Valentines Day

Stratomaster

Stratomaster

Active member
So I've recorded offbeat love songs and shared them with friends for Valentines Day for 4-5 years in a row. This year I chose a Robyn Hitchcock song called "Madonna of the Wasps". The mix sounds ok to me, the drums particularly the snare is still weak. The vocals are ehh-I tried many times to sing this in many ways, this is about as good as I can get it. I didn't try too hard to push the overall volume, I wanted it to sound relaxed. Tried some interesting experiments on this recording...

Used time stretching to speed up the drum tracks about 6 bpm-worked amazingly well
Used a small diaphragm condensor on the snare (sm81)-worked pretty well-still too much high hat bleed
Used distortion (trash 2 izotope) plugin on kick, snare and drum bus, I tried to be subtle but it's a fun plugin to mess with.

Let me know how it sounds, thanks for your time.

Strat
 
Beautiful tune, dude. Great mix to my ears, drums are a little weak like you said, but I wouldn't bring them up too much because their subtlety fits the song. The keys that come and go are very nice and dreamy. Vocals could maybe use a little work, but it does sound like a very tricky song to sing. I liked the harmonies in the beginning.
 
i love hard panned guitars and just the concept in itself...everything opens up so nicely if you balance it out. you def did that. nice job man. kit, snare particularly, could use some high end to open things up a little more.

i don't know if my mixes are overly bright or what, but i'm hearing lots of tunes that sound like they have too many things low-passed. i think it really holds up that sense of "room" and makes things more distant when freq's above 12khz are cut off.
 
Good song and great performances. The mix doesn't have a lot of high end sizzle but I don't know if this song really calls for that. It sounds very good as is. The only thing, in my opinion, that needs tweaking is the vocal level needs to be raised just a little. It's almost getting buried. A hotter vocal level would really make the difference on this tune I believe.
good job!
 
Yeah, my only critique is that the vox is pretty buried. If you like it a little buried like that then I might shoot for a more poorly-enunciated take. Properly bury it rather than having it just be too quiet for the mix.

Otherwise, it's really good. Snare doesn't crack super-hard, as you said, but it works.
 
Mmmk- Well Valentines is over but I did a remix anyway. Took some suggestions here as best I could. Biggest thing is I automated the guitars down for the singing parts. Lessened the distortion on the vocals but pushed a bit more into the compressor to keep the volume even but distort the "S's" less. I also put a de-esser last in the vocal chain. Fixed some of the e bows. I think the mix sounds less strained now.

I'll put the newer mix up if anyone is interested, otherwise I'm considering this done/forgotten.

Thanks for the time, ears and good suggestions.

 
Nice songwriting. The mix is solid. Could use a little more reverb or delay on the vocal to get it off the ear.
There's a lo-fi/mud to the vocal (especially, but the mix in general). I dig it, but depending who your target audience is they might not. Rhythm falls apart a bit at the 2:40 fill, but I can overlook that personally.
 
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