I would like someone to critique my mix.
I need to know whether the mix sounds good or not?
Or if not what needs to be addressed. Thanks!
Love Lessons - IJSMOOTH by GBJ ProductionZ | Free Listening on SoundCloud
I think there's too much reverb, for one. The vocal is much too up front and bordering on hard to listen to. I can also hear the room sound in the vocal. How are you recording them? The music is much better, as far as the mix goes. The vocal does not fit in the mix.
Also, how are you processing them? It almost sounds like you had drastic level variations in the vox but you didn't apply any manual volume editing and only relied on heavy compression.
Tell us more about how the vocals are recorded/processed. There's a good, catchy melody under there, just get it to work as a mix a little better.
I liked it. It also sounds like you maybe had a hard limiter on it. Maybe after following the advice given above, you may want to see about using a peak limiter with a soft knee approach. Just so ya know, I am a Pink Floyd kinda guy but I can get into some Marvin Gaye as well. You got a smooth set of pipes Brother. I could listen to you with the wife sitting next to me, chilling under some candle light!
Andrush already covered the major things. It's pretty obvious that you were layering vocals on a pre-mixed track.
The lead vocal is too loud, and he's clearly in a different room than the rest of the band.
He's also pitchy in a few places.
Assuming you don't have a really good condenser mic and a large hall to record in to get natural reverb that matches the track, your best bet is to probably put him in as dead of a room as you can find (pile up a bunch of quilts or rugs or whatever to absorb sound), close-mic him with a dynamic, make sure that you're not getting any room noise in the track, and then apply a really good reverb after.
Your biggest challenge (and where you'll see the most "bang for your buck" in terms of improvement) is going to be matching the tone of the vocal tracks to the pre-mixed backing tracks.
I didn't catch what parts of this you are able to control individually--just the vocals, or some of the instrumental tracks too? Regarding the vocals others have covered it already. Your vocals need to sit in the mix, not above it, and the vocalists need more support from the backing tracks to give their best performances.
Grena1 - to solve the problem VHS mentions, I would read up on Impulse reverbs. Get an impulse reverb plugin (if you don't already have one), find impulse files (free ones are all over the web), and experiment with different sounds. IMO it would be your best bet (on a budget) to match your recorded vocals with pre-recorded backing tracks.
Anyway, that's how I would do it.