Been a while! New recordgin for client, intermediate/near-final mix... thoughts?

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Llarion

Llarion

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Hi gang! Been too long! I see most of the usual suspects are still churning out cool stuff, I'm so glad!!

I've been recording for some clients recently and I wanted to get some other ears on the work to see if I've missed anything (you get so used to these tunes, you stop hearing things after the 900th playing, ya know?)

This is a tune called (for lack of a better title), "Song 7". The client is singing and playing the rhythm guitar down the left. I'm the drums, bass, and keyboards, and a friend of mine who I play with a lot is the other guitars. (He's the young lady's guitar teacher as well) Any holes?

Thanks for the ears!!!

Song 7
 
Pretty good, the mix sounds tight and complete. What kind of guitars are they using? Drums are really nicely recorded. You've got a grrreat sound on them. Playing is super... Girl sounds good, little work on the pitch and she'll kill em.
 
Record Gin! Sounds like a song or band name - I laughed!
Nice drum intro & the drum sound good following from that.
Just a little growl in the bass to make it defined which is cool.
The organ sound is pretty good though it seems just a little toppy without grunt in the mids.
I'd like a couple of holes punched in the arrangement just to create a bit more dynamics - maybe find the bits where she's singing at her best & pull back around her to give her the chance to shine a little more.
Vox are cleanly recorded but she is a little pitchy & kind of bland: her vocal melody & lyrics didn't hold my attention - I kept going back to the instruments.
MAYBE you've done too good a job backing this!
Lead tone is fabbo!
 
Hey Phil,

I've haven't seen you in here in a while. This sounds great. Levels seem fine. Clarity and balance are all there. Enjoyed the drum performance in particular here. Interesting tone on the lead guitar...is there an octave effect there in addition to the distortion? At first I found it a little too dry relative to all else, but I got used to it as it went along. Anyway, you want that part to be in the forefront when it comes in, so...

The singer has an interesting voice with a fair amount of personality to it which is nice. She did seem to be flat (maybe?) a fair amount of the time - although vocal pitch is certainly not my strong suit so I may be way off there.

You have a nice, full balanced mix here. nice work.
 
It's good but something is missing... Sounds good enough, but the vocals kill it. Not that she's the worst singer, but she needs to do it over a few hundred times hahahah
 
Vocals are really really flat. Painful at times, annoying the rest.

Production is tight though.
 
Right at the beginning when the guitars and bass come in, something is off. Kind of stumbles in. Vocals aside, i really like the overall sound. I'd be happy with it if i were the client.
 
I've tried gently running the vox through Autotune, but she scoops the attacks enough that the line in the sand where the attacks become unnatural is not far enough along where staying behind it renders any significant pitch correction... She's pretty new at the whole songwriting thing, and this is her first recording session (six tunes)... I might not be doing the Autotune right, I'm setting it as a bus, so it's not printing to the wav file until final mix... but I can't seem to find a balance in the controls. Hmm. I'll tinker some more. Thanks very much, everyone! Gerry, her guitar is a red sparkle Epiphone Les Paul, his is a Shechter, I believe... Both recorded dry, each bussed to a Waves stomp box plugin...

Ray, I tried having more mid in the organ, but it was too ballsy; she wants the sound to be leveraged toward the guitars, So I wanted to be a suggestion of the sound, have it cut but not intrude... :)
 
Llarion said:
I've tried gently running the vox through Autotune, but she scoops the attacks enough that the line in the sand where the attacks become unnatural is not far enough along where staying behind it renders any significant pitch correction... She's pretty new at the whole songwriting thing, and this is her first recording session (six tunes)... I might not be doing the Autotune right, I'm setting it as a bus, so it's not printing to the wav file until final mix... but I can't seem to find a balance in the controls. Hmm. I'll tinker some more. Thanks very much, everyone! Gerry, her guitar is a red sparkle Epiphone Les Paul, his is a Shechter, I believe... Both recorded dry, each bussed to a Waves stomp box plugin...

