Again, much obliged.
The two things I most concern myself with are: too compressed or weirdly compressed? And: bass mixed OK (besides the fact that it's a synth)?
rwc wrote:I checked to make sure I didn't have a myspace page playing in the background at one point.
Hah! Point well taken. That's the "other bane" of my mixes. I'm still learning restraint, for sure, but I have to concede I'm kind of a junkie for layers.
RefD wrote:i would do more extreme positioning (imagine you only have L/C/R switches instead of pan pots, nowt wrong with hard panning) and use less (or at least different) reverb...heck, maybe use a bit of slap echo on the lead vocal instead of reverb.
How interesting that folks note the panning. Most of my tunes are crazy panned and I thought I was overdoing it. Guess not.
Part of it was that there weren't instruments of similar timbre to pan, so harder panning was making it a bit unbalanced sounding, but I'm sure there's something I can swing out.
With the verb, I was trying to buck my personal trend of dry-as-possible-without-sounding-weird, and just going for it with the washed-out verb. It does kind of muck things up though. There is a quieter bouncing slap-style echo going on, but yeah, tons of wash. I do like slaps.
I should mention that I'm probably going to honor my personal commitment to not remix this song just so I can get the others done before I die. I'm mainly soliciting this feedback for the rest of the songs on the project.
RefD wrote:as for "too clean", there are ways to remedy this if you feel it's appropriate.
You know, I'd love some tips along these lines. I think I'm gaining an appreciation for why ITB recording/synthing/mixing has a bad rap... Every time I try to add a touch of distortion here or roughness there, to give it some life, it sounds ridiculous. Like a "super clean version of rough", if that makes sense. So, tips welcome, or if you can recommend some free plugins for roughing stuff up... I think it's the basic lack of an acoustic space that the sounds are coming from. Throwing some ambient short-delay verb on it just makes things muddier... well, not always, but. I know, the way to make a recording sound real is to record real things.
BikeSailboatGuitar: thanks so much. It's really important for me to hear that.
The process... let's see, it was a while ago that I worked on that one, but generally: I record everything with an AKG C535 mic (hand held condenser style thing) into a Mackie 1202 VLZ-Pro, into a Presonus Firebox. So, home studio down the line. First, vocals and guitar (often at the same time, vocal mic, guitar DI, but I think I did them separately on this song). Usually I then make a tempo map of the song (of my jerky-tempo playing) for the sequencing, but sometimes I play to a skeleton MIDI arrangement with a few tempo-changes built in. After that, adding bass synth (if it wasn't there), drum sequence, keyboard parts, etc. Tweaking and editing. Vocal overdubs. Whistle overdubs (choruses). Obsessive editing. I mix on headphones and master on my roommates stereo speakers, so that's a liability, but you know. I use lots of free VSTs and VSTi's. The eq/compression/reverb is mostly Waves plugins.
I've also spent a lot of time making percussion sample kits from stuff around the house; tons of samples from a bathtub, hitting stuff in the kitchen with chopsticks, mouth sounds, etc. The kitchen stuff features prominently here.
Happy to be more specific if you like, but maybe that's too much already.
Thanks folks, this is useful.
-c
