Two Bare Hands - Jonathan (better late than never)

I was unable to get the revisions in by the 12th - Was on the road in North Carolina and Virginia with the band. Up to you guys if you want to take this one - I hope you do!

Made two substantial changes to the guitar width and the snare tone. Ran out of time to clean up the vocal. Had a blast mixing this one, thanks everyone for the thoughts and critiques!

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10

0 voters

Sounds cool Jonathan! I love the big full width sound when the whole mix gets going. It’s a lovely, warm tone you have here overall.

For my money, the vocal could maybe use a little less warmth though, as there is plenty coming from the bass already. Maybe automating the low mids to suck out of the vocal once the band gets going in full following the intro.

Nice one!

I forgot that the submission deadline was this past Saturday. (Way too much going on.)

Was I supposed to add a voting poll to this to make it an official submission?

@Jclampitt mentioned the guitars needing more width, and you had mentioned the soundstage needing to be widened. I didn’t have much time to work with it, but I came up with an idea listening to it on the road. Jclampitt suggested using the Waves ADT on guitars, but I’m not crazy about the modulation artifacts it crates (which are cool, but you have to want them). So what I did was checkerboard the mono guitar track and double it with itself. Say you have this progression played four times.

  1. C D G G 2) C D G G 3) C D G G 4) C D G G… then I would cut it four times into different chunks and play it like this:

Original track (top), Doubled track (bottom)
.1) C D G G 2) C D G G 3) C D G G 4) C D G G
.3) C D G G 4) C D G G 1) C D G G 2) C D G G

fortunately there isn’t any section in this song that doesn’t repeat itself at least once :slight_smile: Some quick time alignment and we were in business!

Since you missed the deadline, I personally think it wouldn’t be fair to all the submission into the contest. If a majority of other members agree to let it be included, then go for it.

Nice, Jonathan. Love the width of the guitars. Also blend great with the synth.

In the beginning, v2, and at the end on the verse, the snare seemed a little loud to me relative to the kick. I’m not listening on my regular headphones so this could be way off, but the crash and hh seemed thin to me. But I love the sound of the snare. Would be interested to know about your signal chain! :grin:

I loved the tone on your vocals. Felt a bit muddy to me but I’m pretty sure that might be an artifact of my headphones.

Thanks for sharing what you did with the guitars. Way cool.

Hey man. I know its not perfect…was super pressed for time last week.

I think the snare is a bit loud, but it had to change it after I saw how pushed and bright other people were mixing snares. I should have dropped it a couple db but I didn’t have time to go back and re-do a ton of automation.

I only had about 10-15 min to fix this, but a bad snare can cost you an entire contest. I doubled the snare mix I already had (including the automation) then added a slate sample. That’s all. It was the 3rd Chad Smith sample, I hit it with a UAD Neve 1073 for saturation and then put a Waves LA3 behind it. Then I blended it in.

So there’s the raw track, an XLN Addictive 2 sample, and a Slate sample. But yeah, it is a bit louder than it needs to be.

1 Like

I’ll post those later today or tomorrow :slight_smile:

Sounds good! I agree that the vocals have too much low mids. That’s cool what you did with the guitars! Sounds like it must have been a ton of work.

Huh!! I was super concerned about removing too much of 700, 500, or 250. I squashed 250 a bit with a MBC, but they lost warmth quickly and seemed to get real thin when I went started subtracting more.

I’m really really glad you mention this though. I’ve been struggling a bit with going back to mixing music vocals after doing so much voiceover (where you hardly ever put tone shaping EQ a vocal mic).

Maybe it’s even lower than that, the proximity effect just gets kind of boomy at times. Did you put a HPF on it? If so I would just try moving it up a little to get rid of the boomy stuff.

Are you sure its the vocal? When do you hear it?
I may have forgotten to HP the vocals. But I’ll be surprised if I made a mistake like that.
I’ll check it later today.

Yeah, it’s pretty subtle though, it’s not a bad sounding vocal or anything. Theres just a slight boominess on some words. I notice it more in the intro where it’s more exposed. Like where he says “for the ones” and the beginning consonants of the words “can” and “brain” and “brawn”.

Cool I am happy to have this as part of the contest. I don’t know about others but i say the more the merrier. Nice delay throw on the vocal. Good energy, good balance. I hate to say it but i think that i have been biased by what i read and think that i agree that there is too much mids in the vocals. Guitars are sounding good. I do find that they feel a little weak at 29s but otherwise really good. Well done on this mix it is inspiring, thanks for joining in.

1 Like

Cool! I actually briefly considered doing a similar thing, especially after @Stan_Halen mentioned some L/R imbalances in my mix… but then I thought "what the hell! If U2 can have an entire song (Vertigo) with the guitar panned left and no guitar on the other side, (and it doesn’t impede my enjoyment of that song) Then why can’t I have unbalanced stereo moments in my mix?

In fact, if you listen to the released version of the song, they doubled the rhythm guitar left and right:


(I think they had a different name when they released this - definitely the same band, though.)

As I said, I considered it, then dismissed it as I thought it might “blandify” the stereo field a tad. My taste lately has veered strongly toward very specific “point-source” sounds in the stereo field.

I do like the way you implemented it, though. Good one! :+1:

Good one! No complaints at all from me other than excessive sibilance on the main vocal. You can really hear it in the first verse. And this is just a taste thing but I thought the delay throw was a little distracting. Really nicely done!

Sorry I didn’t get to this before I left for my vacation. I just added a poll to the OP so that you all can vote.