Deep Purple - Perfect Strangers cover. Feedback appreciated.

The singing isn't bad at all, but the mix has a lot of issues. First of all, it's coming at me as almost mono. The bass is too strong in the mix and has too much bottom end to it. There are other things, but I would be nit-picking if I went on. Everall, the mix needs a lot of work. The cymbals are sizzly, almost harsh. The snare sounds like it's panned about 25% left.

Keep at it, we only get better if we take what people tells us for what it is: helpful criticism.
 
Thanks for the useful comments. Feel free to be as picky as you want, I have got no ego associated with this. I just want to learn to get better.

I think the problem with the sizzly cymbals, mono ness and snare panning all stem back to the overheads on the drums. I tried to follow the recorderman method for placement, but the mics ended up too low and the drummer kept hitting them. So I put them higher but probably not in the best position. There wasn't much time to experiment in the session unfortunately. I get the impression that recorderman is better for smaller drum kits maybe. This was a fairly big setup with lots of cymbals. Still, a lesson to chalk up for next time.

The low end was what the band wanted, I would normally reign it in a bit.
 
I don't have anything going on right now as far as mixing. I am stuck in a hotel in San Deigo until probably October. If you don't mind, I would love to take a stab at mixing this. I could PM you my email address if you agree. I think I could fix the overhead problem. Sizzly cymbals usually result from too much high frequency boosting in the eq, and not so much from proximity. I would have to take a look at the track to see how much of the snare the overheads picked up. But I am betting I could fix that too.

Were the guitars mic'd from a cab, or DI?

And I could give you a really meaty bass tone and still have a high pass filter on there set at 100Hz.

Give it some thought. I lost all my gear in a robbery, and I have been jonesing to mix something.
 
Rokket

Thanks for the offer, but it would be a purley academic exercise if you wanted to mix it. The band are happy with it as is, i'm really only asking here for my education. I am not a professional, but rather an enthusiastic amateur :-) The guitars were recorded with an SM57 against the grill. As was the bass, but using an MXL 67 instead. Althought I am wondering how you would mix it in a hotel room with no gear?

I do admit I boosted the HF using PSP vintage warmer and also Ozone using the EQ and the harmonic exciter, to try and match HF in the original track. Maybe I overdid it? I could send the Logic session if you wanted.

joyeym
Yep, I had a few issues there ;-)
 
Rokket

Thanks for the offer, but it would be a purley academic exercise if you wanted to mix it. The band are happy with it as is, i'm really only asking here for my education. I am not a professional, but rather an enthusiastic amateur :-) The guitars were recorded with an SM57 against the grill. As was the bass, but using an MXL 67 instead. Althought I am wondering how you would mix it in a hotel room with no gear?

I do admit I boosted the HF using PSP vintage warmer and also Ozone using the EQ and the harmonic exciter, to try and match HF in the original track. Maybe I overdid it? I could send the Logic session if you wanted.

joyeym
Yep, I had a few issues there ;-)

I have Reaper on my laptop, and my nearfield monitors, which are brand new... I would rather have the .wav files or 320kbps mp3 to mix with. I understand it would just be an exercise, but I am bored to tears and need something to do rather than going out drinking myself to death.

A couple of pointers on the mic placement:

1. I know time was short, but it shows you how taking a bit of time can save you a lot later. Don't rely on a "fix it in the mix" mentality. Some things just can't be fixed. So taking a bit of extra time before you track can save you headaches later. You need to experiment with different mic placements until you find one that will give you the sound the band is going for.

2. Turn down distortion and gain to around 50-60% of what they would use live. Too much of either, and your guitar tone tracks like it's being played on a busted out speaker. REALLY fuzzy, and that's what I am hearing. That can be tweaked out, but it takes a lot of time and frustration. Don't let the guitarist bully you into using his stage settings. If you have the time, record two tracks, one with his stage settings, adn one with the gain and distortion turned down. Show them how each sounds in the mix. I think he will agree, the latter sounds better.

3. Bass is one of the hardest instruments (besides drums) to mix. And that is because it occupies the lower register on the frequency chart. Getting the bass to stand out in the mix without overpowering it or sounding like it was played on a $20 practice amp has given many pros some sleepless nights. You can get a pretty decent sound by putting a high pass filter on the track so it doesn't drown out the kick, and a slight boost on the mids. Another thing is you double track the bass - use an A/B box, and take one track to mic the cab, the other DI into the board. You can then blend the two of them, and give the bass some punch. Play with the eq on both tracks until you get it. One other trick a lot of bass players use - gain. Crank it up, and turn down the master volume. Overdrive the amp a bit, and give the bass some good growl. Stay away from boosting the lower eq on the amp.

And as Joe stated, performance is key. A good performance and the proper tracking, the song will almost mix itself. About all you would want to do is a little eq to separate the instruments from each other and you have it. Also, avoid adding compression or a limiter to the whole track. Leave that up to whoever is going to master it. Don't try to master one song. The idea is to give the entire album the same sound, volume, etc.

