EG close mics are panned LCR. My initial reaction was that the summing of EG channels was already good, flipping any polarities caused more trouble than solved any.
The acoustic was more tricky to do (and even more tricky to explain). I used the only the channels 1 and 2 (close ones). I think I nudges them around to get the waveforms align better, and on top of that I used a some sort of phase shifter/aligner to get out of phase frequencies to twist to the "positive sum" side. I listened the two channels' sum in mono, flipped the polarity to hear which sum had more bottom end. The less bottom end sum had more clarity in the upper mids so I twisted the upper mids' phase around from one of the channels to "rotate" the sum to the other side in order to have both good low end and clarity. God this is hard to explain The goal is simply to have good sounding sum from the two mics.
(02-05-2013, 04:19 AM)Dags Wrote: That was a quick mix Spede! ...heh - I just unintentionally made a joke there
I'm looking at this song (well, haven't had time over the last few nights) and wringing my hands as to what I'm going to do about the snare, guitars, vocals, l-r drum tracks (which have the kick prominently in one side and the snare in the other!)........
Yours has come together really well.
Well done!
Dags
Thanks. If it's any help, I didn't use the side mics at all (they don't work well with the overheads anyway, and the extra misplacement of the kick/snare doesn't really help that ). There also no reverb in the drums. All the stereo space you hear in this mix comes from the overheads panned fully to the sides. Not much compression on them either, just few dBs sawing off some stray snare hits. Everything else in the drums (snares, room, even tomtom) is dead center.
(02-05-2013, 10:24 AM)Xabix Wrote: What i find disturbing : maybe the kit is a little too upfront in the mix for such a pop song. The snare above all, is, for me, a little too much present . It's obvious when you listen to it on small speakers at low volume. Maybe, if you have Auratone or equivalent, you'll notice it after a few days resting your hears...
The drum's forwardness is probably a combination of many things: My habit generally of putting the drums quite loud in a mix (I consider them probably the most important after lead vocals, but I'm also a sucker for super bright snares as is evident here ) and also the fact from a starting point they were the best sounding stem in this whole song (the great drummer is definitely not hurting that situation), so it becomes quite natural to make it "mask" some of the weaker aspects of the song (for example the acoustic guitar here wasn't necessarily that hot sounding).
Hey Spede - how *did* you get so much snap in the snare with this track?
The top snare track is really quite 'muddy'.
I tried EQ (which brought out the hihat), biasing the balance in favour of the bottom mic (which made it rattly), even throwing them out of phase to reduce low end (which just didn't work) - your snare actually sounds like a snare should sound!
Well done!
(08-05-2013, 10:41 AM)Dags Wrote: Hey Spede - how *did* you get so much snap in the snare with this track?
The top snare track is really quite 'muddy'.
I tried EQ (which brought out the hihat), biasing the balance in favour of the bottom mic (which made it rattly), even throwing them out of phase to reduce low end (which just didn't work) - your snare actually sounds like a snare should sound!
Well done!
Thanks If it's any help I can broadly describe what I did. I simply had the goal in my mind when I was tweaking the snare channels.
The snare top is quite distorted. I generally use small amounts of Digidesign Lo-Fi for drum transient distortion since it's character is somewhat related to what Neves and APIs do for drum transients when driven hard (although Lo-Fi has a much bigger danger making the signal little mushy so I have to be really careful and precise with it.). I've added some high end before distortion; Wide bell boosts worth over 10 (closer to 15) dBs for area covering 4-12 kHz. This one needed more than usually. Then a tiny amount of tape saturation to it. The only way I can hear tiny AB is against compressor; a small amount of tape actually make the drum louder when the snare comes from the output of the compressor. After these there was maybe little more added high end before gating the signal quite fast and aggressively; one can barely hear the next hihat hit when the track is soloed. Then just a small amount of compression (only 3 dBs) with a slow attack and a fastest release. I use Waves SSL channelstrips for drums, so that's the drum comp/gate.
The goal is to make the snare top as bright as possible without making the hihat too problematic, and combination of sawing off the transients with dist/tape to that small amount of slow atk./fast rel. compressor brings a certain kind of constrained but punchy low end from the snare. I believe punchyness comes from correct phasing (with everything else) while the crack comes from the exaggerated and distorted high end. I personally believe you can have both
The snare bottom acts in a very different kind of role: sustain. I've expandend it right off the bat, before any distortions with an EQ:ed sidechain so the expander triggers even from the ghosts, but not at all from cymbals. However because of the high bleed it did open from the kick hits somewhat despite the highpass in the sidechain (once again it the SSL channelstrip expanding it. Then there's the same distortion stuff than in the top channel (but little less Lo-Fi and more tape saturation to make it "softer". Finally the SSL channel compressor at the end is chugging good 10 dBs (with a fast attack and fastest release) out of those amplified, distorted "strong hits" while the ghosts become almost as loud as the strong hits. Bleed surfaces approximately to the same level as it was initially.
So in the end I've simply shaped the strong hits to resemble a tight white noise generator-like sound (with minimal attack) and brought up the ghosts to get them audible in the mix overall. I could've just compress the hell out of snare bottom but that would have been little messy. The reason for distorting the transients is to make the compression more even, so it's not all over the place.
On the drum parallel bus there was a Neve 33609 plugin modelling with the fastest release doing 6-8 dBs of gain reduction. It's overall level was pretty much the same as the uncompressed bus, so it could be said it was quite 50/50
The reason why I could get away with such obscene amount of processing on the tracks itself was because of the good drummer. My mentor had a habit to say: "The more consistent the drum performance, the more you can mangle them" The reason for sample usage (at least surely for me and I strongly believe for others too) is that you can do this kind of crazy shaping without having to worry about hihat leakages and hit inconsistencies.
Wow! Thanks for that detailed reply.
I'm going to have a play with the snare when I get some time and see what I can extract out of it using your methodology and my available Logic plugins....which won't be anywhere nearly as 'high end' as the SSL ones
Thanks again, Spede. Its always great to learn something new!
).
If it's any help I can broadly describe what I did. I simply had the goal in my mind when I was tweaking the snare channels.
