Please help me with this mix

I liked the guitar sounds.

The vocal is very dry and sounds like it's in a different spot from the instruments. It's probably a bit too loud too.

There's a little snap in the vocal at :33. Not sure it's the best possible take either. it's not bad, but I think a few more takes might turn up something better. Doubling up the vocal when the song kicks in might be cool too.

I didn't think the snare was horrible. Missing a little high end, but other than that i thought it was OK. The kick is way too loud. It's pretty inconsistent too. Cymbals are a little swishy.
 
The vocals are actually doubled on the chorus but its mixed really low. I might try to pull that up. I agree that the kick is alittle loud aswell. Im going to work on this tonight with all these sugestions inmind. Thanks for the input.
 
Things I'd do.

Turn down the vocals
Add a touch of reverb to the vocals.
Re-record the guitar part and spread one far right and the other far left (or if your DAW [computer program] offers a stereo spread option, use that).
Turn down the kick and add a sub-bass plug in or eq it with more bass (low).
Add more treble (high) to the snare.
The piano sits in the mix perfectly.

I'd turn up the bass guitar slightly too but that's my opinion.


What did you use to record?
Computer program (DAW [logic, cubase, pro tools, garageband...] ) or a mixing desk?
 
Welcome aboard! Overall, pretty good for a first try! Having said that....here comes the critiques:

First and foremost, the vocals are swimming in pitch problems, if you can't retrack, try some pitch correction. It makes it very hard to take the song seriously because of vox. Just imagine listening to an out of tune guitar track, without the basics taken care of nothing will work. The vocals could come down a touch over all as well, seemed to over power the song at times.

The kick, as mentioned is too hot, the drums over all sound a little muffled. At times, the whole mix seems to get a lil crowded, maybe some different panning to create space for everything might help.

The vox NEED to be fixed up first and foremost, it was hard for me to concentrate on the rest of the song because they were distracting me from the overall mix.

Like I said, a good starting point with a lot of potential.

This is just one man's humble opinion.....

Again, welcome aboard!
 
Soft, gentle intro that seems to slow down as it approaches the verse.
There are some pitch probs - nothing big but enough to distract so you'll have to work on that.
The snare & bass drums are a bit too loud.
The mix is almost mono - in fact is it mono? there's a special art to mono mixing/stcking.
Try panning the guitar & piano either side of the vocals & if you can break up the drum kit & put the cymblas into a stereo image of a kit that'd be good too.
You have the parts to build on to make this really good.
Get to work!
 
Thank you guys so much for all the help.

The DAW im using is Cusbase LE and im recording through a fire pod.
equipment used
CAD gxl3000 for vocals
SM91 on the acoustic
Drum er was a DW with a Ludwig Supraphonic Snare
1 sm91 for and OH
Audix I5 for snare
Audix d6 on kick
Guitars were recorded with a tele through a pod xt live
Keys were recorded direct with a Yamaha Mo8

I think I will re record the guitar parts and possibly the drum parts. I have audix D3's and a D4 to put on the toms and I might try a sm57 on the snare

As far as adding reverb to the vocals goes I have been trying but the reverb plugins that come with cuebase LE seem to suck. I dont have any type of pitch corection so thats out. I will post another mix when I get all this don, which will be when my wife lets me :)
 
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I just realized that when I exported it from cuebase that it was set to export mono. It is actually mixed in stero. I will export again and upload another file tomarrow.
 
I like the track. No offense to your singer, but I agree with the comments above about pitch problems in the vocals. Don't get me wrong. she is clearly a talented singer with a very good voice. With adjustments to the monitoring and another few takes I'm sure you could get a solid vocal track. With the one you have, though, you can work and work to make everything else sound great and even make the vocal "sound" great, but it will still be out of tune. This (Great!) song is kind of "about" the vocal, so if that's out of tune, it going to make everything sound off no matter what else you do. I know you said you're working on this for practice with your recording/mixing process, so it may not be worth it, but a way you could fix this vocal track without buying a plugin for your software would be to download Reaper, export a .wav file of just the vocal track, import it into Reaper, apply the ReaTune effect to fix the pitch issues, render the corrected track as a .wav, and then reimport into your software. (I don't know anything about Cubase, so if .wav is not the best format for moving it to/from Reaper, I'm sure there's another format that would work). ReaTune isn't a particularly good pitch correction effect (at least not in autocorrect mode), but its FREE (well, ok not free, but shareware, so...ya know...) In manual mode ReaTune works very well, especially on long notes that are just a little off which is what your track has a bunch of. If you want to go this route let me know and I can give details of how I use ReaTune for exactly this situation. It isn't obvious at first how to use the manual correction mode.

J
 
You are correct, the vocals ae distracting. I worked on this for a while tonight and I think I have a keeper. I used some diffrent compression on parts, added some reverb and pitch corection, and mixed it alittle better I think. I just need to adjust two things tomarrow then I will post up the final version to see what you think.

I downloaded a few free VST plugins that really helped alot. One was a compressor, one was pitch correction, and one was reverb.
 
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