Wow, Chris, that was brave! It was a real pleasure to have access to the individual tracks fo one of your songs. And I'm completely unfamiliar with the genre, so that made mixing it a real challenge.
Juliet mixed by alibish
First things first: great song, typically excellent lyrics, nice harmonies, nice simple guitar playing, really strong lead vocal. Al's slide and steel playing were beautiful too, but I found them very difficult to mix - more on that later.
Also, I decided to try and do a mix that kept the drums and bass intact - brave or reckless, you decide...
OK - mix was as follows:
Drums
Plumb centre, and mono - to reduce the amount of space they were taking up.
EQ - broad boost 6db around 63Hz to beef up the kick. 6db narrow cut at 472 to tame the ringing snare. 5db broad cut at 2.5 kHZ to tame the cymbals. 3db broad cut above 15kHz to tame the sizzle.
I used Dominion from DigitalFishPhones to try and sort out the drum sound. Basically I lengthened the attack parts of the drum track, shortened and cut the sustain parts, and dropped the overall level a bit. I also used Dominion to convert to mono.
I used
Silverspike RubyTube to add a bit of gentle "warming" to the sound.
Finally I used Silverspike RoomMachine to add a bit of ambience - I used the "Studio" preset.
Bass
Plumb centre.
Dominion again - Boosted and lengthened the attack, shortened the sustain.
EQ - gentle roll off below 60Hz, gentle roll off above 500Hz.
Guitar 1
Panned hard right.
EQ - gentle roll off below 150Hz to reduce mud, 4db broad boost around 770 Hz for body and character, 4db boost above 13kHz to open up the sound.
Compression - 7:1 ration, hard-ish knee, threshold -17db.
A bit of Aux Bus ambience.
Guitar 2
Panned hard left.
EQ - same as guitar 1, but broad boost around 2700HZ to distinguish the two guitars.
Compression - same as guitar 1.
Steel
I found the steel really difficult to mix - very dynamic, and heavy compression just knackers the swells, plus it seems to occupy a pretty wide raneg of frequencies. Anyway, here's how I attempted it:
Panned 80% right.
EQ - gentle roll off below 250Hz, 7.5db broad cut around 700 Hz, gentle rolloff above 15kHz.
Compression - essentially the same as the acoustics.
A bit of Aux Bus ambience.
Slide
Panned 80% left.
EQ - gentle rollof below 250 Hz, 4db broad cut around 1350Hz to thin it out.
Panned centre and boosted a few db for the solo.
A bit of Aux Bus ambience.
Main Vocal
Plumb centre.
EQ - gentle rolloff below 200Hz to reduce mud, 4db narrowish cut around 470 Hz, 1.5db very broad boost around 1600Hz, boost above 14kHz for air.
Compression - 6:1 ratio, very soft knee, threshold -9db.
A small amount of Aux Bus ambience.
NO AUTOTUNE!
High Harmony
Panned 30% left.
Autotune
Fair amount of Aux Bus ambience.
There are some "oohs" in both harmonies that are really over-compressed or limited in the original waveforms. I cut the level a lot during those, to avoid the "synth" sound they were giving.
Low Harmony
Panned 30% right.
Autotune.
Fair amount of Aux Bus ambience.
I grouped the harmonies and put some compression and EQ on them:
Compression - 6:1, soft knee, threshold -12db.
EQ - rolloff below 250Hz, rolloff above 2kHz to push them back in the mix.
Then I bounced to stereo and did some finishing off with Izotope Ozone:
EQ - gentle rolloff below 40Hz, 1.6db very broad boost around 178HZ to add body, 5.6db narrow cut arround 7780Hz to tame the cymbals some more, gentle boost above 16kHz for air.
Gentle multiband compression (crossovers at 100Hz and 2700Hz).
I deliberately mixed very quiet, so I was able to add 9db boost with the limiter without really affecting the sound at all!
Anyway, it was a really interesting thing to try, and I learned a lot. The genre and some of the instruments were completely new to me, so that was a challenge. I can't wait to hear the other mixes, and I'm sure they'll all be a lot better than mine, but thanks Chris for giving me the opportunity to mix someone else's stuff - I enjoyed it.
Cheers
AB