By My Side- Up Dated

I wrote and originally recorded this song about 3 years ago.  My equipment and recording skills were not as good as today.  One of the vocal tracks last time had quite a bit of hiss in it.  So....I have decided to give this song a little bit of and update and rework. 
 
I have used the original guitar tracks, but have redone the vocals.  Let me know what you think of the mix.
 
By My Side:

http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=11733556

twisted6s


Love the vocal and the vocal effect, drop the volume of the guitar a bit to let your voice be more upfront

+1
Also find the frequency that the left guitar pick click is happening and give that a quick cut on the old eq.

Twisted and James, thanks for the advice, I will drop the guitar levels just a tad and James I will take a listen to pick click as well.

Lynne, I will need to give the vocals a listen again and see if I can pick out some of those spots....thanks for the kind words.

+1

Hey Bob,

Thanks for the listen.  I started to work on this a little more this weekend, but family distractions got in the way.  I hope to make some more tweeks next week.

  Danny, it always makes me smile when I get a song review from you.  You have a way of making a person feel like they can really do this stuff.

You also read me perfectly and your advice is spot on.  I will follow this rule of thumb.  Worked on some tweeks this morning, but heard a couple more small adjustments in the car this morning.  I should have changes up in a couple of days.

Lovely acoustic work, massage the vox into place and you've got a really good song here Mike.

Sounds like the acoustic's being played with a 50 cent piece... I'm not saying that's good or bad... ...but what do you think?

Jonesy....  thanks for listening and the comments.  I appreciate the kind words.

montezuma,

I appreciate the listen.   Hmmm....50 cent peice.... I don't think I would do that to this rosewood instrument.  The rhythmic strumming is a rosewood Larrivee model with a pick, a touch of delay or chorus and room dynamics.  If I remember from 3 years ago, the room had hard wood floors and had a little bit of a bright ambience to it.  If you are refering to the picking portion of the acoustic, I am just really digging in to the strings with a pick and it might give the tone a little more grit than soft picking the notes.  I have always played with a little more of a blues feel to my picking.  If I finger pick, I get a softer touch.

Hi, Mike, I still like this song, and it's getting better, but I still hear some notes that are out of tune in the lead vocal.  They occur when you sing the words "by my side".  Your voice is sliding from one note to another, but you're missing the pitch on the slide.  Overall, your voice is fine for this song, so it would be worth it to nail those parts.  The guitar clicking is still there, but it wouldn't be an issue if you took it down a notch.  As I said earlier, these are minor tweaks, and the song deserves the best treatment you can give it.  Hope this helps.

Lynn, thanks for the feedback again.  I will listen to that specific area again and see if I can hear what you are referencing.  Mixing and editing your own vocals has to be one of the harder things to do in this industry.  Seems like I can pick out imperfections in other peoples vocals so much easier than I can hear my own.

Philip,

thank you for the kind words my friend.  I will look into that  EQ dip on the guitar.  Also I will play with just a touch of tape on the guitars.  I beilieve that the guitars just have either a touch of chorus or delay on them.

Here is the scoup on my vocal chain.  Vocals are through an MXL 63M mic, through a Behringer Ultragain tube pre.  The pre has 4 total tubes in it, if I remember right.  I played around with the gain on the tubes for quite a while until I found the best setting to get some of the saturation from the tubes while still the cleanest signal I could.  First effect in the chain is the Sonar vocal doubler, with the spread about 50%.  Then I send it to a bus with the Sonitus Delay.  The delay is ever so slight.  I will expand more upon this in a minute.  The last group of fx's is  all Pro Channel.  I am using the LA2A PC plug with both knobs around 50.  Using the Pro Channel EQ, rolling off the lows and bosting some of the highs in the 4K-5K range.   There are 2 vocal tracks on the verses, basically sung twice as a double track.  The second vocal  is lower in the mix, so that you can just barely hear it and it is panned about 30-35% to the right.  In the chorus, I add another vocal track, basically tripple tracking the chorus.  Loudness is blended to taste and panned to the left about and equil amount as the one to the right.

More on the delay.  I have been reading Mike Seniors book on Mixing and was intrigued  by the section on reverbs vs delays.  He mention that it is not uncommon for many pro engineers to us delay as a substitute for reverb because it is clearer or less muddy at times.  He suggested to set up a delay on a bus so that it was ever so slight, so that it sounds more like a reverb than a delay.  Then, basically send everything to this bus as a glue type reverb to help everything blend together.

Hope that make sense.