Just a few tips. If you have the raw .wav files, there are lots of sites that will host it for free so that I can download it. I don't have Logic, or would just take that.
 
Yeah the drums and bass are too loose for this type of song, they really need to be locked in. The recording sounds over-compressed to me, (even the best compression dulls audio) just a thought. Vocalist is good. With some work, could come together nicely.

Thanks for posting.
 
The vocal issues aside, it's not turning into a bad mix afterall. I do have a bit of a problem with your placement of the overheads, but you had already addressed that.

Things I was able to fix:

I don't have a snare panned to the left. It's dead in the middle.

I beefed up the bass and got rid of that midtone mud.

I still have a problem with the cymbals washing out, but if I turn up the overheads, the drum are waaaay too loud. I tried turning down the other tracks, but then they sounded like they were playing across the street.

I will tweak what I have a bit more, then I will let you know. My only question is, do you want me to post it here, or just PM you a link?
 
I know little about mixing, so my comments are from my ears.

Two things stand out for me from a mix perspective. First, the guitar work in the background. I *like* how that sounds, from a mix perspective. Despite the intentional distortion of the guitar sound, it's very pleasant to listen to. I judge this like this: I am enjoying, and am able to focus, on the guitarist's performance, even though this is definitely not my cup of tea in a song.

But the vocals atop the guitar, there is harshness to the sound. I am not making a quality comment one way or another on the singer's voice. Rather the quality of the audio itself. I am betting there is a lot of unwanted harmonic distortion and some clipping going on. The result? Quite the opposite of the guitar comment above. I do the auditory equivalent of looking away from the bright sunlight; I direct my attention away from the vocals because of the harshness. Again, this is not a comment about the singer; but about the processing of the signal (and perhaps a poor recording to begin with.)

Just my two cents.

LOVE the guitar work in the background.

Rick
 
I had an hour this morning, so I thought I would give it a try. It's not great, but it's listenable.

 
>I will tweak what I have a bit more, then I will let you know. My only question is, do you want me to post it here, or just PM you a link?

I'm happy for you to post here, thanks for taking the time.

Also thanks for the other comments, and your mix farview. I will have a listen later.
 
I had an hour this morning, so I thought I would give it a try. It's not great, but it's listenable.


Nice mix. The vocals are a bit wet, but I understand why. I think we went for the same sound with this one. The only difference is the guitar panning. I think I will switch mine around and see what I come up with. Oh, and I went for the 80's long fade out at the end (this song is from the 80's, so why not right?).

I'll put my mix up in a couple hours. I didn't get a chance to do anything after the initial mix, and my ears are rested now.
 
Ok, here's mine. If I keep tweaking, it's going to start going in the wrong direction, so here it is:

http://www.lightningmp3.com/live/file.php?id=28794

It's not great, I haven't mixed anything for awhile, but it's there. Thank you for the opportunity to do this. It was fun mixing something that I didn't create, and a challenge to mix something I didn't track. I hope it's up to par. Farview's "quick" mix sounds pretty darned good...
 
I do admit I boosted the HF using PSP vintage warmer and also Ozone using the EQ and the harmonic exciter, to try and match HF in the original track.

Avoid using harmonic exciters and such on your tracks. They tend to ruin them. Depend on getting it right at the tracking stage. And don't get sucked into the 'louder is better' mode of thinking. Louder only equals distorted, near-white-noise tracks that fatigue the ear instead.

I gave your original track a second listen on headphones. I don't think you panned anything. I don't know why it sounded like the drums were panned.
But I do like how you managed to clean up the lead vocal.
 
Thanks for the two mixes, i'm going to spend some time studying them and then try and re-do my own mix again. Both are improvements on mine, so I have a bit to learn and experiment with. But this is really helpful so I would like to thank you both for taking the time.

There are a couple of other things I struggled with, and would be interested in how you both approached it.

Firstly the kick, I had to eq the crap out of it to get something useful. There is plenty of thump, but the attack sounded all wrong to me. I think we should have damped the drum more and maybe try a flam pad on it to get more attack.

Secondly, I really struggled with getting the reverb right and still ended up with much less than either of your two mixes. If I pushed mine more the whole track just got washed out. I'm not too used to using reverb like this because I mainly do electronic music nowadays and tend to only use reverb for blend, relying more on delays. Any tips here?

Also, any chance I could get your DAW projects? So I can see what you did? I can do Logic or Protools, or download reaper.

Again, thanks for the help.

David
 
Thanks for the two mixes, i'm going to spend some time studying them and then try and re-do my own mix again. Both are improvements on mine, so I have a bit to learn and experiment with. But this is really helpful so I would like to thank you both for taking the time.

There are a couple of other things I struggled with, and would be interested in how you both approached it.

