Hi Jean Marc, thanks for giving it a listen!
I like their latest stuff too, and some of their old er stuff. They cop a lot of flack, but I find that really strange, because they make great stuff. There are quite a few Waves plugins I use on every mix, and have been for a long time now.
I don’t like the vocal tone, but that might be the recording more than your processing. It sounds a bit constrained/narrow, like some important frequencies are missing
The lead vocals, the saxophone and the lead guitar solos were the most difficult elements to mix, in that order. I’m not sure if the vocal mic wasn’t quite suited to the artist, but his voice had some really harsh overtones that made it sound too “hard” and intense for the type of music. There were also some intermittent, rogue overtones too, that were really tricky to tame. I ended up using Waves F6 on those. If you listen to the last word on the 1st mix I posted, there is a really biting tone that I just had to deal with. I nixed it with mix F6 on mix 2. He is obviously a fantastic singer, but for whatever reason, the recording didn’t seem to flatter his voice too much.
I have to admit, as much as I don’t usually like very loud mixes, this ones sounds great even though it is VERY loud. Well to be honest it does sound too compressed but only for a few seconds in the loudest sections (most notably from 3:23 to 3:27). You certainly did a great job of making this sound both good and loud. I still don’t understand why people keep on trying to push the loudness to the limit when the same thing would sound just as good or even better with a slightly bigger dynamic range, but I commend the technical prowess.
I agree that it is probably louder than it needs to be. I think around -10dB LUFS would suit this style of music. I did push for loudness on this one, but it was more of a personal engineering challenge rather than a deliberate stylistic choice. I was working on the theory that the more “loudness potential” you build into your mixes before your master buss, the less invasive processing you need to put on your master buss, and the impression of dynamics and punch is retained, regardless of whether the artist decides to get it mastered loud or not. I’m pretty happy with the tactics I’ve discovered of recent times, and I think this mix illustrates that those tactics work.
Do you mind mentioning where exactly the DBX 160 and the RS124 are used in this mix?
The DBX160 was on the snare only, but I put the RS124 on the Overheads, the bass, the acoustic guitar, the electric lead and rhythm, the saxes, the Rhodes, the piano, and the harmony vocal groups.