Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
El Vuela - AZ Mix
#1
Okay, after about 15 hours, I'm going to call this one done because I can tell that I'm out of m depth here. The way they were recorded/assembled, none of tracks want to blend together and yet at the same time, they're stepping all over each other. There's not enough low end on the guitars and even the bass is iffy, Lowender notwithstanding. (I couldn't get consistent behavior with it because of the source material.)

Anyway, here's my best attempt at this. On the rhythm guitars, I tried to even things out by putting an amp plugin on the three individual tracks with a different simulator on each one and tried to even things out that way but they still felt a bit hollow but also very trebly. I put a deesser on them both to try to knock down about 2kHz and up and that helped but didn't settle it out. On the solo/fill guitars, I tried to up the body and knock down some of the 2.5kHz stuff so they wouldn't poke out as much.

So here's my mix of this. Any thoughts from the peanut gallery on how they have handled some of these problems would be welcome.


.mp3    vuelo-mix-20180615-01.mp3 --  (Download: 8.93 MB)


Old West Audio
Reply
#2
You took on a really hard song to deal with. There is too many instruments and as you've seen it's quite stressful to arrange.

The key word is arrange.

Whatever eq or fx you put on the mix is not gonna matter if your balance is not good to begin with. There is a lot of low end build up as well as mid-range build up.
I would recommend an easier song before taking on a big one like this. Having said that if you really want to deal with the challenge I would start with the following

*arrange sections of instruments and balance them by groups. (drums, guitars, strings, pads, specialfx, etc)

*pick the back bone of your mix. Usually there is always key instruments that will give you structure of a song. Some are very guitars dependent, some are very voice dependent, some very drums or beats dependent. After you picked the foundation instruments, go from there (I would take drums and bass)

*balance your foundation well and mute the rest of the tracks. After you have a solid balance then you start balancing the other instrument groups individually and send them to a master bus.

*use high-pass filters on your eqs on everything but the bass and kick drum. This will clear up low end build up

With those things to do from the start I am confident your mix will sound better but at the moment it's chaos.
Reference other mixes of this song. There is my mix somewhere in there too if you'd like to listen to. I emphasized in a clean sound so you should be able to hear the difference of those few points that I just mentioned. Good luck to you and hope this helps you out. Keep it up.
Reply
#3
Putting things in groups is the first thing I do when loading a multitrack. I've got folders and group faders for everything and often make more (like for each of the two rhythm guitars here so I could EQ them as a single instrument). The problem here is that I couldn't get the session sounding like it was sonically balanced. My ears wanted more mid range in most everything and more low end overall. High pass filters were used on several instruments but apart from the guitars which seem to have been recorded live, everything else was a synthesized part and already heavily shaped as you would expect. That left very few options when it came to trying to fit things in. Some of the frequencies I wanted to try to bring out simply weren't there. Having the bass absent for about a minute after the intro didn't help with balancing the bottom end either, one of the reasons I tried to get more low end in the guitars. As for the bass, there seemed to be little to nothing below about 70Hz. Sure, that'll get you a good bass sound but not the weight and that's why I tried to use lowender, to attempt to fill out some of that region. Not terribly happy with the snare sound either. There's a lot of ring and a good deal of buzz but not a great deal of *crack*. Given the nature of the part, though, it didn't seem to be to be a good candidate for augmenting with drumagog or etc.

Usually on a mix, if I just keep fiddling with it long enough, it eventually starts to come together even when it feels like I'm about to lose control of it. Didn't get that sense with this one which is why I decided to call it early.
Old West Audio
Reply