Ray, I tried having more mid in the organ, but it was too ballsy; she wants the sound to be leveraged toward the guitars, So I wanted to be a suggestion of the sound, have it cut but not intrude... :)
Click to expand...

Autotune might give her a false sense of security. I leave that to you as producer :-) This is a lotta vocal song, but maybe a few takes with some comps? Then she has actually done it on her own, albeit slightly edited.
Her songwriting is good = would like to hear some more when you get it mixed.
 
ido1957 said:
Autotune might give her a false sense of security. I leave that to you as producer :-) This is a lotta vocal song, but maybe a few takes with some comps? Then she has actually done it on her own, albeit slightly edited.
Her songwriting is good = would like to hear some more when you get it mixed.
Click to expand...

Well, she doesn't have an unlimited budget to keep hammering away at it... I'm a little bit limited by that.... :(
 
Llarion said:
Well, she doesn't have an unlimited budget to keep hammering away at it... I'm a little bit limited by that.... :(
Click to expand...

Don't ya hate that?

Okay... I listened to it, and haven't read any other comments, so I apologize for any redundancy.

1. Something is off with her voice. Off-pitch in quite a few places, and something else...

2. Cymbals, when hit hard, are a bit too shrill for me.

Guitars sound great. Provide a wonderful bed of music. The drums sound really, really good. I found myself wondering if the kick should be brought up just a bit, but the more I listened to it, the more I liked where it was. Organ sounds great, too.

The music generally sounds really well done. The singer's vocals are super nasal-y, and as mentioned, off pitch. They're so nasal-y sounding, it makes diction a problem. I couldn't really understand what she was saying half the time. Problem is - I don't really know how one would fix that. If you find a way to change that, please share with the group. I'd like to know if there's some sort of EQ range to cure nasal attributes of vocals.

Great work, Llarion. Sounds very, very well mixed.
 
I quite like her voice, it's got it's own character and the pitchy parts can be corrected. My only problem with it is that it sounds intelligible to me. I can understand very little of what she's singing. but there's hardly anything you can do about that, Phil...;)
The recording sounds pretty nice. Some harmonies in the chorus would have been nice too. Very good work.:)
 
I haven't read any of the replies so I'm just shooting straight from the hip here....

Those vocals are terrible. I'm sorry, but damn, that's bad. The drums sound a little thin and very mono-like. They just kind of sit there all smack-dab in the middle. No bigness to the kit. The rest of the instrumentation is all very good, very big, and very wide which makes the drums seem like an afterthought. The mix seems pretty good. Everything sits well and is audible with no obvious clash of frequencies. It just needs bigger drums and a new singer. :D
 
Greg_L said:
I haven't read any of the replies so I'm just shooting straight from the hip here....

Those vocals are terrible. I'm sorry, but damn, that's bad. The drums sound a little thin and very mono-like. They just kind of sit there all smack-dab in the middle. No bigness to the kit. The rest of the instrumentation is all very good, very big, and very wide which makes the drums seem like an afterthought. The mix seems pretty good. Everything sits well and is audible with no obvious clash of frequencies. It just needs bigger drums and a new singer. :D
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So, you're saying I need to, like, buy bigger drums? :D Actually though, I'm a little confused by that, because the drums are set with an X/Y overhead, hard panned L/R, and the toms are isolated in different places in the field (I edit my tom tracks, removing all but the actual hits, so I have no overring/resonance/phasing issues, and so I can place them precisely...) the kick is down the middle and the snare is just right of center (I come in with 8 tracks of drums). Is it just an EQ thing you're hearing? I'm never happy with my snare sound for some reason... :confused:

I like the character of her voice too, (plus she's a robobabe), I've tried to pitch correct her, but like I mentioned, it's hard to walk the line between pitch correction and mechanical sounding with her attacks being so swoopy. I need a clinic on how to use Autotune better, I think. I also have to limit the crap out of her vocal to get them anywhere near even, you should see it... I use an L1+ to do it, it's about 13dB of limiting where she sits now...

