Hi. Here's my mix of this great song. I'm really digging this tune which'll hopefully show in the results. I'm also really proud how this turned out to be, considering some of the aspects in the raw tracks. Those vocals were a b***h to mix; god only knows how many dynamic EQs I threw at them to tackle all those resonances. With LV I exhausted all my insert slots in PT before rendering everything, then I exhausted them again
I felt the chorus was a bit underproduced, so I took the liberty of adding some more drums to it. Adding all the midi tracks was a nice move, that enabled me to add some more "minimoog" tracks onto the chorus.
And pretty much every single synth track got some kind of distortion and/or filtering
Incase anybody was wondering, my main tools I use to craft these kind of processed sounds are actually the A.I.R. plugins in PT: Lo-Fi, Distortion and Vintage Filter. Rarely I go beyond those.
I do not like the sound of your main vocal, snare in verses could have more air and verb to it. But, your choruses sound amazing and epic. Very good mix. How did you get your choruses to sound good, dense, glued together and epic ?
I'm doing my best to mix this thing without adding any additional elements, but I'm not sure it's possible. When you've got more interesting music in the verses than the choruses, is abut of an uphill battle from the beginning. Widening the synth bass is an interesting if unorthodox tactic, but it pays off for sure.
Lots of distortion going on, but there was an awful lot to begin with. I see your point, but I'd personally consider using really hard compression on the individual tracks to get the attitude you're going for without everything getting too fuzzy.
Cool ideas here that I'll have to try out!
I'm grateful for comments and suggestions. Thank you for listening!
i've not worked this, so i'm shooting from the hip....
the danger with adding distortion is that too much of it will cloud the mix because of all the additional spectral material. it works in small doses, but i think you've over done it, as evidenced by the masking issues and the lack of clarity during some moments especially. but in a way this can form part of the vision (intended lack of clarity or simply an alternative sonic statement or a way of distracting the audience from poor quality tracking)? however, with too little definition, you risk fatiguing some of your listeners which in a commercial world might be a dangerous and somewhat costly burden on the revenue stream. there is a lot of merit where a track is less than good (who defines what "good" is or should be in the World of Art anyway????), to disguise it's inherited recorded virtues by distorting even more, but it's very much open to question where and by how much one could get away with this strategy; each situation needs to be evaluated on it's own merit and such an assessment falls into the realms of personal taste as well as being able to assess the Market's opinions accordingly (as would a decent Producer and even then it's.....subjective!). the bottom line at the end of the day, is that we can't fix it in the mix....and in trying to do so we can only "succeed in failing" by losing some elements of the emotional delivery as a consequence. another issue is regarding the genre and especially the concept of the song and whether it can sustain such an approach (let's ignore the band's intended audience and market for the sake of discussion). subjectively i think adding distortion to specific instruments at specific times in the song can help drive the emotional intentions. however, by adding too much of it i.e. keeping the distortion engaged for the entirety of a song, we can lose the impact and it simply becomes a norm which we adjust to, potentially raising the risk of losing the listener's focus and attention. change is good, but too much of the same stuff isn't, kinda thing.
there's a problem somewhere in the final octave which you've overlooked in the mix specifically, and mastering as a Final Inspection quality routine especially. i'm not using tweeters on this audition, just a stereo pair with 7cm woofers, nevertheless it's uncomfortable and burns on occasions. if you can't hear it or feel it, then perhaps you might need to question your monitoring, the condition of your ears....or whether you're taking enough breaks (or all 3 - yikes!)....and if other's giving feedback are missing it?
the sub element of your mix is muddying up the low end somewhat. there's not sufficient clarity between the kick's sub here and the bass line. something that does stick out is the extended decay on the kick's sub which won't help things. perhaps a gate might help tame the wash, but the EQ strategy in the 40Hz to 160Hz two octaves needs re-evaluating; the outcome might give you more headroom too. it's easy to get carried away by the kick's abundant harmonics higher up the spectrum and lose sight of the mischief down in the fundamental zone.....i often beat myself with a big stick to try and keep focus on it - that's not a recommendation by the way! by clearing this up, it would offer some scope for exploting the improved spectral space by offering it to other instruments which would otherwise risk muddying the mix; just a thought. drop a low pass filter with 36dB/octave gradient or more, and sweep it around the 200Hz zone and lower, especially if one's ear doesn't tune into this range easily without being force-fed. referencing decent CD's while doing likewise can help the ear focus on the appropriate detail and offer a benchmark. which reminds me.....i should/must practice what i preach with far greater regularity than i do. lol
a pedantic observation regarding your transition into the chrous; it hits loud and jumps out even at a low monitoring level. this suggests that cranked up you might have over-done it, depending on the spectral elements contributing to the loudness and the ear's non-linear sensitivities of course. some like their toast on the brown side though. subjectively i very much like and applaud the essence behind the attack.
