We approach a lot of things in the same way, I appreciate you listening to the track. I'm a Logic user and I always phase aligned visually but you lose the ability to do quick A/B comparisons (thinking of it I guess I could just quickly undo/re-do) I still prefer to leave tracks in place if I can though. I never actually thought of re-setting the time counter at the top to display in ms and using the sample delay plugin to align your tracks. What a great idea that is sure to change my workflow a bit. Thanks for that! I probably learn something every day that Logic can do. I have just discovered the whole idea of LUFS and had strapped this across the master in logic limiting up as close to 0dbfs without any gain reduction and seeing the loudness, which is higher than expected. -10lufs. Might have squashed the mix too much woops. But snare sounds punchy still, I reckon I can get away with squeeing another 3db's out of it without too much degradation to the snare as this is probably the only thing that will get limited to get the -7LUFS that seems to be the standard for modern pop. Not sure if this is a good thing or not. . . . . .
It's mainly down to how I processed the bass though, the whole song is bass. I just did the usual "produce like a pro" method of using the clean DI for the sub 250hz using low pass filter, and the real amped recording high passed at 250. Except I squashed the hell out of the bass DI so the meters don't even fluctuate on Logics peak meters using 2 instances of waves mv2 in series to squash the hell out of it with both downwards and upwards compression (overkill probably). Then I just copied the track and distorted heavily with a low blend for intelligibility on smaller speakers. that's it. . .
Parallel'd the drums, squashed the hell out of them aswel, but for snare I also copied that to a new track with transient designer with sharp attack, and minimum sustain, blended in. added a plate verb to snare bus.
rhythms are pretty much left as is. just a minor cut at 5khz to adjust warmth/brightness ratio to better suit.
my leads suck (in context at least)... mainly this is what will finish the mix up. and the acoustic guitar seems too muddy to me, so will cut some 350ish and call it a day with fresh ears. Probably too much room, I have a lot going on low in the mix on the lead though, it's probably this which I need to dial back. so I have -
Multiple copies of lead guitar one of them is -Pitched octave down, -3cents detuned L +3R, and then the same again at 6cents, 9cents, 12cents, slaptback distorted delay, and some weird hi frequency exciter morph thing. all blended in for stereo width and thickness. at this point I couldn't hear straight anymore but everything is routed to a seperate fader so tomorrow I can just lower it appropately.
Got all the same processing on the doubled acoustic guitar aswel. This is why the mix is hitting -10lufs because of the high density of tracks I guess....
simple mix! It's why I chose this song to practise with. I probably spent about 20 minutes re-learning the song, i did a cover of this probably like 5 years ago but the whole mix sucked balls. and I have actually done very little mixing in the last 5 years, I only finished 1 other song in all that time I think.
Family commitments.
The kick drum is really tricky to place in the mix. I don't really know whether i'm in the right place unless i walk around the room. There is a really fine line between too much and too little. And then using EQ to balance click to oompf with 60hz oompf, and 4-8k click. I think my low end is way off. It will probably become really apparant to me when i listen again tomorrow, but right now I have literally blown my ears out for the day and I guess there is only 1 thing left to do . . . . start a new song.
Quality comment though, I learned a lot by your process. I really liked the Logic phase alignment tips.
Edit: I'm using sonarworks to give me a flatter listening experience and also measured out my monitors from left to right wall with minimum of 18" away from any boundary, listening in equalatteral triangle. the basics are right at least. no treatment though. not yet anyway
Cheers man.