Seedy Side of Heaven with JohnnyAmato and ibleedburgundy

R

Robus

Well-known member
I posted the song demo on the forum a while back. Here's working on the finished product. JohnnyAmato sang lead and harmony vox. Ibleedburgundy played the drums. Awesome job!

Early days for this mix. It's more complicated that what I've been mixing lately. The arrangement has a lot of moving parts, including enough guitar tracks to drive me crazy. I deleted some for the sake sanity.

At this stage, I'm working to get the vocals edited and sitting in the mix. I want the lyric to be intelligible throughout--ideally, every syllable of every word should be intelligible on the first listen. That is the gold standard but I'm far from meeting it. I'd much appreciate any thoughts on how the vocal is sitting.

Thanks, all. It's been a journey with this song, that started with a riff on a tone clip a couple of years back.



Seedy Side of Heaven
Words and music by Ray Taylor, 2017

The morning kicked off early
Cop lights blinking on the lawn
The details of last night are blurry
Though the salient points are known
Hitched up to the station
To pick up your car and keys
Seems the tighter wire I’m walking
The shorter is my leash
Ever since I’ve been with you

So we’re parking in your trailer
Connoisseurs of hand-me-outs
Last year’s outlook was bullish
Till the bank towed the T Bird out
Sweet dreams of Shangri La
Guess we learned what they’re about
And while the lottery may yet deliver
The forecast otherwise is drought

Gimme a few more weeks with you
I’ll be walking on the seedy side of heaven
The way that I met you

Tonight come wrapped in velvet
Whiff of voodoo in the air
And the evening hot and surly
Breath of bayou in your hair
The things we do on a summer night
Better done than mentioned
Let me say in brief and I repeat
You sure got my attention

Well ever since I’ve been with you
I’ve been walking on the seedy side of heaven
And every day I spend with you
That’s time enough to break my heart in two
Leave me crying adieu

Ever since I’ve been with you
I’ve been walking on the seedy side of heaven
It’s where I found you
 
Awesome, love it! Very creative use of the harmonies, especially in that first verse. Again, that's why I just put 'em on the whole song so you could mess with it and use what you wanted. Very tastefully done! I like this just as much as San Antone, maybe more, but I was actually more proud of this one 'cuz I struggled a little with it at first. Really had to work a few sections until I was happy with it. I pretty much stuck with the melodies you had in your scratch track, I tried to shy away a little bit here and there but it never sounded right to me.

I see what you mean though about every syllable being heard on first listen, I think they are here pretty well, but maybe my vocal could use a tiny bump in the mids somewhere. Not sure though. My eq's on my vocals on my tunes are never set exactly the same, always depends on the song of course, here it seems I might need a tiny bit of mid-range punch, maybe somewhere between 800 and 2k, hmm. It's fine as is though, I'm totally nitpicking, see what others say when they chime in. Did you do any drastic eq to it?
 
Hey man, thanks! I'm really happy with it too. It's a different level of complexity than San Antone, mostly because of number of guitars that come in and go out during various parts of the song, and the harmonies. Mixing it is like a solving a Rubik's Cube--it's hard to fix one thing without messing up another. But it's coming along.

I'll try the EQ bump on the vocals. I didn't do much. There's a high pass at maybe 100Hz or thereabouts, and slight cut in the 400-500Hz range that helps it slot in. Then I did a high shelf up around 8000Hz for air, and a cut on the sibilance frequencies, somewhere in the 5000-7000Hz range. All those are gentle cuts and boosts, a couple of dB only.

I was telling Taras that your tracks are so well recorded that they mix themselves. They are pro quality. I've needed to do very little EQ. I did quite a bit of automating the levels of the different parts so that the vocals build in the right places.

Fantastic work!
 
Robus said:
I was telling Taras that your tracks are so well recorded that they mix themselves. They are pro quality. I've needed to do very little EQ. I did quite a bit of automating the levels of the different parts so that the vocals build in the right places.

Fantastic work!
Click to expand...

Thanks! I can't take all the credit, that Slate VMS Condenser mic is one of the best purchases I ever made. The thing is fantastic. It models a few classic mics; a 47, a C12, an SM7, etc. I usually gravitate to the C12 in most situations. However, the tracks I send you have no modeling whatsoever, it's just the straight mic. The modeling is applied after, and since I'm sending you completely raw tracks, I don't bother. (Well, technically the modelling is on during tracking since there's no latency, but I don't render it to the track before sending)

Check it out on YouTube, there's a bunch of videos on it, but the actual Slate video for it probably explains it the best, I think it's only like 15 minutes long. It's a very nice mic.
 
"Ever since I've" is pretty quiet. I'm noticing now that some vocal spots are rather low in the mix. I didn't notice that last time. How are the original dynamics of the vocals? Would they benefit from being split into a "quiet vox" and "loud vox" channels? Typing as I listen, and yeah, lots of spots are very quiet.

Good punch, clarity and instrument balance, though. I like Dave's drums here, a lot. His snare sounds brighter than usual. Coming along nicely fellers
 
Thanks Taras, leveling vocals is the main thing I'm working on right now. I did split the chorus and bridge vocals off to separate tracks to boost them more easily. I also did some line-by-line editing to get the quieter passes up to the level where they need to be. Still more work to go. I agree that the chorus vocal needs to pop more.

I agree about the drums. When I shared the mix privately with Nola, he suggested remixing the drums to give the snare a bit more snap, among other changes. I did that and like the results.
 
I would like to add that I get a definite Steeley Dan vibe from this song - the arrangement and some of the guitar.
 
Hey spantini, I get that a lot but I don't hear it personally--apart from a fondness for color chords and inversions. I am a Dan fan, it's no secret.
 
I can't offer any mix advice, sounds totally done these headphones. Not sure I could make out every word on first listen, but then I never focus on the lyrics. Agree with the steely dan reference, esp with the backing vocals. Nice job
 
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