Acoustic Mix: Chris Tofield - "Give Life One More Chance"

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Critique my mix. This is the original recording: youtube.com/watch?v=-l991XwpGek

Hi everyone. I've been playing music for a while but I'm new to mixing. I'm taking it seriously because I've been meaning to get good at this for a long time, and I've invested in enough gear to have a good go at it. So please give me your honest feedback and don't hold back. I can only get better from here.

Here is my version:
Chris tofield give life one more chance - Instaudio

(Notes: I think I left the guitar too rough, but the style is a bit rough. What do you think?)


Update: Version 2:
Chris tofield - give life one more chance (v2) - Instaudio
Info: Acoustic Mix: Chris Tofield - "Give Life One More Chance"
 
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The space/ambiance sounds good in the guitar and vocal once he starts singing. There may be a little too much reverb for my taste (I like to feel it more than hear it), but it's not bad at all. This is also a matter of taste, but the vocal sounds too loud compared to the guitar to me. It sounds like the guitar is ducking out almost too much when he's singing for the first half of the song. That's just nitpicking though - sounds great overall... far better than the YouTube mix.
 
Thank you for your opinion.

I was cross about the reverb. I felt it was too much but then thought with such a small mix and with his raw-style of vocals and playing it could use some thickening. Dialed it back a bit and then pushed it back up a few times.

The main issue I’m having is that I start losing my ears after about an hour of mixing. Is like my brain can’t handle concentrating on sounds for that long. And once that happens all decisions become a pain because I feel I can no longer trust myself to hear things right. I’m expecting that gets better with time, but it has been holding me back from finishing mixes. I decided to start finishing them anyway and suffer about the mistakes afterwards.

I think you are right about the guitar vs voice volume. I meant to go lower with the volume a bit but I think I over did it. His guitar performance falls “off center” a bit at times and I was hoping to take some of the spotlight off it by ducking it altogether a couple db.

I do think it needs to come back up more. I’m going to try to massage the guitar in a different way, by softening the compressor so it is not quite as present, and maybe using some delay to “mud” it up a bit.
 
Great voice, you've got good grit and are hitting the notes. I like the melody it's like you know where the melody is going just by how you are singing if that makes sense. As far as the mix i have to agree that the vocals could come down a bit. I think the tone of the guitar and voice are both excellent, but in general i like vocals to sit a little more into a mix. Nice recording, great song would be nice to hear with a full band and horn section, im sure it would translate very well to a band sound.
 
Thank you for your opinion. I think I should have been more clear in my post that on this one I'm working on the mix to hone my skills but I'm not the recorded artist.

I'm working on corrections to the mix based on your feedback.

BTW, this music is from:
telefunken-elektroakustik.com/live-from-the-lab-season-3

The original recordings are available for download for those of us looking to practice mixing.
 
Mix sounds very good. The acoustic guitar sounds a bit unnatural, almost like it's distorting (compression?).
 
It's overcompressed for an acoustic track, and mastered too loud IMO. I'd dial back the compressor and limiter.

Not sure what the reverb is, but (to my ear) if it's not natural, so you might try poking around with some different IRs and maybe slightly different pre-delay on guitar and vocal.

Do you have both guitar and vocal straight up the middle? I like to pan them ever so slightly so the "reverb" (on a mono->stereo setting/bus) gives an ever so slight bit of difference. Maybe you did that already, but to repeat myself, the reverb isn't quite as natural as I like.

P.S. from the video it sounds like the guitar is bright, but I'd consider maybe a bit of bass lift, watching for boom where it conflicts with the voice. Just a tiny bit. (Only listening on cans tho')
 
Re:guitar
I normally like acoustics near uncompressed and with little EQ, but in this case the treble-y pick/strumming noises were very strong and I felt that his aggressive strumming was creating a very transient-heavy setting for the vocals. So my goal was to mellow out the transients with the compression, and also EQ with a shelf after around 3k to bring the brights down. I also added thump to the guitar's bottom to address the lack of bass in the song and that the guitar is on the bright side.

I do feel I went too far with the guitar treatment, so I'll try to dial it back.

