A Rock Song

Straight up rock mixes aren't my strong suit (but I have heard some really good rock mixes on this forum). This was a fairly old project that I remixed recently. Some of the tracks aren't stellar quality, but I used it as a learning experience to explore a genre that I don't normally mix in.

The song is called Sayin Nothin. (link below)
Hope you like it.

RC

Rix Mix Brix

Thanks Ron! The mix isn't quite right in my opinion, but I'm having trouble deciding how much of it is the tracks, arrangement, etc. (I really screwed up the drum recording.) My contribution to the vocals was genetic (the vocalist is my daughter Holly, who also wrote the song). The band only did the song briefly (not really their type of music). The vocal recording session was done somewhat strategically. Holly did three passes on the verses and skipped the last choruses. When we had those recorded, she went back and did the more-intense last choruses a couple of times (which can kind of blow out her pipes for the day). The backups are some of Holly's, her bass player, and two backup singers.

Holly has a perfect voice for that track.

My first ever mix of a rock piece is farther down the page. I usually do orchestral works, so it was a big stretch for me. But it might give you a laugh if you listen to it.

Ron

Great vocals, and I loved the acoustic guitar intro (I don't know if I would categorize this as "Hard" rock though). The drums need to be re-tracked

Hi RC
Well written song and +10 for Holly's voice. Also loved the acoustic guitar intro. Kept wishing that the acoustic guitar came back again and again in the song! That is perhaps a point of success!! Even I felt that the mix could have been a little better, but it's sounding quite good anyway.

Kaushal

Hi Kaushal,
The acoustic does continue through the rest of the song, largely doubling the electrics in the chopped sections. It's tough to get a big electric sound and leave room for the more subtle acoustic in the mix. If you listen carefully you might pick up parts of the acoustic from time to time. Probably the best fix for the song (outside of retracking drums) might be to remove some of the electric tracks and let the song breath a bit more. I kind of wish I had a side-chain ducker plug-in to try (not a compressor) to let the vocals subtley ride the guitar bus downward. You can do this with a compressor, but it's not really the same thing since when the vocal is the quietest, the attenuation of the "ducked" track is the smallest (rather than a fixed amount of attentuation).

Hi Legion,
Thanks for the compliments. You're probably right about the guitars. I think I was influenced a bit by the released version of the song (search for lowenbad on itunes & cd baby). Most all the songs on the released version were mixed (by a different engineer) and the vocals were occasionally overpowered by guitars on nearly all the songs. My take on the mixes was fairly simple: Figure out what the most important part of the song is (usually the vocal), and try not to screw it up. I spent some time trying to get the guitars fairly large on this song. One problem I had was the guitar and bass tracks had little "clicks" played on dead strings by the instrumentalists along with the snare hits (everybody wants to be a drummer!). Sadly some of them weren't all that together with the snare and kind of spoiled the contrast in the chopped sections of the song. I ended up manually muting clips to get the contrast back. There is a slight amount of time correction in the verses to get things as together as possible between 6 guitar tracks and the bass (aligned with the drums). In the chorus I created one of the descending (arpeggio'd) lines on the guitars from part of the song that I really liked (and pasted it into most choruses). I split the guitars to two busses and used the transient shaper on the verses (on one bus). This kicked up the impact of the chopped sections, but required that I fade it back during the choruses to avoid artifacts. A fair amount of panning and side channel emphasis via channel tools to place the guitars wide in the mix. I pulled the drum bus panning in slightly with channel tools to leave the edges of the mix somewhat clear for reverb returns and the chopped guitars. One last note on the guitars..... During the solo (panned right) you can hear a previous version of the solo running backwards in the left channel. (The band is big on leaving little audio-easter-eggs in their mixes which are usually picked up only with headphones).

Great mix sounds good on this end, excellent vox.

Wow! She's really really good! The mix sounds good to me too. Great song.