Colour Me Red - Nate

[HbGuitar]

Hey Nate,

Listening to version 3. There are a lot of things i like about this mix. Vocals are great and so is the overall instrumental tone and balance.

Two things I'm not sure about;

1. The snare seems a little bit papery with not as much thud that one would expect around 200-500 hz. It also seems to be more prevalent in the side channels than the central channel which suggest to me a balance issue between the OHs and snare close mics.

2. The bass/kick balance seems a bit off - the kick is slightly over powering the bass - most noticeable in the drop section at around 2:45-2:50. I can't really put my finger on it (levels, compression or eq) but it feels discordant rather than harmonious

If you can tweak these two effectively then i think it will improve your overall balance.

keep it up!

Cheers, Simon

[nate]

Simon,

Thank you for the feedback. I really appreciate the comments. With the bass/kick, you are very close. I employed some sidechain compression on the bass from the kick. I wanted to get some more movement in the sub sonics an so I took a stab at that technique. I'll balance the two better based on your input.
With the snare and OH I'll also revisit that to balance it better.

Thank you again!!

[nate]

Well, Here's my adjustments. The snare had some heavy handed compression on it so I rolled that back to get a better sense of the decay. As far as I can hear that helped with that wafery-ness that was present before. I could do some drum replacing with the snare via gate to midi... could be fun to hear what could be sampled in.

Bass is brought more forward, more grit is present. And the kick is now brought down a tad by virtue of the bass being brought up.

Hope you like it!

I'll give this a day but I think this might be the one for Mike to review.

Thanks!

[Mixinthecloud]

Two comments on your latest mix. I find the kick to be a bit too thick and dominating the low end too much. Also, while the snare sounds pretty cool, it just seems a bit out of place to me. Too distinct and not acting as part of the pulse of the ensemble which I think it could be more a part of. Other than that, not bad.

[Mike Senior]

Listened to the version-four mix. Lovely meaty kick-drum sound, but it does seem to overpower the rest of the mix a bit. For me this isn't just a balance issue, though, because the kick takes the back-beat during the verses and seems to slightly imbalance the groove there as a result. To be fair, the snare is also nice and strong, although the toms feel then very underpowered by comparison, and the kit as a whole also sounds more hip-hop than it does roots/rock. Were the rest of the production also in line with a more programmed perspective, I reckon you'd get away with it, but as it is the comparatively conventional guitar and vocal sounds make it less convincing as a vision for me.

The bass guitar has a nice muscley sound -- not too wiry, but with plenty of note definition so that we can really appreciate the details of Joe's performance. As with many mixes on this sub-forum, the low end of the bass feels a bit underplayed, but if you were going to add much low end to it you might have to rein in the low end of the kick to avoid your overall LF levels getting out of control. The guitar sounds are appealing in a general sense, and the acoustic guitar/banjo pick noise is well handled to avoid those instruments poking out of the balance too much. Overall, though, the combination of bass and guitars is giving you too much low midrange, I think, so some careful dips in that region across those parts (or even across a buss of them all) might bring some benefits there.

I'd personally bring the lead vocals up a good decibel or so, and also add something to make them sound a little less starkly separated. I like the idea of upfront vocals, but I think you could still add some width and/or a hint of some kind of acoustic without distancing them unduly, and that way they'd seem to belong better with the guitars/drums, I reckon. Just something like a hint of stereo slapback would do the trick, I'd have thought.

The same issue about effects applies to the backing vocals too, although there I'd probably bring them a little down in level overall. Also, it seems a bit odd that the backing vocals move over to the left for the Outro, and then hop over to the right again for the penultimate phrase, returning for the final phrase. Pan stunts are all well and good, but this one just seems a bit random -- not mad enough to be a feature, yet not quite logical either somehow. A lot of listeners seem to be sharing earbuds these days, though, so maybe it doesn't matter...

Thanks for delivering another distinct vision -- there's some serious punch and attitude here!