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The Wind - Joe P mix
#1
The tracked drums on this sounded great. The lead vocals did NOT sound great! The backups were much better, but the tracking plan was weird. Why does every indy song have to have a Rhodes piano in it? That track could have been ditched if it were up to me. Acoustics sounded good. This whole song could have been those awesome drums, (better) lead vocals, acoustic guitars, a couple leads, and large group backups. My opinion.

THE MIX

- Lead vocals could go down a pinch or just do an automation.
- Don't love what I did with the snare (a little squashed)
- Stopped working on the backups since I didn't feel like cutting them up to EQ each part of each stereo track.
-Mixed in Logic on Sennheiser HD600s (that is to say, I didn't do a lot of extra listening on this one)

Other people's mixes I've heard:
More often than not, I hear really thin and tinny electric guitar intros. They are waaay to thin. I'd recommend getting a full bodied sound out of that track for the first few bars and either automate the low-mids down a little once the song kicks in or sidechain compress that track with the acoustics or something that will tame it when the instrumentation is in full effect (probably too much comp., maybe just mult the beginning). Might not even need that if it's just EQed nicely to begin with. I will say that most people did a good job on the lead vocals with all things considered. One mix there was a kick drum that was way too bubbly. Like too much beater mixed in and not enough booom. That boom is the best part of this song. If I mess with this one again, I wanna bring it out a little more myself.

Things to think about:
Think about selling this song. No offense to anyone, but I wanted to turn off the track once that first guitar came in on a lot of these mixes. Fortunately, I didn't since the rest of the song was much better. I don't love the tone I got from my intro bars on this one, but it's full enough to keep listening to and I think the listener will settle in once the drums, etc roll in.

Comments welcome.


.mp3    The Wind 6.mp3 --  (Download: 7.33 MB)


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#2
Hello joepalumbo and welcome!I agree with you about the snare, the guitar is a bit muddy and needs a little more meet.Also the kick needs to be louder to give that feeling you said.One more thing, i found vocals and backs, are way to loud on the mix.
keep up.
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#3
Welcome joeplumbo this is a pretty good mix of this song and a first post ,which i didn't have much luck with !
I have to agree with gopner with the vocals and the snare !
Good work Big Grin !

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#4
Thanks folks!
Yea, now it's bugging me too. I might go in a toy around with it a little more. The dullness and muddiness (I think partially due to the way I employed the reverb) of the first guitar is a little disappointing.
I might start the snare, and all vox from scratch with a new approach.
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#5
Thanks for the replies folks!

Here's an update. (There's a limiter on the stereo bus for volume's sake. I didn't max anything out so don't think it damages the mix but let me know if you hear any denigration to the sound... minus what you're hearing from the mp3 compression rate.)

Made a lot of changes.

-re-EQed the GUITARS and managed the spring reverb sections a little better (took out some of the cloudiness). During the intro bars I put a rBass plugin slightly emphasizing 73hz on the guitar and automated it out once the song kicked in. This just added a more body in the spot where there was no other music to compete with, and then the body dropps out when 10 more guitars are added (ha). Oh! and I made that into stereo track by making a duplicate and bumping one back a few milliseconds and bumping the other forward a few milliseconds and hard panning each track.

- Mixed the MAIN VOCALS again using both a large hall reverb with long pre-delay (can't remember exactly how many ms) time and a mixed in swirling stereo delay. I still think that there's a frequency I can't zero in on that has to be pulled out a little.

- BACKUPS are pulled down and adjusted as much as I could stand to deal with them.

- RHODES piano was turned into a stereo track and widened and has a different reverb setup.

- Tweaked the DRUMS. This includes, remixing in the snare and modulating the snare, adding more overall 'boom' to the kick and emphasizing it in the two kick drum breaks earlier in the track with an EQed reverb with a 36ms predelay. This gave it a lot of depth and space to hear when the guitars dropped out. Plus a number of other eq and compression tweaks to the kit.

- Added automation where I thought little nuances should be exploited.

Comments welcome.
Enjoy! (320kbps)


.mp3    The Wind 9 + limiter.mp3 --  (Download: 7.42 MB)


soundcloud.com/joepalumbo
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