I guess the most notable EQ moves were ~1khz bump for acoustic and electric guitars to bring them forward, and mostly panned out of the way of the drums and vocals
Still not incredibly confident when it comes to balancing layers of the same part or same instruments, mostly just panning and reducing layers that sound too loud
Brought down the volume of instruments during the FX break so that next chorus section could bump back up again; did some editing and volume automation for the ramp up
As I progressed in the project I kept nudging the Pads lower and lower in volume as mix started to feel more cluttered and muddy with so many elements
Most important elements were Drums, Bass, Vox, and Acoustic Guitars; everything else seemed secondary
Parallel compression for the whole mix at the end to beef it up before mastering
It's a hard mix. One that is hard to keep energy in. I think the bad points here is your vocals sound very harsh. Especially that breathy "come to me". Not s fan of the fx you used (if any) as the lead vocal sounds a bit robotic
I believe your listening device or environment is not the best for you as your overall feel of your mix sounds very hot. I think keeping it organic can benefit the mix for now and also you should always reference with different songs of the same genre. That will get you in the ballpark the best way possible.
Not a bad take and I really like how interesting you made that drop/bridge section. Definitely vocals need the work though.
Hey thanks, Shul. I listened to your latest mix beforehand and was wondering what your approach was with those vocals? How light was your processing and your approach for organic?
My environment isn't superb but more likely it's my addiction to hi-end and air, which still gets away from me at times, especially with vocals. For example I could hear how your vocals fell into place no problem.
What are you using to mix? Monitors? headphones? Sometimes having a really high fidelity headphones gives you a fake impression of what your high end really sounds like. It may sound great in your listening system as you mix (because the high fidelity has little to no distortion on the top end), but when you play it in the car, or in cheap headphones or in a small speaker the mix sounds harsh. At the same time having a low fidelity system can lie to you as those usually are very midrange heavy and lack that brittle in sound so sometimes you end up boosting a lot more than what it needs. That's why referencing tracks helps you spot the inconsistencies in frequencies. Pros do it all the time so it's not just a beginner tip.
As far as organic goes sometimes I too emphasize boost on highs and lows but when your midrange is there it's bearable or not that noticeable. I think that's why pro records sound so amazing.. they focus a lot on the midrange and just enhance highs and lows just to put that ear candy on it. Something I'm still learning but I no longer go crazy on my highs like before.
I would say to keep it organic balancing the tracks as whole is one of my approaches. When you balance all tracks to the point where you pretty much hear everything to some degree, the mix slowly tells you what it needs without going crazy on the eq, compression fx etc. When you have things at a good spot, for example if everything sounds too thick in the low end, then you begin to highpass tracks to clear out the low end. In comparison if you solo every track and try to make it sound great in solo, by the time you bring all tracks to the balancing process you get a lot more chaos and now you gotta go backwards to tame or fix some things.
After a while you get used to the most basic moves so you do them without thinking first. For example for me I know every single vocal track gets highpassed from 100hz(depends there are times where I don' highpass vocals but has to be for a specific reason) and below. Once all tracks come in I then I check and see how far up in the freq. it needs to be.
For this particular mix I highpassed the vocals up to 165hz-200hz. I boosted high shelf of 1.3db from 7khz. I did a -4.3db cut at 1.6khz with medium Q. on top of that highpass filter (because the curve of that roll off is not that big) I used a low shelf cut of -6.3 from 200hz down. (I used the ssl channel plugin for this). Again all of these choices were done in reference to all balancing of the tracks. Sometimes you think you are done.. then you tweak something else.. and then you gotta come back to what you thought was good.
19-04-2024, 03:46 AM (This post was last modified: 19-04-2024, 03:56 AM by krujap777.)
Hahaha no problem at all mate, long comments are better than a generic 2-sentence response any day, and thanks for the specifics. This forum is for sharing and I honestly wish I saw a little more of it.
I have Sennheiser HD 650 headphones and Yamahas HS8's w/ Sonarworks. My room is far from perfect but in the headphones it's about as flat as it can get, but like I said before I also know my tendencies to exaggerate the high end (years of listening to non-vocal EDM) which I've been fighting back slowly but vocals are still a "?" to me in terms of a mental mixing roadmap.
Had to go back and that "come to me" was damn loud, I don't think it was as loud in the mix (ignoring the other issues you mentioned) but mastering made it excruciating!
EDIT: I forgot to mention about references, I totally agree but the issue I have is finding similar or comparable tracks when working in a genre like this for the first time. Maybe you have tips on that.
With reference tracks I always isolate the options.. so in a song like this I'd go for some electronic genre like techno, edm, synthwave... similar genres and isolate one thing at a time. how does the voice sound how much brightness, body, how much fx or delays it has etc. Does it sit above everything else or is it in the middle blending with the rest of the music etc. Same way for individual tracks IF you can't find a song that is similar in terms of musical arrangements or 100% the same genre. When nothing matches, isolating each thing helps me.