RE:reverb
Thank you for that opinion. I'm new to applying reverb, and being spoiled for choice with modern software I'm finding it hard to identify what a "good" reverb sound is. I'm very much at the early stages of figuring out my reverb recipe. I feel I have the right approach but not quite the right reverbs.

I have 3 layers of reverb at play. I'm using a presence reverb that thickens the middle without leaving a tail, a hall reverb meant to sound like reverb, and a low-volume atmosphere reverb meant to act faintly in the background to thicken and glue things. I really like the presence reverb, but the other 2 are a work in progress.


RE: Width
I was stuck with this too. I would normally find space for tracks by moving them left or right, but with a 2-track situation I didn't know what to do. I left them both in the center for fear of making it sound weird. My thought was to apply a widener to one of the tracks (probably the guitar) to fill out the stereo field better, but I don't think I did that. I'll try moving them slightly to the sides. I also like the results when sending the reverb to the opposite side, so I could try shifting them 20% and sending their reverbs 20% the other way for a natural-sounding dynamic and fuller sound.
 
[MENTION=199073]jochicago[/MENTION], it's just too much of everything for me. Why 3 reverbs? Why the concern with "thickening? It's a guitar and a singer, so trying to turn it into something else is, at the risk of putting myself in the performer's head, not going to be where I'd start with a first mix, but, instead, keep it close to the original tracks, and then address weaknesses.

I did a quick mix with just the builtin EQ & compressors in Logic, with a pinch of exciter and then limited it up to about -14 LUFS. When I drag my bones upstairs to listen on my monitors and better cans I might hate this, but this is kind of where I'm coming from.

(MP3 upload failed for me!)
P.S. I only used the acoustic guitar track and not the DI track. Left the intro in to hear the single reverb I added.
P.P.S. This guy sounds a *lot* like Mike Zito!
 
Overall I thought this was pretty good.

The guitar sound was pretty good. I think it's missing just a bit of top end. But not bad. The reverb tail on the right side was a little strange sounding. I'd make the whole mix a little more intimate by shortening the decay on all the reverbs and drying it up. It's kind of a concert hall sound, when I'd prefer a nightclub sound.

Very nice singing voice.
 
I want to thank you guys for all the feedback. Gave me lots to think about.

Here is the updated version:
Chris tofield - give life one more chance (v2) - Instaudio

Overall I had over done it across the board, so this version is just a thoughtful pullback on the processing.

Guitar:
I eased off the guitar so it is louder (and more natural) by about 5DB. I also added an imperceptible touch of slap delay to bulk it up and help hide some of the performance imperfections.

Mastering:
I had a mastering plugin (Limiter6) slamming the track up by about 5-10 DB. I pushed that back by 2 thirds, so now it is more like 2-4 DB. So the whole track now feels less loud but also more natural, more in line with an acoustic performance.

Reverbs:
I dialed them back across the board, and replaced the hall reverb with a room reverb with a shallow tail.

Didn’t do much to the voice outside of the reverb change and dialing back the FX just a touch (slap delay, chorus). I also added a 20% pan to the guitar and voice, but I have a supporting ambient track still in the center.


Honestly, I don’t know if this is better. I think it is, but after an hour of mixing I lose my ears and can’t tell what I’m doing anymore.
 
Well, to my ear, it's light-years better because it sounds more natural. Might be spread more than I would, but many of these decisions are just subjective opinions, and depend entirely on what/where you're trying to go. (This is why a lot of folks use reference tracks to compare their work against.)

For me, perhaps a bit overcompressed for a mix, but I'm not sure whether you're trying to get to a more finished sound or not with this. I'd start by really keeping the mix and master steps separate, and get used to bouncing your mixes to un-normalized, non-lossy files so the volume and dynamics are still somewhat maleable for mastering/finishing.

I'll suggest reading up on LUFS if you haven't already and get a feel for dynamic ranges of the type(s) of music you'll be mixing. This MP3 measures -12.5 LUFS/LKFS with a "reconstructed" peak of 0.2 so I'm guessing the MP3 was bounced with "normalize to 0dB" set. (I don't know why that's a default option on some DAWs!). So, for instance, it's just a bit hot for some streaming/video sites, and the peaks high for further lossy-compression that's done at places like SoundCloud (not sure what your site streams at).
 
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