whirlwindRA
Member
Hello once again! I have received some truly great advice from this forum in the past, and I'm back for more. This is a new song I've been working on with my band, and I think I've made a much better initial mix than I was able to a year ago when I did an album. This time it's even more complicated, with louder drums and more guitars. I'd just like to get some opinions to make sure I'm on the right track, even though some things aren't the final recordings yet (bass, some vocals).
General things I've done so far:
-Basic volume and panning adjustments
-Gating, light compression and EQ on individual drums
-Duplicate snare track with emphasis on the "crack" using high-pass EQ, slight distortion, and envelope shaper (about -10dB lower than main snare track)
-Slight tape emulation on the overheads
-Gently EQ'd guitar tracks, light compression/tape emulation on acoustic
-Sent most tracks to a reverb bus (sometimes quite minimally)
At this point, the drums are the main thing that are bothering me. At times, I feel like the snare is a bit odd, but I'm not too sure why. There is definitely a lot of wrestling with cymbal bleed, and I have automation that switches the gate on/off at certain points of the song where the snare playing becomes soft vs loud, but there are parts where the gating isn't feasible due to the drummer's excellent dynamic contrast. Also, I feel like the acoustic guitar is awkwardly placed in the soundstage (too close to the kick and snare?). I'd really like to double track it and hard pan it, but our vocalist/acoustic guitarist thinks that kind of production would remove the central focus on acoustic guitar and would be straying too far from "folk" (this doesn't even sound much like folk anymore anyway...). Right now, it's sitting at 45R with it's room mic (turned down a bit) at L30, just for kicks. There are a few other auxiliary instruments that I removed from this track since I figured they weren't crucial to the skeleton of the mix.
For previous songs I've done, I've been told to ditch individual drum compression until I've tried parallel compression on the whole kit, but I was never sure how to do that/get a good sound out of it and I'm wondering if that would be useful here.
Thanks in advance!
Mix 1 8/17:
[MP3]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/54393172/Sample.mp3[/MP3]
Mix 2 8/20:
[MP3]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/54393172/Sample2.mp3[/MP3]
General things I've done so far:
-Basic volume and panning adjustments
-Gating, light compression and EQ on individual drums
-Duplicate snare track with emphasis on the "crack" using high-pass EQ, slight distortion, and envelope shaper (about -10dB lower than main snare track)
-Slight tape emulation on the overheads
-Gently EQ'd guitar tracks, light compression/tape emulation on acoustic
-Sent most tracks to a reverb bus (sometimes quite minimally)
At this point, the drums are the main thing that are bothering me. At times, I feel like the snare is a bit odd, but I'm not too sure why. There is definitely a lot of wrestling with cymbal bleed, and I have automation that switches the gate on/off at certain points of the song where the snare playing becomes soft vs loud, but there are parts where the gating isn't feasible due to the drummer's excellent dynamic contrast. Also, I feel like the acoustic guitar is awkwardly placed in the soundstage (too close to the kick and snare?). I'd really like to double track it and hard pan it, but our vocalist/acoustic guitarist thinks that kind of production would remove the central focus on acoustic guitar and would be straying too far from "folk" (this doesn't even sound much like folk anymore anyway...). Right now, it's sitting at 45R with it's room mic (turned down a bit) at L30, just for kicks. There are a few other auxiliary instruments that I removed from this track since I figured they weren't crucial to the skeleton of the mix.
For previous songs I've done, I've been told to ditch individual drum compression until I've tried parallel compression on the whole kit, but I was never sure how to do that/get a good sound out of it and I'm wondering if that would be useful here.
Thanks in advance!
Mix 1 8/17:
[MP3]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/54393172/Sample.mp3[/MP3]
Mix 2 8/20:
[MP3]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/54393172/Sample2.mp3[/MP3]
Last edited: