Sounds good. For the snare transient peaks you showed in that picture. I wouldn't bother too much. In the end it can be squashed with a limiter. The snare hits are a very percussive sound and the transients are (by definition) short time periods, so there will be no big loss in quality for the song overall.
Thanks. The thing is...that image
was the final mixdown (of one of the earlier mixes) so the limiter had not dealt with them at all it looks like. The thing concerning me was that my idea of mixbus compression is to glue things into a cohesive unit...but with these crazy snare spikes I get the feeling the body of the song is not really even being addressed by the stereo compression...only the peaks. The makeup gain is turning up these peaks and the body of the mix/ song doesn't get glued. What I worked out is that (I use ezDrummer) the overhead channel contains 99% of the snare/ kick volume and tone. The individual snare/ kick channels could
literally be muted in my DAW and nothing would change regarding the kick and snare volume and tone in the drum bus. Crazy! So I realised that my problems were
not on the snare and kick channels (I spent 3 days putting every plugin known to man on the snare channel...for nil result)...but in the OH's. At that point I had options...a) turn off all bleed in EZD, lower the OH's then mixdown to audio, b) do nothing to the EZD mixer, mixdown to audio
then high pass the OH channel so that it largely eliminates the kick and snare, leaving the cymbals and hihats etc.
Monitorism:
Voice and bass seem right.
The snare really pops, but I don't hear much of the kick.
What happens if you don't pan the organ both left and right? What if it's just left, for instance, opposite that guitar on the right?
I've figured out something that reminds me of those Dylan albums - this tune's cheerful. Impressive.
Funny you mention the kick. The last thing I did in the mix was turn it down by about 5db because I thought it was too loud. I tell you it's a long way to the top if you wanna rock and roll...from your spare room...alone. The organ...I didn't try that. Thought about it but decided to just leave it alone in case smoke started coming out of something and I was engulfed in flames.
Can’t critically comment on mix, but on my iPhone it sounds fine.
But I must say you have a substantial body of work
Thanks man. I'm trying to get good at mixing. One thing I'm quite sure of...a bad, amateur mix can absolutely kill all the work done to write and record what should be simple 2 or 3 minute songs. I mean I'm not assembling a 40 piece band here. It's 4 or 5 tracks/ parts. Amazing how easy it is to throw the old anchor right through the middle of the deck and scuttle everything to the bottom of the sea.