Fragile Thoughts

[Mike Z]

There are only seven tracks here and most of them have bleedover. The percussion track seemed the hardest to handle since some of it was lost in the bleedover. The bass track also has some fairly severe noise. Here are the main things I did:

Denoised the bass track with iZotope RX and processed it with the “Deep Bass 9” preset in Gtr Solo 3.
Did substitution on the kick and snare. Added pan automation to the overhead on the tom-tom licks.
Pared the percussion track down to just the ratchet. Made new MIDI tracks for the shaker, chimes and bongos/congas using the closest sounds I could find in Xpand2. My bongos/congas could be improved.
Looped the first 4 bars of the guitar and placed the loops in the intros/verses.
Put a short mono-to-stereo delay on the guitar chorus.
Copied the guitar chord “chops” to a separate track.
Deleted non-vocal sections from the vocal track and keyed a compressor from the guitar chops & snare to reduce their bleed-over.
Added miscellaneous volume & pan automation as well as short and long reverbs.

[jeremias666]

I used izotope rx on the bass too.

I like the ambience you got on the drums.

I like the guitar sound but i would remove some low mids or maybe add some hi mids.

The shaker feels too loud. I think i made it too loud in my mix and its not as loud as yours.

I like what you did with the congas.

The chorus lacks some punch, boosting the guitar could help getting that big chorus feelling.

And i would like to hear the bass a little more.

Nice mix overall.

Feel free to comment on my mix.

[Mike Z]

Thanks for listening & commenting!

Drum ambience: I have been working with the short and long reverb technique Mike Senior has written about. The snare and overheads both have about 2 dB more short reverb than the other instruments/voices so that may be what you’re hearing.
Guitar EQ: I don’t play guitar & sometimes don’t have a good sense of EQ’ing them. I ended up with 4 guitar tracks all EQ’ed the same - a high-pass at 80Hz and a 3dB bump at 4kHz.
Shaker loudness: I raised the gain just as I was finishing up (& getting tired of) the mix so it could be a bit much.
Congas: Glad you like them, I don’t. It’s a 4 bar loop. The high conga is on one track the lower is on another. One track is panned slight left, the other slight right.
Chorus guitar: I raised the bass 3dB to try to make the chorus bigger, perhaps more on the guitar would have helped.
Bass: the “deep bass 9” preset I used appears to have some extreme compression in it. Maybe a bit more volume would help.

[Mike Senior]

You've gone a great job of giving this track a more hi-fi feel, with your de-noising, effects, panning, and added guitar layers. I do wonder whether you've sanitised it a bit much, though. It's still basically a band in a room, and it's sounding a bit like an overdubbed production now! That's a considerable achievement on a technical level, so I can't help but applaud it in its own right, but I think it might be a disservice to the original intent of the music and performance.

I do like the way you've managed to give the choruses a certain amount of weight, presumably by virtue of your multing scheme, so well done on that front too. I like the percussion stuff you've done with the percussion on the whole, especially in the choruses, but that opening ratchet feels a bit too in my face. Could there be a bit more weight to your kick sample? It seems a bit overpowererd by the snare, even on my big speakers.

Thanks for posting!

[Mike Z]

Thanks for the feedback! Yes, I went a overboard on sanitizing things given the tracks. While I mixed I wondered if it was recorded in a club before or after hours when a crowd wasn't around.