Jessica Childress - Slow down

[lydkjell]

Hi all!

This is my mix of this fine song.

I found myself having a lot of problems this mix.

First of all I think that the kick and snare sounds awful, the kick is only a click, with no weight at all, and the snare has alot of ugly resonances between 500-1200Hz and no weight either. There is not much help to find in the OH's either.

I used alot of time making the drumkit sound better but still not happy with it.

The bass and guitar sound fine, but the piano sounds very one dimentional and in my view he or she plays to much, which makes it hard to blend in without taking too much space.

Vocals were fine to me.

Please feel free to comment.

Thanks!

[Daniel Deymon]

Hey lydkjell,

here a couple of advices from me:

- Reduce the volume of the bass guitar, it's way too loud... I guess you used the amp signal, however I mainly used the DI signal with just a bit of the amp signal, though I think the amp signal doesn't bring anything special to the mix.
- Replace the kick drum with a sample. Generating MIDI data on the basis of the transients worked pretty well in Cubase.
- It seems, there are some nasty resonances in the lower mids, maybe around 500 Hz.
- Use a lot more panning, this mix is almost in mono and so feels like someone has squeezed the air out of it.
- Try to make the backing vocals sound more like a unit. I had to reduce the dynamic range with some low ratio compression, tune the vocals with the cubase's native pitch corrector and make a decision which voice is the "lead" backing vocal. Note, that the backing vocals change pitches among the different song parts.

[lydkjell]

Hi Daniel

Thanks for your reponse!

I've been through a periode of denial, but in the end I do agree with your most of your comments, so I've made a new try to make this song right!

"- Reduce the volume of the bass guitar, it's way too loud... "

You're right here, the bass was too loud. I'm using the di signal and running it through a amp sim in paralell, as I did'nt get the miked amp to fit in.

"- Replace the kick drum with a sample. Generating MIDI data on the basis of the transients worked pretty well in Cubase."

Haven't replaced the kick but I think I've got it anyway.

"- It seems, there are some nasty resonances in the lower mids, maybe around 500 Hz."

Do not hear them on my Adam A7s...

"- Use a lot more panning, this mix is almost in mono and so feels like someone has squeezed the air out of it."

Have been a bit braver with panning, I'm generally not a fan of panning really wide unless there is a stereo source, but panned the piano to the left and the guitar to the right with a wide reverb and also widened (!) the OHs.

"- Try to make the backing vocals sound more like a unit. "

Have tried to make the BVs sound more like a unit, think its better now.

Please take a listen and tell me what you think!!

Thanks in advance!



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[Bereket]

I thought I would drop you some comments, first the bass is a little bit too much considering you you didn't put clarity on the kick. That could be achieved by cutting are 400 and boost up 1k for the kick. the next thing I noticed is when jessica start singing I've noticed some ppop which could be removed by hp or specifically by going around 80hz nothing and filter out that one. If you have a time use also cutting chopping it out. thing like that. The other thing is by no means don't bring BVC louder than the artist. It has to support the vocal not take the lead vocal place. what you do for backing vocal is put hp all the way 300 or maybe more depending on your approach. And put too much reverb on backing vocal that will let them to sit back to the lead vocal. Cheers I've enjoyed listening keep on mixing.