Firstly the kick, I had to eq the crap out of it to get something useful. There is plenty of thump, but the attack sounded all wrong to me. I think we should have damped the drum more and maybe try a flam pad on it to get more attack.

Secondly, I really struggled with getting the reverb right and still ended up with much less than either of your two mixes. If I pushed mine more the whole track just got washed out. I'm not too used to using reverb like this because I mainly do electronic music nowadays and tend to only use reverb for blend, relying more on delays. Any tips here?

Also, any chance I could get your DAW projects? So I can see what you did? I can do Logic or Protools, or download reaper.

Again, thanks for the help.

David

For the kick, I put a noise gate on it to take out the transients it was picking up from the rest of the kit, then it was a small (1.4 dB) boost at 80Hz, and a pretty good one at 300HZ (2.6dB) using Reaper's eq. I put it through Reaper's compression with a 2 to 1 ratio and the makeup gain set at +0.0dB.
That's pretty much all you need to do to bring it out. That, and every other track is going through a buss with a high pass filter set at 100Hz. If you carve out the lower end in your other instruments, it helps the kick to punch through. The reverb I used on the entire kit was Kjaerhus Classic Reverb with the 'percussion' preset.

I used a pretty heavy reverb on the vocals to mask some of the performance issues (which I normally wouldn't do, because the major studios are doing that, and most new bands sound like a bag of ass when you hear them live because of that), I used the 'vocal hall 2' preset on there. I did a lot with the eq too, high pass filter set at 100Hz, cut at the 300Hz range, slight boost (1.3dB) at 1000. Same setting on the backing vocals, except for the 1000Hz, where I cut them slightly (-1.8dB). The trick with any eq is to cut first, boost if you have to. Reverb is one of those effects that can be overused, and on most vocals, I only apply the Kjaerhus reverb with 'vocal ambient' setting. It gives the vocals a little lift, but it's amost imperceivable.

One more note about using reverb: Don't record with it. And use the same reverb throughout for the instruments or you end up with a track that sounds like it was recorded in different rooms. And avoid adding effects to the master volume in your DAW.

I deleted your tracks and the DAW project when I was done because it's not my property; sorry.

But if you run into trouble, just post on here in the appropriate forum, there is lots of experienced home recorders on here who will help you. I will chime in too, if I am around (the last time I was on the boards for more than a minute was 9 months ago; hazzard of the job).
 
There are a couple of other things I struggled with, and would be interested in how you both approached it.

Firstly the kick, I had to eq the crap out of it to get something useful. There is plenty of thump, but the attack sounded all wrong to me. I think we should have damped the drum more and maybe try a flam pad on it to get more attack.
You (almost) always have to EQ the crap out of a kick. I added 9db of low shelf at 50Hz, took away 15db at 800Hz with a narrow bandwidth, and added 10db of high shelf at 8kHz. Then I compressed it with a med attack and fast release at 3/1. It was also noise gated.

I also sent all the drum tracks to a group buss and compressed the crap out of them.

The overheads had a low shelf at 300Hz taken away and high shelf at 8k added. They were also compressed to death as well.

Secondly, I really struggled with getting the reverb right and still ended up with much less than either of your two mixes. If I pushed mine more the whole track just got washed out. I'm not too used to using reverb like this because I mainly do electronic music nowadays and tend to only use reverb for blend, relying more on delays. Any tips here?
I should have posted the track without the "mastering", There isn't as much reverb as it seems once the limiter gets to it.

In general, you want the reverb on the drums decay at some musically relevant rate. Meaning you want the reverb to last 1/4 note, half note, etc... so it helps push the groove along.

On vocals you want to chose a reverb that has a different tonality than the singers voice. That way, the voice still sticks out from it. I went a little overboard on the effects. I have a doubler (short delays), a plate reverb and a long delay on the vocal.

I only had reverb on the snare, toms and vocals. The drum verb was different than the vocal verb.


Also, any chance I could get your DAW projects? So I can see what you did? I can do Logic or Protools, or download reaper.
I'm using Nuendo and I use a lot of UAD plugins, so it won't be much help.

The main thing that help this mix out is panning two of the guitars wide and leaving the cleaner one in the middle. One of the guitars (audio12) has the worst guitar sound I've heard in a long time, so I EQed it to sound more like the other one. Then I sent all the guitars to a group buss and EQed and compressed them some more.

The bass was EQed and compressed to death too. I added 9db of 50Hz, 6db of 1kHz and 9db of high shelf at around 2kHz, then sent it through two compressors to smooth it out.

There are a lot of things working against you in this recording, most of them being the core sounds and the performance. The drums, however, sounded really good. You just can't rely on the overheads for the main sound of the kit because of your placement. The bass sounds really good too, it just doesn't work with the goofy guitar sounds they had.
The singer should have taken a couple more passes at the parts where his voice cracked and/or hit the bad notes. There is a mistake in the bridge on the audio12 guitar.

You just need to pan some stuff and don't be afraid of EQing too much or compressing.
 
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