PI, I'll try rolling off the egde on the overheads more, see how it comes out...
 
Llarion said:
So, you're saying I need to, like, buy bigger drums? :D Actually though, I'm a little confused by that, because the drums are set with an X/Y overhead, hard panned L/R, and the toms are isolated in different places in the field (I edit my tom tracks, removing all but the actual hits, so I have no overring/resonance/phasing issues, and so I can place them precisely...) the kick is down the middle and the snare is just right of center (I come in with 8 tracks of drums). Is it just an EQ thing you're hearing? I'm never happy with my snare sound for some reason... :confused:
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I hear the toms are panned a little, but the hats, crashes, and ride seem smack centered. Your X/Y technique may be the culprit. X/Y doesn't typically get a very wide stereo image, if at all, as drum overheads unless your mics and room are very good. With X/Y, the capsules are right next to eachother and drums are so noisy that you get a bunch of crash and boom in both mics, fucking up your stereo spread. But, if you listen to the very end of your clip, you can hear some spread on the cymbals as they ring out. If your snare track has a lot of bleed and it's not gated, that could also be giving the cymbals a centered sound, since the snare is mostly in the middle. Also, try flipping the phase on the snare track. Rami told me about that little trick a while back and it can really fatten up a snare.
 
There is a graphic mode in auto tune that you can zoom in with and perfectly correct her singing. You'll have to do a lot of searching and find some tutorials on how to use it correctly, but it'll be worth the time just learning a new trick.

It's going to take you hours of sitting there and correcting everything to the perfect pitch. I would just go ahead and throw it in for free seeing how you'll be using her stuff to learn something new LOL. But that's just me...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bHNge8aCLY
 
Greg_L said:
I hear the toms are panned a little, but the hats, crashes, and ride seem smack centered. Your X/Y technique may be the culprit. X/Y doesn't typically get a very wide stereo image, if at all, as drum overheads unless your mics and room are very good. With X/Y, the capsules are right next to eachother and drums are so noisy that you get a bunch of crash and boom in both mics, fucking up your stereo spread. But, if you listen to the very end of your clip, you can hear some spread on the cymbals as they ring out. If your snare track has a lot of bleed and it's not gated, that could also be giving the cymbals a centered sound, since the snare is mostly in the middle. Also, try flipping the phase on the snare track. Rami told me about that little trick a while back and it can really fatten up a snare.
Click to expand...

Good stuff, I'll try mucking with the snare. I might also manually gate it like I do the toms, to further isolate it... I do my x/y with some offset to avoid that condensation effect in front of the mics, plus the room is super dead... The more I think about it, the more I think youre' right that the snare bleed might be causing what you're hearing, because I don't gate it, (I don't like the way a gate makes the attack sound) and there's a lot of hihat bleed in that channel. I offest the snare to the hi-hat side more sometimes, to make the hat move further over, maybe I didn't do that enough... Hmmm... :D Thanks!!
 
FoulPhil said:
There is a graphic mode in auto tune that you can zoom in with and perfectly correct her singing. You'll have to do a lot of searching and find some tutorials on how to use it correctly, but it'll be worth the time just learning a new trick.

It's going to take you hours of sitting there and correcting everything to the perfect pitch. I would just go ahead and throw it in for free seeing how you'll be using her stuff to learn something new LOL. But that's just me...
Click to expand...

I flat rated her on the post production and I'm not telling her how much time I'm actually spending... :) I tried the graphic mode, and was mystified. I'll have to look for a tutorial, thanks for the suggestion...
 


All the auto tune versions basically work the same and with what ever program you're using. Just a little tip you'll have to figure out how to route the corrected vocals into a new track. In pro tools it's pretty easy, but I haven't used it in any other DAWs.
 
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