Hi Peppermark, great title. I had a lot of fun mixing this track. That said, not easy or obvious.
The main job is to find the general atmosphere. Make all the tracks coherent. I opted for a more 3D mix
(just to increase the difficulty, lol...) rather than for an "upfront" 2D mix, easier but without real interest.
I'll let you all like it or not. Your opinions are welcome.
well, that's a different mix i should say! i definetly see (or rather, listen) what you mean by 3D mixing. tracks sound more separated than usual, witch is interesting.
even with that, i still love the punchyness of the drums. kick and snare sound really good.
i do have some nitpicks, but don't know if they will help you achieve your goal with 3D mixing:
- bass grit is a bit too loud! you can turn it down a bit and maybe distort it even more to get that high end to cut through the gtrs
- guitar solos sound like there's too much reverb, so it's a bit drowned in the mix
- use an pitch shifter for the "octave gtrs" and pitch them 1 octave bellow. those gtrs are supposed to "fill the blanks" the gtrs left in that part
- OH sounds a bit overcompressed and the mix a bit muffled. try being a bit more shy in the compression on the OH and bring the high end of the gtrs by boosting them or the whole mix
Peppermark, first of all thank you for taking the time to listen to my mix.
Your comments are really interesting.
Mixing/mastering are fairly complex operations, you know that as well as I do. By this I mean that "retouching" something in a mix
will destabilize the whole work done. For, I never considered this kind of solution. So starting all over again seems to be the only viable solution.
For me the real difficulty in a mix is to properly detect the "mask effects". Example you have a great sound for the drum kit and now you add the bass,
which alone also has a great gift, and wham, everything collapses. This is a typical effect. So in summary, retouching a single track will change the
whole balance and necessarily create problems. That's it, a very personal view.
What really interested me in "Interlude", is a rather subtle mixture between different musical currents. There is obviously a clear "metal" trend.
The "3D" option is not at all obvious under these circumstances. But hey, I tried it and it suits me quite well. And I hope I have convinced you.
While remaining cool...
I just listened to some of your tracks on Soundcloud. I really like. Among other things "the garden" which is related to "Interlude".
Do you plan to put other titles on Cambridge MT?
I'll take it....
Hey Shul, I use these terms personally to try to best explain a sound situation.
In a majority of mixes that I listened to in these posts relating to "Interlude", including the original mix, we can see a common characteristic
which is: everything UPFRONT. This implies in two-dimensional mixing: the width, therefore the stereo and the height which encompasses
the entire sound spectrum from the sub-bass to the extreme treble. And there, the third element is missing, which is depth.
The headphones experience is the most convincing: In an "upfront" mix, all the instruments are on the same line, from left to right.
In a 3D mix we find instruments placed more or less in space: for example a snare that we perceive virtually above the head while in 2D it is
"inside" the head, between both ears.. Completely personal opinion that engages only me...
