Glad to try the new brainworx ssl-approved emulation on this rather nice track, even though some indications on what he's singing about would have been nice, my Finnish being limited to paiva and kitos (spelling uncertain).
I'm not certain to like this new version of the plug, tho. Compared to the original I find the highs harsher. Dunno. Will probably try and make a comparison between the original bx console G, the new version and ssl's own one.
In the meantime, ahem, the drum recording... and the timing of the bass (and of the drummer, kept wondering who's following who) :-D
Many, many guitar parts. Not certain they're all useful but I like the challenge of using everything.
Time not allowing, I confess I gave up trying to sort out the backing vocals, so I kinda let them be. Sad, because there must be some nice things to do to them, but just not on unpaid time ;-)
Hey mat-noir!
I really like your drum sound! Did you use a sample for the snare and trigger it with a gate or something?
Some things i'm thinking i would've done differently:
I would personally not use that effect on the vocals, i like it to be more open. Though i have to admit it fits this genre.
I miss some warmth in general in your mix.
I would want some more separation between instruments. For example the guitar that's playing all the time is drowned sometimes.
It's really messy when there's lots of instruments playing at the same time especially at 1:30.
Also, did you push a limiter too hard maybe? Sounds like there's some distortion in a couple of places.
Sounds good to me other than that!
Thank you for taking the time to listen and comment!
Actually, as I found the drum sound rather, ahem, let's say "not great" on most mixes I heard here was what pushed me to download the tracks. Which is why I admit I mostly focused on trying to get something out of them, the rest being more of a rough mix.
I ended up triggering kick, snare and toms by cloning the two original tracks and editing the toms, using Steven Slate's Trigger 2 plugin. I kept a wee bit of the original sound in each track, say around 10%. Also I filtered one of the clones to keep hat and cymbals that i ran through a stereoizer from iZotope.
Once the drums sorted out, I also spent some time fixing the bass playing, most often by moving bass notes onto the kick and sometimes the other way round depending upon who played most out of timing :-)
As I said, the rest is more of a quick and rather rough mix. The guitar arrangement being a bit weird imo, it would have taken time to rearrange all of the parts to make some air at times. I also listened to other tracks posted on Soundcloud by the same artist and they all seem to share this feature. But you're totally right to mention the absence of separation, it's kind of "my thing" as my taste goes towards compact and tight mixes rather than airy ones...
I'm not too happy with the vocal sound, at least for the "quiet" part at the beginning and I prefer it when it goes heavier (I did start trying to "Melodyne" it, but quickly gave up). I actually moved that part on another track to apply a different treatment. Which leads to distortion : it's not a couple of places, it's everywhere. :-) But it comes from harmonic distortion plugins rather than a mix overload. I confess not being a very audiophile person and I'm rather reaching out to grabbing raw energy, and that often comes at sound pureness' expense. Besides, I find it translates rather well on all kinds of consumer devices and gives a "grit" that I like and, also based on what I heard on the artist's Soundcloud, would probably not put him off.
A final note on the mastering, or absence thereof : again, I did not had much time to spend so I went for iZotope's Ozone 8 "master assistant", which allowed me to try it out. It did not touch the overall eq, except adding one or two very narrow bands of dynamic eq in the mids, and setup the maximizer in a way still respectful of the overall dynamics, as the measured PSR remains in the green zone (according to Ian Shepherd's Meterplug).
