Monsieur Periné - Encanto Tropical

[mikej]

Hi!

It sounds like you gave the mix a pretty thorough listen! Really appreciate the comments.

I'll have to revisit the mix and investigate a couple of the points you raise in more detail as I am not 100% sure regarding a couple of things.  I think I can remember enough though.

My approach was to attempt to get a decent mix but to try and do as little damage as possible, and to also try and get a bit of that island atmosphere in the mix too. Ha.

I didn't add any extra saturation as such, as a separate thing, but I did use an analog modelling eq on the master bus and a channel compressor.  - More because I like the plugins, rather than for the saturation as such.  The saturation can be switched off though, so might be interesting to check the difference with it switched off.

The whole thing was recorded from a balcony overlooking the Carribean sea it says.  I am pretty sure it's the waves, birds and wind noise you can hear in the background.  The wave sound is made a feature in the video of this track. 

For the video I am not sure if the waves were recorded as a seperate track, or just boosted from the given tracks.  We didn't get a seperate track of wave noises I don't think, but it is definitely there in the video.  I do wonder if it is possible to create a seperate set of paralleled compressed tracks or something to get more of the noise.  Not sure if anyone has tried doing anything like this yet?

I'm wanting to check now to see if I did make any compression errors with the backing vox.  I have a feeling the raw tracks did sound a little saturated though, so I'm curious to check now to see if it is something I did by mistake.

I mixed it without reverb, but I felt I wasn't getting quite enough atmosphere through, so I took a risk and put a reverb over the whole mix. I was being as careful as I could, as it really did feel like I was taking a chance haha!

I was a little worried in hindsight, as a few days later it occured to me that it meant I had put reverb on the bass as well...  I spent a bit of time finding the right kind of reverb and I think it was a Bricasti impulse called 'valley' or something like that I used in the end.  That's the kind of thing I was looking for anyway, and I added it as lightly as I could. 

So yeah, I didn't worry too much about the noise and the hiss as I wanted that atmosphere in.  I tried my best to kind of pan the mics as well as I could as I thought they were placed when the recording was made.

To be honest, in general that sort of noise doesn't bother me much, if I feel it adds to the atmosphere.  Interesting thought to use a denoiser though.  It doesn't occur to me unless it's a really bad recording rescue or something, and in this case for me, I wanted the noise in!

I find these more 'natural' mixes really difficult. I always feel kind of caught between thinking am I doing too much, or not being brave enough.

Listening to some of the other mixes I think I could afford just a touch more kick & bass to come through.

Thanks again for giving it a listen.

Cheers!