(28-01-2015, 10:23 PM)laurieharrison Wrote: Didn't like this song all that much till I mixed it.
Quite a challenging one to mix, this - badly recorded vocals, difficult to get the right balance between the verses and choruses. Overall, I felt this needed quite a lot of work to make the song come alive.
The vocals in this mix are quite heavily treated (chorus especially), but I think it needed it. I also added quite a lot of ambience to the synth sounds, plus various delays all over the place - needed some depth and variation.
I'm quite pleased with how it turned out, but very interested in anyone's thoughts (positive or negative).
Laurie, this mix has stunning dynamics, well done for keeping them in! you have a small measure of clipping evident in the lossy file. i'd recommend backing off the brickwall limiter on the master, say to -3dBFS to give the codec headroom to do it's thang.....and bring it back up via peak normalisation IN THE LOSSY CODEC ONLY (caps for emphasis) to say, 0.3dBFS and NOT 0dBFS!!! it will keep the audio clean with consumer grade DAC's (and even a lot of professional ones, eh?).
some interesting and brave production choices in here, i admired your vision. l especially loved the vox effect into the chorus to help with the transition! i'd probably encourage you to push an FX further so you break away from the kind of cliche risk and get into a world of originality; it takes time and effort but it's worth it i feel. using this fx as an example, why leave it like this? how about adding additional FX to it to give it movement, modify it's spectral shape with time, make it pulse, pan it wild, woteva. there's no limit to what you could do here and it would be 100 percent original. think out of the box, go wild, let your intuition speak and keep your logical brain from talking you out of it!
i also liked the way you brought the listener into the song with the selective drum edits on the way in....a gentle, progressive build-up.
you've pushed the Rhode's blips and squeaks right back into the mix. i'm not going to knock your approach, but i'd go for less wetness and bring their level up a touch. i agree with keeping them out of the way in places because i thought they were one of the most irritating noises due to their incessant presence in the song.
one other thing, and i think this one's important; your outro.....and the egtr. the gtr here is buried and it feels to me like you've lost a lot of emotional benefits which this instrument can bring, especially at this stage of the proceedings. pull it out and make the thing wang and i'll have goose bumps!
The outro is THE most important part of the whole song, because it's the last thing your listeners will hear and you will want to make a big emotional impact - they will love you for it.
your mix made a refreshing change to the vanilla out there. nothing wrong with vanilla of course, but simply EQ'ing what's there in the limitations of studio/home tracking isn't what mixing is always entirely about.....and especially not with this genre where some production effort is required in the DAW to get the song out.
great approach! and i admire the fact that you've spent some time deliberating about where to take the song too.
cheers
Dave
