advice on mix (college project)

DamagedTrax

hey guys,

anyone wanna give me some advice on this mix? its basically an audio analysis project from college where we're given a folder full of bounced stems and have to anylise and fix them but i noticed deep in the folder was the original session files so i decided to have a go at mixing it from the ground up for a bit of practice.

sorted thru about 60 files, comped them down and mixed it and this is what i came up with.. still sounds a touch boxy to my ears but i've been at it all day so i really dunno at this stage, will go back to it tomorrow anyway.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=LC50NU8Y

thanks in advance

DamagedTrax

while i think of it, does anyone drumagog overheads? i did the kick, snare and toms (originals were muck!) on this but i couldnt get my head around the overheads.. it just didnt work at all

fitz

I like this a lot...
Nice track.

There's some frequencies bugging me...the sibilance in the vocal is highlighting it for me, but I think that it's across the mix. Gimme a minute to listen again....

DamagedTrax

fitz wrote: »

I like this a lot...
Nice track.

There's some frequencies bugging me...the sibilance in the vocal is highlighting it for me, but I think that it's across the mix. Gimme a minute to listen again....

the sibilance is most likly the culprrit.. after 6 hours of mixing it i think my ears have stopped working above 1K :pac:

fitz

Just loaded it up in Logic and tried pulling a bit of 6K out of the entire mix. But too much of an impact on the guitars and drums, but definitely seemed to improve the vocal.
Listen in the morning and mess around with that a bit, I'd say you'll have it sorted in all of 10 minutes! :P

DamagedTrax

sound. cheers for that. not a bad little tune actually, anyone recognise the artist?

DamagedTrax

c'mon lads. i need help with this

trackmixstudio

I think the biggest improvement would be to let more attack through the vocal compressor and reduce ratio. They sound far too squashed to me. The stereo delay is also exaggerating the sybalance. Try a short verb with a medium pre delay and low pass it below the ssss frequencies at about 4K. If you were having problems getting the vocals to cut through without heavily compressing them, try bussing everything apart from the vocal and eqing a cut in the bus to make space for them. A cut at 5K on everything else usually sounds much better than boosting this on the vocal.
Also I would pull some high mids 5-7K on the overheads, pull the HPF to a lower freq than you have it on now, Wide q boost at 500-2k to enhance the body of the cymbals then narrow q sharp cut and sweep to find the snare and pull it back a bit.
The overall balance of the mix sounds great to me other than the 5-7K region on vox and overheads.

DamagedTrax

thanks michael

i have the vocals dry on their own track and then buss'd to an aux for compression and fx so that the effected signal is coming in underneath the dry to try and keep it from sounding over compressed (as this is a common problem with my mixes it would seem). ill ease off the comp and add a de-esser or eq cut and post up another version later.

ill also put a little more body in the OH's in that 5-7 region as you suggested.

i have a room mic track aswell but took it out to add my own space to it. should i bring it in just under evrything else? (i dont think it'll create too much problems as all drum pans and drum reverb pans were done to match the overheads so the localisation should still be ok).

trackmixstudio

Re the vocals, if you are using the dry signal and parallel compressing, they may have been heavily compressed in tracking. There is very little dynamic in them. The body of the overheads is not 5-7. This is the sizzle and/or harshness. Sweep around 500-4k to find it. Zoom in on the room mic track and make sure it is (or drag it) in phase with the overheads and squash it to hell than bring it up under the kit. It should really gel the kit together and make it sound far more real, especially on the toms which sound a bit artificial. When doing rock/metal stuff, I use a lot of the mono room mic to add realism to the sample replaced kick/snare. I never trigger toms as it sounds wrong to me. You just have to make sure they are tuned well and that the drummer hits them HARD. However if your toms sound sh1t try using the close mics blended with samples rather than 100% replacing them. Not using such a high HPF on the overheads should add a lot of body and dynamic to the toms although you have already said the shell tracks were bad.

DamagedTrax

so you meant the body of the actual overhead track? i thought you meant to just bring the cymbals out more! cool i'll have a look lower down the range.

vocal waveform does look a very compressed in places, especially in the latter verses. the first verse looks fine but then it looks like another take was done and all the vocal multi's after that have little or no dynamic range.

so if im compressing in parallel would i be right to put the de-esser first in the chain on the currently dry track?

will try that with the room mic to. thanks again michael.

DamagedTrax

just saw your comment about the toms there michael. i reckon they were triggered. theres absolutly no bleed and the backend sounds too perfect to be gated.

i57dwun4yb1pt8

sounds like green day to me

DamagedTrax

final version (as its to be in tonight)

tried to sort the vox as much as i could but didnt wanna completly kill them with a desser. lifted the drum room mic up a little aswell and eq'd the 5k very slightly.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=3PDXO7TW

PaulBrewer

The track sounds good.

It sounds like it was well tracked. It also sounds like there could be backing vocals? None there, no?

The track feels very 2 dimensional to me. There's no sense of depth or space and the 3 elements, Vocal, Drums and Guitars, sound completely disconnected.
Why I don't know.

However to work out how to fix that I couldn't judge from a mix but would have to listen to the individual tracks.

You're welcome to come down one of the days and we'll squirt it through the SSL if you want?

DamagedTrax

PaulBrewer wrote: »

The track sounds good.

It sounds like it was well tracked. It also sounds like there could be backing vocals? None there, no?

The track feels very 2 dimensional to me. There's no sense of depth or space and the 3 elements, Vocal, Drums and Guitars, sound completely disconnected.
Why I don't know.

However to work out how to fix that I couldn't judge from a mix but would have to listen to the individual tracks.

You're welcome to come down one of the days and we'll squirt it through the SSL if you want?

yeah that'd be great paul. like i said final hand-up is tonight but i'd love to hear it thru the SSL for myself. when suits you best?

im after re-rendering it now. for some reason when i record it to disk the BV's are gone but when i bounce it they're there ok. checking all the routing and everything is ok. very odd!

PaulBrewer

DamagedTrax wrote: »

yeah that'd be great paul. like i said final hand-up is tonight but i'd love to hear it thru the SSL for myself. when suits you best?

im after re-rendering it now. for some reason when i record it to disk the BV's are gone but when i bounce it they're there ok. checking all the routing and everything is ok. very odd!

Ah, so there are BVs? If felt like there naturally would be.

Friday is free at the moment if that's any good?

Gerry Fish is in with Phil Hayes Thursday having run over from last week so once they're done...

DamagedTrax

PaulBrewer wrote: »

Ah, so there are BVs? If felt like there naturally would be.

Friday is free at the moment if that's any good?

Gerry Fish is in with Phil Hayes Thursday having run over from last week so once they're done...

yeah BV's are there now but not many at all. only in final chorus.

this week is out im afraid as i have protools 101 and 110 to do on monday so im in studying and i really really need to get my head into it.

best i give you a shout next week and see what time you have free (or week after, whenever suits you). cheers

PaulBrewer

DamagedTrax wrote: »

yeah BV's are there now but not many at all. only in final chorus.

this week is out im afraid as i have protools 101 and 110 to do on monday so im in studying and i really really need to get my head into it.

best i give you a shout next week and see what time you have free (or week after, whenever suits you). cheers

Next 5 or so weeks gone I'm afraid, I'm trying to get a day myself for the Remix I was supposed to do Friday!

However, things always change ...

DamagedTrax

PaulBrewer wrote: »

Next 5 or so weeks gone I'm afraid, I'm trying to get a day myself for the Remix I was supposed to do Friday!

However, things always change ...

cool, keep me in mind, just a little unfortunate timing with exams.