zesbez wrote:Fair feedback... I'm a fan of dryer vocals and drums myself. Any improvements?
Well the immediate impression the mix gives is a poor one as the snare sounds out of phase. It lacks body and it sounds like the mixer tried to make it up by putting this crazy dense/long hall on it. Its just too much and it isn't tying the snare into the rest of the kit/mix at all. I mean, you can't really fix this without getting a quality reverb. Nothing exposes a bad reverb faster than snare/vocal tracks.
At the very least, I'd set it up with a MUCH shorter decay and less predelay. This kind of track can get away with a sub .8 second reverb on the snare easily. Getting the snare to be in phase would be the first priority here.
The kick is gone on small speakers, too. A mult of it to get some "knock" from it can solve that.
The verb on the guitars is cool but VERY wet and the guitar is only panned left. A smart trick is to mult it with an 18ms delay to make it stereo and pan them somewhat opposite with slighty (or dramatically) different reverbs and delays. This will make the guitar sound huge.
The vocal could use a compressor with some character. I'm on small speakers so I can't comment much on the tone.
It sounds like it doesn't have a good delay/predelay on it which is hurting it tremendously. Before I even THINK about throwing a long verb on a vocal, I run it through a dedicated predelay to prep the vocal for the reverb. I prefer lexicon delays for this (don't ask me which ones). I will also process a vocal many ways after a chain compressors and eqs it might look something like this:
One send feeding two lexicon delays with different delay times, split L+R feeding a stereo reverb or two different mono reverbs for the left and right. This is usually my "long" or "bloom" reverb for the vocal. It can often have a chorus/flange/symphonic effect sitting between the delays and the verb.
Another send that goes to my general "glue" reverb. More often than not, this is a small "studio ambience" type room sound that most everything in the mix gets a touch of to pull the parts together.
Another send feeding a H3000D/SE on the Micropitchshift setting or the Dual 910 patch. This is typically automated heavily, coming up tons in the chorus. The Eventide often gets de-essed or even fed into my "short" reverb in the mix or a subtle chorus effect.
In the end, all of these effects are heavily automated to make the vocal change dynamically as needed.
