Now that I’ve commented on everyone else’s mix, here’s mine! Have it at…
-I tend to make things really wet, so I tried to hold back on the reverb. Hopefully it still sounds glued and natural.
-My philosophy, unless there’s something really really wrong, is to find whatever the artist fell in love with and highlight that. So I used the amp sim guitars that Big Al provided even though I wasn’t excited about how dissimilar the tones were and how they didn’t seem to lend themselves to panning. But I notched out a bunch of whistle tones and found a balance I’m pretty happy with. Cheers to @redworks for inspiring me to bring out the palm muted guitars.
-I would have loved to have the drum multi-tracks. There are a lot of harsh frequencies in the cymbals that I want gone.
-I didn’t tune any vocals. If you want perfect pitches, you should sing them. Otherwise, I assume that you signed off on your performance.
All feedback is welcome, thanks for listening and thanks to Big Al for providing the track!
It is sounding good. I am glad that i could inspire somebody even just a little bit. Good thing that you mentioned the vocal tuning. I 100% think you should at least give it a gentle tuning but i hear where you are coming from in that the tuning should be done before it ever gets to mixing. It does pull down your version for me. Otherwise you have a good frequency balance going on, good movement and the overall dynamics are good. Thanks for getting involved.
the reverb on the main voxs didn’t seem to match up with the background voxs so it made the main vox less cohesive…
I would have liked the rhythm gtrs in the solo to be brought down to highlight the solo…in some parts they seems to overpower the solo.
The one “ahh” voice coming in on the left side in the chorus was pretty jarring each time…if not tuning as a solution maybe some reverb, or delay to mask it, or lower it in the mix.
I’ll have to play with that. I typically send all the vox to the same reverb, like they’re all doing one take together in the same room. In this mix, I sent the lead and bvox to different reverbs.
I actually don’t think it’s JUST the rhythm guitar! The acoustic and rhythm are both more or less center there and they seem to be adding up to this accent pattern. I thought about taming it, but it didn’t seem to interfere with the solo and I liked that it was the only time it happened in the song. I could probably spend a bit more time automating reverb throws in the solo…
Yea… it’s too high and it’s distorting when it hits the tape saturation. I noticed when I was in “mastering”, but it was too late to go back and fix it. If I had given myself more time, I would have brought it down a bit and maybe added some light ping-pong delay…
Very good mix. I agree with the comment about the “Ah’s” coming in too strong on the chorus in the left channel. There’s something about the reverb you chose for the lead vox that isn’t sitting well with my ears (and I love me some verb!). Maybe a reverb that doesn’t bring out so much roundness would have worked better. Anyway, good job.
Had a good listen to the mix. There’s some things I’m really digging about the mix - there’s a lovely thump and pump thing going on, and I’d love to be able to do that in a mix.
I’m noticing a number of different reverbs between guitars, vocals and background vocals. For me, at certain points of the song my head was swimming in a weird space. At other times it was beautiful. Now, I find the tone for the guitar in the solo is my favourite of all the mixes. You’re close to that elusive “Eric Johnson” violin tone that has become my life’s mission to achieve!
Something that I realised in an early mix that I made, was if the bottom end wasn’t sorted out the mids just clashed. So I spent a stupid amount of time getting the kick, the bass and the low mids away from each other into their own space. In your mix I find by the end, my ears are quite fatigued by the low end.
By the way, if you don’t mind, can I ask how you got the tone for the solo???
Thanks for the thorough listen @madpsychot, you have some really thoughtful feedback.
I think I know what you’re hearing, and I may have still been too intense on some of the individual reverb sends. A big thing for me right now in my practice is balancing the reverb I give to a track to give it some life with the reverb I send everyone to. Maybe THAT’s not even the right thing to do (for some mixes). I might try another mix with less reverb, or at least differently balanced reverb.
I probably could have scooped out some low-mids from the guitar tracks. I may have been able to do more with the bass guitar as well. I had trouble getting it to not seems so… subby. It was like it was recorded for a trap record. I really wanted to get some more string noise but couldn’t seem to get it to sit right. I hear you, and I’m pretty stoked about the low end in the mix, so I wonder if that would change how you’re hearing it…
Yea man, I was excited about that too!
-I have a “de-clicker” that’s taming some of the pick noise
-Waves F6 is attenuating 100hz-ish which I think was just body noise or lower string noise
-a little bit of cla-2a
-a send going to a short reverb that I just love putting on leads
-another send going to a long slap delay at 140ms
I’m really into de-essers on instruments other than voices - you can tune them to get rid of that SSSSSS frequency - wherever it is on the spectrum. I’m going to be studying reverbs a lot more - up until recently I was throwing reverbs on every single instrument and then scratching my head when my computer would just freeze at 100% CPU.
I’m really interested in sending reverbs to delays and delays to reverbs (and reverbs to reverbs). Like you, I’m trying to get that confident “enough is enough” point, because some of my mixes sounded like they were underwater, while others sounded like they were recorded in a small bathroom!
I’ve realised that now! I think the thing that this mix contest has taught me (for the first time may I add) was how important the following things were before and after you mix a song:
Have an actual vision for the mix (rather than my mix while you work it out)
Have a workflow that actually works
Make decisions and fix mistakes with conviction
Previously my vision would change while I mixed the song. That would be like changing the recipe of a dish while you’re cooking it! I can see the value of tweaking your vision - and discovering something while you mix, but starting without vision is a recipe for disaster.
My workflow (I thought) was good. But scrolling endlessly through plugin folders trying to gain inspiration (see number 1 on the list!) and then hoping for the best was not doing anything for my creativity. For this mix, I had my channel strip set, my busses ready to go, a master bus sorted, a spectrum analyser up and running from minute 1!
Number 3 is my work in progress. Big Time! But I feel I’ve come so far forward in this respect. I listen to mixes in different settings, at different times of the day, and I take notes. The gap in my knowledge is once the notes are created, how I can actually fix the mistakes I hear.
Have you spent any time sending test tones through plugins, tweaking them, and looking at what happens on a spectrum analyzer? I think that exercise really helped me get to a place where I’m not looking through plugins “for inspiration”, but hearing a sound in my head and reaching for a plugin because I know it will get me there.
Yeah, I’ve made a point of testing the same guitar / bass / synth piece through different plugins. I feel like I’m getting to a point where I can pull up a compressor and use it not only to control the dynamics, but affect the feel of the sound as well. I feel I need to work a lot harder to do the same for my busses, so that I can get my reverbs and delays working for me and not against me.