one star? this forum has many juveniles. personally, i think the Thread Rating is renedered meaningless as a consequence. i personally hold NO VALUE to it whatsoever simply because of the complex nature of mixing (and of the extent of ignorance that manifests within it) and i dare say those of us in the more mature camp, including the younger elements with emotional intelligence, will think likewise. there is an assumption that the Rating applies to the Quailty of the Mix herein (who defines what Quaity should be, in what is afterall a highly subjective subject??), but that misses a fundamental point, namely that a thread can have some really decent, objective, balanced opinions by some respected forum participants which could offer other's valuable insights. thus, a one star rating would be nothing less than idiotic and irrelevant anyway and i tend to interpret them in this way! Mike would be doing the forum better justice by removing the column - as it stands, it only cheapens the site and degrades it, in my opinion. i'd give you a 5 simply in saluting your ability to take a different perspective in your vision! it suggests the person who awarded you one star might be envious of your skill-set which comes as a gift at birth; it can't be pirated unlike the joker-with-a-grudge's abundant VST collection, i dare say. if such a "feedback" bothers you, Mike will be able to check the board's admin records because it is stored in the logs. if the thread rating scheme was transparent, this bullsh1t wouldn't prevail. the problem fundamentally, is that the Thread Rating is a feature-set built into forum software and doesn't take into account the varied nature of environments served by such software on the web. furthermore, because there's no stipulated criteria or meaning behind such a system in this forum, it further exposes opportunity for ritual and repeated abuse.....and where there's opportunity, there's an outcome and a consequence.
anyway, keep up the 5 star mixing attitude and especially keep challenging the status quo!
catch you in 2015...i wish you and fellow thread followers herin, a good "transition".
regarding the high frequency grittiness-- I'm familiar with the tracks and I'm not sure what can be done about it. Everything I've tried has either been too much or not enough because the situation changes from moment to moment, and after about a minute of trying to fix it, you can't hear it anymore anyway. Adding some kind of distortion is one of those things that can either help tremendously or make the situation even more difficult when stuff is going on like that. You're either giving yourself enough frequency info to low pass without sounding too unnatural, or if the harmonics are really uneven from the get go, well, you get it. something about the really high resonances on the vocals suggests to me that the chosen mic wasn't fit for purpose... sounds like a cheap condenser to me.
at any rate, though, dodgy tracking can be a boon with an alternative style like this and may well have been intentional. you have the choice to either try and polish it or embrace the low-fi nature of the material and go for a more garage-rock sound.. I prefer the latter for this song.
if I might suggest an interesting reference CD for mixing this song... check out Bibio's "Mind Bokeh." much of the music has a low-fi sound, but it really works for me. shame that it was crushed at mastering, but it might give you some interesting ideas on overall mix tonality. in many of the tracks, it sounds like the entire track has been low passed somewhere around 15 kHz and mildly saturated, and the resulting sound is rich and warm.. but somehow gritty at the same time.
I'm grateful for comments and suggestions. Thank you for listening!
update: I'm finding narrow notches at the resonances followed by very mild saturation works pretty well as far as smoothing out the harshness on the chorus vocals goes. I think you can get away with high cuts in the backing vocals, honestly... they don't don't contribute much IMHO. The conundrum thereafter is that the vocal sounds a bit muffled in context, but EQ cuts on other instruments unacceptably dull the overall tonality and really blunt the most interesting musical features of the song.
So how does one brighten a vocal that's had half of the treble notched out? With a difficult vocal situation like this, we run the risk of being way too technical... at least that's a problem I confront pretty frequently... but a trick comes to mind. Even after the saturation, there are holes in the vocal highs using my method, which is probably why you (Spede) went for the dynamic EQ instead, but I think in this case there are too many resonances scattered around for dynamic EQ to be as effective without spending all of your processing power (and free time). The melody is very simple, though, and it's mostly the sustained notes that need help... it'd be simple to program a midi track to follow the vocal. The right pad, EQ'd properly with proper gain, could transparently fill those holes. Even better... go for a synth with two oscillators (or more), detune as neccesary and spread them out a teeny bit, and you've got much needed stereo width that won't clutter the mix at all. That's a very pauli sort of thing to do anyway, but I'd love to see what you could do with it.
Or you could always rig a multiband distortion setup.
I'm grateful for comments and suggestions. Thank you for listening!
