Lead Inc: Inner Circle (Robert's Mix)

[Robert]

I really like this band.
All comments welcome

[chuck moe]

I'm digging everything except for the drums seem low and the snare seems....loose and flabby to me. I like the vocal treatment.

Cheers

[Robert]

Hi, Chuck.

Thanks for your kind words on the mix. Could you explain 'loose and flabby' to me, please. It's not a term I'm familiar with.
Maybe it's just down to your own personal preference on how prominent you like particular drum components to be in your
own mixes. Sometimes (I feel) drums can unbalance a mix by being too loud in some songs - so getting the kick, snare and
bass working together first sets the general foundation balance for building the rest of the mix. The drummer from Lead Inc
is usually around; his feedback would be most welcome too.

[dcp10200]

Hi, Chuck.

Thanks for your kind words on the mix. Could you explain 'loose and flabby' to me, please. It's not a term I'm familiar with.
Maybe it's just down to your own personal preference on how prominent you like particular drum components to be in your
own mixes. Sometimes (I feel) drums can unbalance a mix by being too loud in some songs - so getting the kick, snare and
bass working together first sets the general foundation balance for building the rest of the mix. The drummer from Lead Inc
is usually around; his feedback would be most welcome too.

I think what Chuck means is that the snare doesn't have enough transient attack, listening to your mix I noticed that the drums are low and sound like they haven't been processed to fit into the rest of the mix. It seems like you've went for a more raw sound on this mix, which is a cool idea, however this has lead to the mix being muddy in the low end.

I would say for this mix, use more of the top snare 1 mic. If you have access to a gate that has a sidechain in it, use the snare trigger track as a gate source for the top snare mic and use the bottom snare track ungated to fill in the ghost notes. Heavier tracks like this really need the drums to punch through to get that aggressive sound. Right now the drums just seem seem have much punch.

The low end of your mix as I mentioned seemed flubby to me. There's a build up in the 200-500 Hz range that really makes the mix muddy. The culprit to me seems to be the relationship between the kick and the bass, try using a sidechain compressor triggered from the kick and maybe a dynamic eq around 150-200 Hz to clear up the mud.

Overall there are good ideas here but the mix needs some tweaking.

Cheers,
Dcp

[Robert]

Thanks, Dcp. That gives me a lot more more information.
I think I need to look at the low-end response of my listening environment.

[Robert]

Back again.

After comparing my mix against hard rock reference material, I'm not finding any great dis-similarities over the sound spectrum and the apparent loudness. Of course, I'm making that comparison listening straight from the DAW on my mixing monitors (compared to listening to an MP3 online with 'ordinary' PC speakers or headphones). I've done the car test, the ghetto blaster test and hi-fi test and there's nothing really outstandingly 'wrong' sounding in this mix for this genre of music. I don't want to tamper with things in my listening environment (as yet) and hope that Mike is around for some commentary.

[dcp10200]

Back again.

After comparing my mix against hard rock reference material, I'm not finding any great dis-similarities over the sound spectrum and the apparent loudness. Of course, I'm making that comparison listening straight from the DAW on my mixing monitors (compared to listening to an MP3 online with 'ordinary' PC speakers or headphones). I've done the car test, the ghetto blaster test and hi-fi test and there's nothing really outstandingly 'wrong' sounding in this mix for this genre of music. I don't want to tamper with things in my listening environment (as yet) and hope that Mike is around for some commentary.

Interesting, out of curiosity what's the mix you used as a reference?