Here’s my take on the song. I thoroughly enjoying diving in and mixing it! What I did: I added a bass and an “ambience” track. I also took some liberties with the arrangement as far as the background guitars and piano, and shortened the break before the solo.
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Many thanks @holster for running this contest and @Cristina for giving us the opportunity to mix your beautiful song. Particularly favorite “moments” for me are the lyrics and phrasing at the beginning of verse 2 and the background vocals at the end.
I should say that I found your mix well balanced and nicely edited. The additionnal tracks work really great with your idea of the song.
Your mix is really dry a found (at least not that wet) but the overall tone doesn’t suffer of that choice.
I don’t have things to complain about. To be really picky, I would only wish to hear more attack from the kick but nothing more.
Very good mix. The only thing that doesn’t sit well in my ears are the E notes the bass is playing during the solo. I think it would be better playing C# or A. Plus I think that cutting that part of the bridge takes away of the climax. Good luck!
Nice vocals tone and verb.
Generally, i prefer more upfront drums (my taste)
The move you did around the bridge is not what i prefer.
Like you had an unfinished idea.
BTW i loved to listen to your creative work
Thanks for the comments guys! The edit in the break: this came about because I started out thinking I’d do a BIG reverb for the whole “wasteland” idea, but found I kept dialing back the FX on the vocal because I liked the intimate feel to @Cristina’s performance. In the process of doing that, the “yell” at the end of the break just didn’t seem to fit anymore with the very melancholic introspective mood of the song, and even started sounding harsh and a little “forced” to me. So I thought I’d give this version a try and ended up liking it better for my version of this song. I feel the guitar in the break adds enough anger/frustration/dissonance to get the emotion across…
Anyway, if I haven’t already, I’ll be sure and go through and give your mixes a listen and vote when I have a chance. I’m really enjoying hearing how others are approaching this song.
@Jerze - Thanks for the kind words! I’m glad you noticed that ambient track. I created it with this FREE Ambient Reverb from Stone Voice. (http://stone-voices.ru/vst/ambient_reverb) I snipped Cristina’s first arpeggiated chord and ran it through the reverb and flipped the “freeze” switch to create a drone. Then I kept feeding it every now and then with a harmonic or another chord when I wanted to emphasize a beat or word like “lies” on “…everybody lies” or “place” ("…when we get out of this place") in the second verse. I liked it so much I was afraid I was going to mix it too loud.
For the BG guitar in the chorus, I felt it was too busy and distracting, so I edited out the sections that played while she was singing and made it a kind of “answer-back” between the vocal phrases.
Anyway, thanks for the listen! I’ll give yours a listen as soon as I have a chance…
loved the vocals !
loved the bass addition and very creative to bring the guitar back around 1:57 ,
It felt a wee bit late to me unless it was for a syncopation effect. Sounded good either way.
I did miss the cry at 2:48 , I felt it was a pivotal part of the song, but if I did not have knowledge of the track, I would not find anything amiss either. It feels like a smooth listen.
Fabulous work and great creative additions!
The main vocal treatment sounds killer, it’s hard to really find fault with this mix. If I were to get picky a little more backing vox in the chorus would have been nice but it’s purely subjective. Awesome effort.
Here’s a revision I made inspired by feedback on @JayGee’s excellent mix. The main thing I wanted to address was the main guitar track.
What I did: Rather than duplicating the track, I split the L/R channels of the main guitar and slipped the time on one by 11 ms. Each channel has it’s own instance of the Waves CLA-2A for its own independent leveling to add more separation between the channels. Finally, the Right Channel has a smidge of Blue Cat’s Chorus and the Left a smidge of Soundtoys Microshift. I think this added some interest to the guitar track and spread it out more to make room for the main vocal up the middle. I also added some saturation to the solo guitar and a little more sweetening to the main vocal.
