You Are The One

[bmullen]

Pretty good sounding mix now.you can only polish a turd so much

[thedon]

Good job

[Pedaling Prince]

Decided to have another go at this one.

Overall, this is a good solid mix. The balance is good, stereo image is wide and involving and you've got a nice solid bass sound going here. However, I feel that the mix as a whole is a little on the dark side as far as frequency balance is concerned.

That acoustic guitar is a major problem, not in your mix specifically but as a track. It has a severe high frequency rolloff and considerable AC hum. The way I dealt with it was with some fairly aggressive EQ: a -24 dB cut at 260 Hz, 3.5 dB boost at 3100 Hz and 16 dB boost at 4800 Hz; I also applied a hipass rolled off at 200 Hz. The low cuts helped address the hum and the mud and the high boosts helped bring back some of the sparkle.

Your electric guitar sound is excellent and the hammond sounds good, but I feel the vocals are a little muddy. Actually, aside from the print-through the vocal tracks are in decent shape and really don't need any unusual EQ. It sounds like you're pulling down high frequencies, perhaps in an effort to remove some noise. If that's the case, I wouldn't; I say it's better to leave the air on the vocals intact and suffer the noise. Also, the piano sounds a little like it's coming out of an AM radio. What I did with it was apply a 4.5 dB boost at 80 Hz to give it a little body, a 5.5 dB boost at 12 kHz to give it some air and to help it stand out and give it a little life I boosted 24 dB at 7600 Hz. I also applied some gentle compression to help it stand out in the mix. Finally, the conga recordings are quite dull in tone; to sharpen them up I applied an 11 dB boost at 2200 Hz, a 24 dB boost at 5500 Hz, a hipass at 150 Hz and some gentle compression.

Normally I don't give such specific advice, nor do I usually apply such aggressive EQ adjustments. However, the source material here had significant technical issues. Normally I would never suggest such heavy-handed adjustments. But with these tracks? They need them IMHO.

One more suggestion. You can hear the noise rising up just before the full band joins the acoustic guitar. This is a little distracting. You might try just leaving the noise of those blank tracks playing along with the acoustic guitar; it'll be more noisy but that's preferable to changing the character of the background noise as that's more distracting IMHO.

[bmullen]

Went back one more time to tweak the eq's and compression on this one

[Pedaling Prince]

Went back one more time to tweak the eq's and compression on this one

OK. My reaction to this went through a bit of an... evolution you might say.

At first, I thought, "Not enough air; the mids sound like they're coming out of an old transistor radio." Then, as the song went on and heard how beautiful the definition among the instruments was, how cleanly the guitars and drums in particular just jump out, how nice and smooth and full the bass was, and I began to realize that the "transistor radio" sound on the higher frequencies fit the song perfectly. It's not "high fidelity" in the traditional sense but it certainly suggests that 70s feel, listening to that tiny radio on the beach on a hot summer day. And when the Hammond hit, and came together with that guitar? That was just magic.

My only remaining gripe is that the vocals still need a little air. They are the star of the show; they need to shine. Try giving them a little air with a 12 kHz boost of 2 or 3 dB.

Otherwise, really nicely done! Love it!

[azwayne]

My only comment here is that there's a certain "poing" in the attack on the bass that I personally find a bit distracting which likely comes from overemphasis of one specific frequency band, probably a lower one.

Otherwise, I agree. You've manged to give this mix a certain sound, a blend that's very appropriate to the era and it fits nicely. Well done.
I'm not actually sure I could do that if I wanted to...

It just goes to show, there's more than one way skin a cat, often many more.
(Heaven help that cat...)