Brand New Song

whirlwindRA

whirlwindRA

Member
Hello once again! I have received some truly great advice from this forum in the past, and I'm back for more. This is a new song I've been working on with my band, and I think I've made a much better initial mix than I was able to a year ago when I did an album. This time it's even more complicated, with louder drums and more guitars. I'd just like to get some opinions to make sure I'm on the right track, even though some things aren't the final recordings yet (bass, some vocals).

General things I've done so far:
-Basic volume and panning adjustments
-Gating, light compression and EQ on individual drums
-Duplicate snare track with emphasis on the "crack" using high-pass EQ, slight distortion, and envelope shaper (about -10dB lower than main snare track)
-Slight tape emulation on the overheads
-Gently EQ'd guitar tracks, light compression/tape emulation on acoustic
-Sent most tracks to a reverb bus (sometimes quite minimally)

At this point, the drums are the main thing that are bothering me. At times, I feel like the snare is a bit odd, but I'm not too sure why. There is definitely a lot of wrestling with cymbal bleed, and I have automation that switches the gate on/off at certain points of the song where the snare playing becomes soft vs loud, but there are parts where the gating isn't feasible due to the drummer's excellent dynamic contrast. Also, I feel like the acoustic guitar is awkwardly placed in the soundstage (too close to the kick and snare?). I'd really like to double track it and hard pan it, but our vocalist/acoustic guitarist thinks that kind of production would remove the central focus on acoustic guitar and would be straying too far from "folk" (this doesn't even sound much like folk anymore anyway...). Right now, it's sitting at 45R with it's room mic (turned down a bit) at L30, just for kicks. There are a few other auxiliary instruments that I removed from this track since I figured they weren't crucial to the skeleton of the mix.

For previous songs I've done, I've been told to ditch individual drum compression until I've tried parallel compression on the whole kit, but I was never sure how to do that/get a good sound out of it and I'm wondering if that would be useful here.

Thanks in advance!

Mix 1 8/17:
[MP3]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/54393172/Sample.mp3[/MP3]

Mix 2 8/20:
[MP3]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/54393172/Sample2.mp3[/MP3]
 
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I listened to this in low volume, I didn't hear anything that jumped out at me. I did think the song was rather crowded, but that is just an opinion, so take that with a grain of salt.

Good stuff, has that (excuse my ignorance if I am wrong), Irish modern folk/rock sound. (My apologies if I got that wrong.)
 
I think the drums in this sound fine to me, the snare does seem to lose all its attack and bite in the parts where the guitars drop out, don't know if that was where your gate automations were, or if that's what you meant by odd snare. The panning on the guitars definitely gives them a dominant position in the soundstage and to my ear they are crowding the drums and bass into the background a bit. I think that might have more impact on the sound of the drums in the mix than trying to use compression to have them cut through the guitars a bit more. Just some more subjective opinions if it helps. Pretty cool song though, enjoyed the listen. Definitely got the folk vibe.
 
DM60 said:
I listened to this in low volume, I didn't hear anything that jumped out at me. I did think the song was rather crowded, but that is just an opinion, so take that with a grain of salt.

Good stuff, has that (excuse my ignorance if I am wrong), Irish modern folk/rock sound. (My apologies if I got that wrong.)
Click to expand...

Thanks for the feedback!

Anders Erisian said:
I think the drums in this sound fine to me, the snare does seem to lose all its attack and bite in the parts where the guitars drop out, don't know if that was where your gate automations were, or if that's what you meant by odd snare. The panning on the guitars definitely gives them a dominant position in the soundstage and to my ear they are crowding the drums and bass into the background a bit. I think that might have more impact on the sound of the drums in the mix than trying to use compression to have them cut through the guitars a bit more. Just some more subjective opinions if it helps. Pretty cool song though, enjoyed the listen. Definitely got the folk vibe.
Click to expand...

Gating was actually disabled in the quiet parts since there wasn't much bleed in the snare. But I'll definitely take a look at it to see why it loses bite.

You both mentioned "crowding" from the guitars; would the solution be to simply lower the volume or re-evaluate the panning? Again, I'm not too happy about the placement of the acoustic but I don't know what to do with it.
 
I understand the "crowded" comments. But to my ears, that could be because it feels the vocals are struggling in the mix. It might by fixed by simply bringing up the vocals relative to the rest of the mix.
 
The 400hz - 1200hz range is really crowded. The guitars are covering the vocal.

The snare is a bit on the dull side. Not much crack to it. The kick is a little soft. The drums are really busy.

I think it's a situation where the guitars, drums, and vocal are all struggling to be #1.

A couple of pitchy spots in the vocal in the quieter middle part.

Kind of a weird fade at the end.
 
Thanks for all the feedback everyone. I did the overall levels from scratch, and I attempted to give the snare more crack, not sure if it helped (I realize it is a bit loud). I also tried to free up some of the crowding. Any better?
 
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