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Down the rabbit hole...
#1
"Is it just me or does it smell like the art teacher's office in here?"

Or is there a fungus among us? Tongue

Awesome thing about mix... I'd have turned my nose up at music like this a couple years ago, but all the exposure to the genres has me really liking this a lot.

If you fancy a go at this... kick and bass are pretty tricky. One of the hardest low end issues I've ever faced, anyway. It's also hard to get a decent stereoness here. Very few of the instruments can sacrifice enough low end to move off the the side much, and one of the guitars was icky and I deleted it.

Maybe some more high end?


.mp3    Celebrate.mp3 --  (Download: 11.43 MB)


I'm grateful for comments and suggestions. Thank you for listening!
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#2
(29-10-2014, 02:51 PM)pauli Wrote: Maybe some more high end?

maybe some stereo in the v2? Big Grin



Beware...........Cognitive Dissonance!
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#3
LOL!!

I'll have to figure out what the keyboard shortcut for a mono check is and change it.

This ranks within the top 5 of my engineering idiot blunders... somehow I activated the mono check before I rendered!! I remember listening to Mike Senior's version and being jealous, then listening to mine and thinking it sounded a little snotty. Well, that'd do it.

While I'm on the subject of Mike's mix, he went a completely different direction than I did. The song is listed as "dark break-based dance" and he definitely got a more danceable mix. Not having the artist here to explain his intentions, though, I noticed the oopy-gloopy bass synth was operating in the phrygian mode, which is normally associated with flamenco music and malaguenas... but for classic rock fans the Jefferson Airplane track "White Rabbit" comes to mind, or perhaps "Alone Again Or" by Love (if you haven't heard it, check it out and the entire Forever Changes album... the music is incredible and the story behind it even moreso), so I guess I forced my psychedelic interpretation on it when I shouldn't have. It'll work better I think with more high end and some of the space between notes cleared out a bit, the EQ is a little sloppy at the mo.


.mp3    Celebrate-001.mp3 --  (Download: 11.43 MB)


I'm grateful for comments and suggestions. Thank you for listening!
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#4
Great mix (the stereo one! Big Grin)
- I think the lead vocal could be louder though, it's a bit buried/masked under the percussion and bass.
It gets better when the bgv comes in, but still could use a couple of db push IMHO.
"Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something." - Frank Zappa

Some air moved here
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#5
Patrick... you are the man. You've only joined the board a few days ago and already you've given so many comments. That's fantastic!


I agree about the lead vocal.. I had some concerns about the stereo image even prior to the silly rendering debacle, so I widened it slightly during mastering, That might actually be why the mix got summed to mono during rendering, I might have been checking to make sure the mono side effects of the widener weren't too severe. As a result I'm now feeling the side channels are a bit too hot and it's overemphasizing some of the percussive loops, burying the vocal slightly. I wonder if the vocal should be widened a bit with a plate in addition to the stereo delays already present to help cohere with the background instruments and help keep it dominant?

Also it seems like the backing vocals could be tightened up a bit to keep the choruses from getting a little sluggish.

Thanks for your comments... I'd love to hear some mixes of yours. I checked out your soundcloud page and there's lots of great music.
I'm grateful for comments and suggestions. Thank you for listening!
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#6
Thanks Pauli! I'm used to mix my own stuff, but not so much mixing other's music.
I spend a lot of time producing my own music, which I do in my off time, and there's only so much hours in a day.
It also takes me forever to do a mix, so I need to be engaged emotionally to put that time in, but since I want to get better at it, I might start doing that. I know that the way to get better is practise, practise and more practise.
In the meantime, I thought I could give some feedback... critical listening is an essential skill in this thing, so it's win/win for everyone involved, given that it's honest.

Now I think you are right about the widening, the percussion in your mix are perhaps too big in the side channels.
Adding some body to the vocal might help... otherwise, I suppose you could back off the widening a bit.
"Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something." - Frank Zappa

Some air moved here
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#7
the bass line is gobbling up headroom by the boat load so i'd revisit that as a matter of priority. you should find the vocal will sit better in the mix when you clear out the mud in the low-mids; her vocal is being out-dominated by all the butch machismo action in the sides here. i think i'd smack the bass synth around quite a bit and make a few different tracks from it, and EQ each track to have it's own sonic contribution to the mix - hello distortion toys. at least this way you can pan the lighter elements more out to the sides and leave the weighty stuff near or in the middle. there's also some scope perhaps to automate the panning and get some movement working in an otherwise static arrangement...this is electronic so stuff can move without it seeming odd. the elements with more treble could be hacked to get upto some stereo mischief with fx to your taste. in headphones, it otherwise makes for difficult listening because of the dominant and somewhat weighty elements you have wide in the sides currently and the lack of continuity in the opposite channel. on that front, if you have a beast you want to pan out to a side and the mix is sounding skewed in the stereo panorama, i strongly recommend getting up to some Haas mischief. if you EQ the ghost track with less treble and play with it's timing to best effect (from a phase perspective), it will help retain the balance L and R for the listener without changing the illusion of it's original pan. just watch out for frequency build up though, but normally this wouldn't be too much of an issue in a sparse arrangement, and in a busy one it's likely there will be an alternative instrument that can be panned opposite in order to retain symmetry anyway.

the great thing with electronic music is that we have no conceptual understanding of how the instruments should sound or behave, unlike acoustic stuff for example....we all know how a piano should sound. so this leaves a lot of scope for sonic mischief to support the concept of the song...in stereo Big Grin Wink

go wild Big Grin
Beware...........Cognitive Dissonance!
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#8
Thanks for your review, Dave. I've been struggling with my mixes lately... Tracks seem to lose or gain low end power while I'm Eqing them, I've had the damnedest time trying to figure it out. On a morbid whim I took a look at the sub to see if a connection was loose or something. Found out there's a great big dent in the speaker cone :/ which makes me wonder if I've been way over mixing the bass the last few mixes.

Anyway, your advice is well taken... I'm too conservative sometimes and that can really hold you back on a tune like this. I'll probably be absent a while to get this sub issue sorted and give this one a look!
I'm grateful for comments and suggestions. Thank you for listening!
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#9
Good sound, but I like better the mono version ( I dont like your panning in stereo version ).
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#10
LOL that made me smile. Panning's very much a matter of personal taste, especially in this genre, but I made some pretty serious technical goofs in allowing too much low end in the sides relative to the mid. That's asking for trouble with dance music of any kind.

I did a pretty bad job on this one... very unfamiliar with the genre and didn't reference appropriate material. Thanks for taking the time to listen.
I'm grateful for comments and suggestions. Thank you for listening!
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