Jesus He Knows Me (Genesis cover)

Dig a little deeper

Nola said:
The singer is nasal. Maybe it's hard for people to hear b/c it's a female singer. I'd lower her in the mix and cut the nasal frequencies, and also in the future I'd consider tilting the mic off axis and aiming it downward at her chest to reduce that. I'd like more emotional and loose singing, too. It's a bit...robotic.
Click to expand...
I quite agree with these remarks. I wouldn't use the word "nasal", but the voice lacks warmth, could be the reverb (too present) is accentuating the high mediums and overall the voice is too loud. Yes, the singing lacks some expression and emotion (drama?).
The song isn't really building up to a climax, not enough nuances. This said, there is a real potential, but the "performance" needs to mature before recording it, if that makes sense...
 
Listening to the third mix. Piano is fine. I'm not sure the boosts to the upper frequencies really improved things. Maybe a little boost, but you might have gone too far. Personally, I preferred the vocal a little lower in the mix, the way you had it before. It's a fine line. You don't want the piano hogging the limelight, but the voice is very exposed in this mix. She has a beautiful voice, but the midrange is super dominant. I'm not sure you've quite got those frequencies tamed quite yet.
 
Not familiar with genesis songs, so I can't compare to the original.

The elements here are clear enough and the performances seem tight.

I think mix two is better than mix 3, but I'd still go further in the direction that mix 2 goes in. The piano is louder and bigger sounding in mix two, but still dominated by the vocal, which sounds like it has a much bigger reverb that accentuates too much of the upper mids.

It's tough with just the two components like this, but I would try to get the piano bigger sounding and work on taming some of what I hear as harshness in the vocal.

Just my thoughts. Sorry I didn't respond to this earlier.
 
To get a bigger piano that's not killing the vocal there is a trick I use. Again, you need left and right on two separate tracks panned hard (some DAWs allow this, or you can duplicate the track and hard pan so left track is left and right track is right). Now push one or the other about 4ms ahead of the other (not enough to hear). You'll get more volume without stomping on the vocal because it tricks the brain into thinking it's coming from both sides. Try it, you'll like it. :)
 
I agree! :) After seeing a thread on lcr in mixing techniques I decided to try it on this mix (mix 3), so I did that very thing. My delay is around 50 I think though, only difference. It does sound maybe a little non standard but with so much space in the center it lets the vocal come through and I think it's a good trade off.
 
We decided to go with mix 3, I really liked different bits of each. But the main audience is Sarah's friends and family so I went with the one that featured her most prominently. Thanks guys for all your notes, I think this is like my second piano mix so even though there was just one instrument it wasn't terribly easy for me. . .
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top