01-11-2020, 03:01 AM
Thanks for the detailed feedback!
I agree that the drums sound surprisingly chill in the commercial mix, esp. for this genre. I'm a bit of a drum nut myself, so definitely felt a need to push them a little bit more forward in the mix, though I may have overdone it a bit with the snare. Upon second listen, it's a pretty bright. Having individual drum tracks would have really helped here. Hard to really make things punch when all you've got is the stereo stem, cuz you can't smash / distort the stem nearly as aggressively as you might an individual drum mic. Ah well.
Indeed spent a lot of time balancing vocals on the front end. After that, I did the best I could to get everything as present as possible by high-passing and distorting the high end of the vocal in parallell, but it did start to create sibilance issues for me, which I had to counteract with a heavy dose of de-essing. The sort of hyper-sibilance of the commercial release really is a testament to the original engineer's patience. I imagine it took a good bit of tweaking to get all those breath sounds that up front in the mix without becoming too harsh.
I tried a bit of deliberate clip-gain automation on the backside all the words in the lead vocal to achieve the same result, but it came across as a bit too much in my version. Without time to do another pass at the automation, I ended up pulling the clip-gained vocal down in the mix a bit to counteract the issue. I could have definitely been a bit more careful and also used clip-gain to counteract S-type syllables on the front end. I bet if I just went through and cleaned up this automation I could pull that vocal to the front a few extra dB.
Side-chain compression did prove a bit useful, specifically for getting the the one pad-type synth to sit back when the vocal came in, though on review I maybe overdid the compression ratio by a factor of 0.5 or so.
Didn't think to put an 1176 on the vocal (I think I just used the generic channel strip comp in Pro Tools), but in hindsight the 1176 would have imparted a nice, gritty character to the male vocal that would have definitely benefitted it, presence-wise. I usually only think to reach for that comp on drums, but should start experimenting with it on more sources.
I remember that podcast episode on distortion, and could def afford to give it another listen.
I agree that the drums sound surprisingly chill in the commercial mix, esp. for this genre. I'm a bit of a drum nut myself, so definitely felt a need to push them a little bit more forward in the mix, though I may have overdone it a bit with the snare. Upon second listen, it's a pretty bright. Having individual drum tracks would have really helped here. Hard to really make things punch when all you've got is the stereo stem, cuz you can't smash / distort the stem nearly as aggressively as you might an individual drum mic. Ah well.
Indeed spent a lot of time balancing vocals on the front end. After that, I did the best I could to get everything as present as possible by high-passing and distorting the high end of the vocal in parallell, but it did start to create sibilance issues for me, which I had to counteract with a heavy dose of de-essing. The sort of hyper-sibilance of the commercial release really is a testament to the original engineer's patience. I imagine it took a good bit of tweaking to get all those breath sounds that up front in the mix without becoming too harsh.
I tried a bit of deliberate clip-gain automation on the backside all the words in the lead vocal to achieve the same result, but it came across as a bit too much in my version. Without time to do another pass at the automation, I ended up pulling the clip-gained vocal down in the mix a bit to counteract the issue. I could have definitely been a bit more careful and also used clip-gain to counteract S-type syllables on the front end. I bet if I just went through and cleaned up this automation I could pull that vocal to the front a few extra dB.
Side-chain compression did prove a bit useful, specifically for getting the the one pad-type synth to sit back when the vocal came in, though on review I maybe overdid the compression ratio by a factor of 0.5 or so.
Didn't think to put an 1176 on the vocal (I think I just used the generic channel strip comp in Pro Tools), but in hindsight the 1176 would have imparted a nice, gritty character to the male vocal that would have definitely benefitted it, presence-wise. I usually only think to reach for that comp on drums, but should start experimenting with it on more sources.
I remember that podcast episode on distortion, and could def afford to give it another listen.