Is the vocal too loud? Drums too harsh?

grn

Well-known member
I struggled with the mix on this a LOT. I'm still not a fan the hi hat sound. The bass is fat and sounds great on its own, but is almost too much for this song. I could not get a good vocal performance and get the tone I wanted so I essentially did a hi pass on the vocal from 250 up and then sent it to a bus and pitched shifted it down an entire octave to fill in the low frequencies, then used a stereo spreader to make it wider, brought it up until I could just barely hear it then turned it back down. This was after comping vocals, picking doubled vocals out, going in and manipulating the volume dynamics by hand on the beginnings of words/loud parts and making them more dynamic on the endings with false crescendo's, pitch correction, time correction, changed the formant, crazy compression and de-essing... I don't even know. It was crazy. I got a friend to help fill in with vocal harmonies.

Please let me know if you hear anything that sticks out that I can do to make this better. I don't know that I can listen to it objectively anymore. Is the vocal too loud? Drums too harsh? Guitar solo too harsh? Or too muddy?

View attachment 28 November 2020 - When We Grow Old_mixdown.mp3
 
I don’t think the vocals are too loud.

As for the drums, I don’t quite know how to describe it. They don’t sound harsh. They don’t sound weak. They don’t sound thin, but it sounds like some meat could be put on them.
 
The tom @ 1:05 is a little boomy in my closed phones. The guitar @ 1:15 sounds muddy. I really like the lead vocal's characteristics and tonal qualities. No major problems jumped out at me. The melody is very nice and the whole song sounds like it came right outta early 70's pop radio.
 
Took a little boom out of the tom and a little mud out of the guitar solo. I also added some "meat" to the drums (used a little parallel compression on a drum bus and... also increased the stereo spread a bit in the cymbals and hi hat).

Do the vocals still sit okay in this mix?

It's amazing what a few little tweaks will make to a mix.

View attachment 29 November 2020 - When We Grow Old_mixdown.mp3
 
Wow ... absolutely phenomenal. Any comments I would make would all just be incredibly minor and all completely personal preferences. This was one of my favorite tracks I've ever heard on this forum. Bass sounded fierce. Your voice is so great; I didn't want you to stop singing.

Big kudos. Thanks so much for sharing! :)

Please let us know when you have an album available because I want to buy it.
 
After reading all the stress and effort the vocal took i was expecting a mess...but its sweet..really nice work.

Mark
 
Back
Top