An important song for me, sounds bad and hollow

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patrickkata

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Hey, so I just finished recording and mixing a new demo song of mine.
It's about some bad life experiences and quite important for me, but as usual - I can't get it to sound right.

It's kinda hollow-sounding, and I think I over-compressed it - I was trying to get it to be high output, but I may have overdone it.

It's a rock tune, with a rather simple arrangement.

Would anyone be so kind and let me know what's the worst part of it, and how to fix it?

 
Too much compressions.

Sounds flat. smush smush
Unsmush it?
 
Yeah, everything sounds squashed together. Some re-leveling and panning to make some space would help it loads.

Sounds like there's a good recording under there. :thumbs up:
 
patrickkata said:
It's kinda hollow-sounding, and I think I over-compressed it - I was trying to get it to be high output, but I may have overdone it.
Click to expand...

The hollowness on the vocals sounds like room sound - where'd you record it and was there any treatment in the room?

Overcompressed: yeah, back off on the compression and let things breathe a bit.

There are timing issues in the segment that starts at about 3.43 (which is weird cuz the rest of the tune is pretty tight) - I'd be tempted to edit that whole part out and make the entire tune shorter.

What about all those extraneous sounds during the quiet segments, like at 0.39? Do you really want them in?
 
Thanks for the replies, I really appreciate that.

Vocals were recorded with 2 mics, a dynamic and a condenser (pretty decent), in a room with no good treatment. But there's a tiny bit of artificial reverb added later on, maybe that breaks it further. Same for the accoustic (which is barely audible, anyway)...

For the compression, I was hoping to make the thing loud - looks like I went too far. I'll try again.

And about the weird extra sounds in the quiet sections - I know they're there, and they were not intended, the condenser recorded a little more than I expected - but if I can fix the rest, I don't really care about them.

I'll re-mix it when I can, and I'll try to ask you guys for a second opinion, thanks.
 
I'd redo the vocals, then. Same room, but this time rig some absorption behind the mic and hang up a quilt or something behind the singer too. That'll nail all the high frequency reflections and the upper mids as well (if I know what I'm talking about, but I don't). Point is, it'll get rid of the room sound on the vocal. And...if you track the vocal again, you can be careful not to bang around this time. :)
 
Yep. Lots of noise in the solo vocal.

You're going for that lo-fi, white stripes esque sound here, right? You large capture that, especially in the guitar tone and vocal tone when everything's going. It does sound a little messy in those parts though; the drums get pretty buried and washy.

Electric beep at 3:05 and again at 3:15. Where's that coming from? Interface glitch? Interference on a line?
 
Yes, I was kinda going for the lo-fi sound, something like QOTSA, I guess...
But in the end I was hoping to capture more of individual instruments. Recording and mixing is superfun, but it's really damn hard...
Especially with the drums. I bumped up the low tones to get a bit more of bass and kick, but in the end it probably made things even worse.

With that electric beep I have no idea what that is, sounds like a diy click track or something, but it's not. It's probably a buffer overrun in the interface driver?

But - I'm kinda proud of the song itself, so I'll try to put it together once again.
 
the main problem is the pumping of the compression, it's messing up the high end and crushing it down because the threshold isn't set right, sounds more like a brickwall limiter to me? I can also hear a noise at 3:16 it sounds like mobile phone interferance, I think that's what your mystery noise is....

Try having NO compression on the master bus even if it's 20dB quieter, I'd rather be turning it up.
 
I'm hearing "hollowness" mostly on the vocal. Where it exists on the other tracks, they tend to cover each other. And I agree with dobro that it sounds like a bad room. Mic technique might be a factor too. If you can't change the room, mic as close to the singer as you can.

The performances are a bit sloppy, particularly early in the song.

The guitars are a bit out in front and the drums are way back. The guitars are a bit muddy and taking up a lot of space.

I will say that I really liked the song. It was cool and it had a lot of energy. Just need to practice and tighten up the performances.
 
Btyre2013 said:
Try having NO compression on the master bus even if it's 20dB quieter, I'd rather be turning it up.
Click to expand...

^that

At the Mix phase. You're better off mixing quieter and getting it to sound the best it can and then getting volume at the mastering phase.
 
K, thanks for all the detailed responses :)

A stupid question - if I sum the master bus and end up with low volume, then try to turn that up with no compression to something more acceptable - what do I do with the peaks that will run out of range? Clip them with some hard limiter?
I was listening to some foo fighters recordings for mixing inspiration, but it doesn't show. But, I thought there was quite a lot of compression on them, too.

As for the vocal recording, true - I was close to the dynamic mic, but the condenser was about 3x further away.
 
patrickkata said:
As for the vocal recording, true - I was close to the dynamic mic, but the condenser was about 3x further away.
Click to expand...

Just to make sure I understand... You used two mics on the vocal - and they were spaced apart by some distance? I'm not sure why you would do that. It might be contributing to the hollow sound. I think just a single mic (probably the condensor) close up would be best.
 
Room mic? Why not? But who would have mixed the room mic in that prominently?
 
He said one mic was 3x further away than the other. To me that's not a room mic. That's a "create a phase issue" mic.
 
Yeah, ha ha. I've never had much luck with room mics. In the end I usually don't use the room mic track, cuz it sounds better with the close-miked track alone. But tons of pros use room mics all the time, so it must be useful. I think they mix it in really low.
 
dobro said:
I've never had much luck with room mics. In the end I usually don't use the room mic track, cuz it sounds better with the close-miked track alone.
Click to expand...

Yeah that's me exactly. I don't have a great sounding room. Most HRers probably don't. So I avoid room sound like the plague and add artificial reverb. Again, probably like 99+% of everyone here. Fortunately I hate reverb beyond a minuscule amount. :)
 
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