Dust Jacket Centerfold

The bass - pre preamp prob is too loud - I like it and it sounds great BUT is too fat forward.
 
Ah! Lip smacks! Right in my ear! I'd back those spoken word parts up a little bit. Maybe add some reverb or something. I feel like two people are talking straight at each side of my head.
 
The vocals are nice and clear. But I'm also hearing some mouth clicks and pops. But the tone and clarity are nice. Cool harmonies.

You could probably nudge down the bass during the spoken parts. It should still be a prominent part. But it's pretty loud during those sections and taking a bit of attention away from the vocal. It's a bit sterile sounding - not enough low midrange.

The snare sample has a bunch of hyped high end that I didn't care for.

The tone on the lead guitar was nice. You might nudge up its level just a bit.
 
Thanks guys, I gotta pay more attention to vocal parts, seems like they take 10 times more work than anything else. . .
 
Wow, quite a change of direction for you! I like the song a lot. Sarah sounds great. The bass is coming along nicely. I'd agree that the bass is a bit loud. I'm getting a kind of metallic, percussive tone both from the bass and the drums. If you could soften that, it would help. There's actually plenty of bottom on the bass, but the upper mids are dominating it. Overall, the mix it very mid-rangy. It also sounds quite compressed and boosted. Maybe back off a little with the FX on the mix bus.

It might help to A/B this against a reference track doing this kind of dance/funk/groove thing.

I think the mouth noise, pops, and so on are a recording level problem. If you are tracking at inconsistent levels, then leveling everything up even when you comp, you'll hear a lot of noise in what were the softer parts. It's signal-to-noise ratio. When you bring up the lower parts, you'll also hear more preamp hiss, more mouth noise, room noise, etc.

I like where this is going!
 
Thanks for listening Ray, this is my first real bass so I'm basically learning to mix bass all over again. I agree there's something grating about it in the verses, I think I tracked it too hot. The preamp really squashed and boosted the signal and I didn't realize it till I was done tracking. Don't have to worry about that happening again. . .
 
Listening again. I really like it. I hadn't paid as much attention to the guitar solo before, because I was listening to your bass playing--not bad, by the way. But that guitar sounds good. It's sitting at a nice level. Good melodic playing.

As I listen again, the biggest problem for me is in the spoken parts. I want to hear what they're saying, or at least catch more of it. But I'm just getting a tangle of voices. It's cool if the song's one of those things where you need to listen twice to really focus on each vocal in the pair. But that would be hard because it seems like the ambiance on the vocals on either side is kind of echoing together and really getting in the way of clearly hearing either one. Also as others have said the bass is competing with the voices. If you could lower the bass and pull that ambiance back, you'd have clearer mix. Another thing you might try is make one voice in the pair just a bit louder than the other.
 
I'm actually okay with not being able to understand the words, I just like their textures. There's this album called systems/layers by rachel's and they use this layered speech thing in different places, I thought it was pretty cool so I wanted to do something similar.
 
Hi, I think this has lots of cool stuff in it. The twin spoken word parts work really well and I think texture rather than clarity is fine.

I largely agree with Trip in that the lead guitar part would be good to bring up a bit and about the snare. The kick was the main thing that stuck out to me - it's quite prominent, but quite clicky sounding and I think I'd like more body to it.

Really unusual though, good work.
 
Had to let it sit for a while so I could reset my brain on it. I swapped out the snare and kick (nice having fake drums sometimes!) and adjusted levels. A little bit of delay to give the bass more dimension in the verses, it seemed kind of boring/dry as it was. Oh and lots of vocal editing. Not too much else going on with this one but I think the difference in levels between verse and chorus gives it more energy, see if you agree. . .

Here's mix 2: View attachment 97274
 
Much better vocal mix. You know where I'm coming from--I'm in the "every word must be intelligible" camp. I can mostly hear what is being said in the spoken part, especially Sarah's. That jumble of ambiance that was tangling up the L and R spoken parts is mostly gone now.

The backing tracks are still sounding middy and kind of metallic, especially in the verse. Chorus is better. The bass is sitting better.
 
Yeah I cut some of the low end for a better sound on laptop/phone. It was kind of eating up headroom. :\ Is it too soft now, or just different?
 
Just sticking with the monitors for this one, I took off the low-end attenuation and adjusted the vocal levels. If it sounds okay in the car I'll probably just go with it. I think it'll just have to sound good in the average case, trying to get it right on everything (monitors/headphones/speakers/phone) isn't really working.

Mix 3: View attachment 97300
 
Still middy for me. I think it's a combination of things adding up--the percussive sound of the bass, the gated reverb on the snare. It may not even be that the low end is deficient, just that there's a lot going on in the midrange. Yeah, it's hard to imagine a mix that could translate to so many different systems and environments. Mind blowing really. And way above my mixing skill level.
 
Some content in the harmony vocals and/or the synth is dipping into the bass freq area and masking the bass a bit - you could experiment with a hi-pass filter. Good song
 
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