"Toss It All Behind" A tale of unrequited

I really like this song. The vocals reminded me of Bowie. Definitely preferred the second mix. The bass player is terrific! I prefer hear more bass, but that could be down to the fact that I'm a bassist. The drums have an 80s synth feel. I'm assuming they are MIDI. More variation and fills would help. I liked the horn but felt the outro could have ended sooner.

Jeff Maher used to haunt HR frequently. I've not seen or heard from him in quite a while though. He did a great job on the bass and on the electric rhythm guitar. Really stylized the tune.

When the kick comes up ... it and the bass don't play well together. The low end energy must be corralled accordingly.
 
Mix is good, seemed a tad bright to my ears. I agree with the the comment in regards to a little more bass. But I could understand not doing that as it may change the feel of the song.

The bright is the mastering plug, Dave. I even turned the high end down because I shared your suspicion that it was a bit too much. Thanks for the note!
 
Sounded pretty good.

Vocal is mostly very good. Nice and clear. Some of the notes that you really belt out get a little harsh. Harsh enough that it needs attention.

Drums sound fine. But just fine - your drums usually are more realistic. Kick is a smidge too loud to me.

Bass sounds real good.

I liked the piano. But I didn't care for the "trumpet".

The acoustic guitar is just a bit bright to me. Sounds compressed a bit much.

Except for the "trumpet" I thought the instrumentation was excellent.
 
Interestingly the thing I like least is the bass guitar - the style, sound and panning just don't do it for me. It has a "musco - white funk" feel to it that could fit in with Jan Hammer's 80s fusion. That's pretty much the same for the electric rhythm gtr.
Nice song; a more organic drum track would take it away from the 80s.
 
Seems like the vocals are clipping in several places. Wondering if they were recorded hot? Like TripleM, I'm hearing the crispies. Check to see if the vocals clip without any inserts active, because what may happen is the vocals go hot into a plugin where they are then compressed and don't appear to clip (VISUALLY). But by then, it is too late.

Digital audio is all about the zeroes and ones, but you're limited by the number of bits you have left in a hot signal. When you're working with the dbFS scale and you only have -3db of headroom before you hit the ceiling, you could inadvertently clip inside a plugin before the signal comes back out of it. Maybe your EQ or compressor boosts the signal slightly internally.

This would be something you could never know; the signal could hit the dbFS ceiling internally and visually you would never see this because the output from the plugin goes into the next insert in the chain. By the time it hits the fader, the level could LOOK ok... but the clipping has already happened inside the insert plugins. (Just something to think about).

This is why lately I try to track vocs no louder than about -18 to -12 dbFS... the noise floor is incredibly low on most good audio interfaces these days, so there's not as much reason to track hot any more.

Back to your mix.... listening objectively, the two things (other than the crispy vocs) that stand out in a bad way are the drum sound and the low-end definition (roundness) on the bass guitar.

Drum sound overall seems harsh and a bit too boosted in the highs, and IMO it makes the drums sound wrong for this tune. Maybe it's the reverb on them that sounds way too bright.

The bass guitar sounds a bit wooly in the low mids
 
The reverb on the drums does seem to have too much presence. The things I picked on in the first mix are taken care of. I think the fade-out could be started a minute earlier - and be quicker too, 20 seconds at most.
 
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