"Bleed"Big Rock w Huge Chorus, Opinions on song/ Mix/

Both great tunes dude! I'd not touch a thing on the eq's on either of them, but here's my take.

Bleed: Kick and hats are a bit too dominant for my liking and the guitar and snare need to come up. When the vocals hit, the guitars disappear into the abyss. I hear hats the most in this mix...lead guitars could come up as well. Again, leave the eq's alone...this is perfect with a little leveling.

I won't wait: Too much limiting or compression or something. Snare drum disapears, pumping on all the accents. Electrics are disappearing again when everything hits. Acoustic is absolutely beautiful. Eq's on this seem to be decent, but not as tight as the first tune. It could be the limiting, but something is definitely pumping somewhere that shouldn't be and it seems to be pushing the low end when it does this.

The tunes as well as your writing, playing and engineering skills are quite good...I'd just work on the levels on these a bit and watch the limiter on the second tune. Other than that, fabulous job....right up my alley! :)

I can not offer any good help with the mix, because mine don't come close to what you have. I did like both songs. I wont wait for you sounds less like it is something I have heard before. I like the chord changes in that. Really good songs!

Just posted new mix w tweaks on suggestions on "Bleed". Opened up threshold a bit on comp. made suggested level changes. Better but not quite there. Almost I think. :-)

Great! Really enjoyed the song. Great playing, singing and production.

lellington954


Hi Danny:
I just viewed your site & listened to some of your music. Great stuff, playing, production & songs.  thank you for taking the time to listen & comment.
Your right. I just finished that mix yesterday. The hats are def a tad too hot as well as snare needs to come up & guitars kinda fade here & there. Often I have a great sounding 32 bit mastered wave file & when I convert to mp3 the compression going from 32 to 16 bit changes the way things sit in the mix. So I find myself by trial & error going back & forth trying to get that nice punchy pump in the 32bit & tweaking comps to compensate for 16bit mp3 conversion.
Anyways thank you again & I will be posting a "tweaked mix" this morning. Same issues with the other song only more comp than levels.  Question? I frequently again have an issue with mp3s. When I render to mp3 the playback has a kind of slight distortion/artifacts. I've tried "dithering" only once as suggested by many in the forums but still get this frequently. either in making a Master wave file or only dithering when converting to an mp3, still happens  Do you run into this? any suggestions?
Thank You,
Lawrence Ellington,
Las Vegas, NV

Hi Lawrence,
 
Thanks for the kind words, much appreciated. :) As for your mp3 question, this very well could have something to do with the places you upload your stuff on. For example, I never have any problems with mp3 conversions. You always want to convert using CBR at a bit rate of 192 or higher for nearly lossless audio. My stuff on Myspace, is all completely jacked up and distorted. Whatever the heck happens on that side when you upload an mp3, is beyond me. It totally kills my audio. But if I were to put the songs on my server at like 320kb mp3, you'd be like "wow, what a difference". Even at 192, they would still sound like CD quality.
 
So you shouldn't notice any distortion or other artifacts on your mp3's unless the program you use to encode them may not be too good or something. I use Wave Lab for my mp3's and in my opinion, it has been my best choice where I can't tell a difference to be honest.
 
Dithering....this is questionable man. There are people that believe in it and swear by it, yet there are others that believe it's a bunch of bs. I do it because it's supposedly the proper way to alter your audio for CD burning. There are times when I have not dithered and have not ever noticed a difference. So in my mind, I've bought into the hype and do it because it's what I've been taught I'm supposed to do. There are people that claim they can hear the different noise shaping within dithering. I have some pretty good ears and an excellent monitor system. For the life of me, try as I may, I can't hear any difference at all no matter what.
 
I've had the best luck using the Waves stuff to dither or pow-r 3 in Sonar. Other have mentioned they hate pow-r 3 the most out of the dithering and can hear a difference between them. I sure can't, so maybe my ears suck. LOL! Anyway, there shouldn't be any differences in your mp3 vs the wave file that would be incredibly noticeable unless you used a lower bit rate like 128 or 160 and using VBR could also bring in some artifacts. Just about any encoder will work well at 192 or above. Lame or Fraunheoffer or however you spell that, lol both sound the same to me at the higher bit rates, but some claim Fraun is better for lower bit rates.
 
I will say this though. The better your mix without loads of pumping or limiting, the better it will sound once you convert it to mp3. Ah I see you've updated the mixes....I'll give them a listen. :)

Really very nice mixes. Danny's got you covered on the mix situation. Great playing and singing.  Cool stuff.

Love your new song......now for a long time fave of mine "I won`t wait for you".....The mix sounds way better than the old one which is still on my soundclick station...One thing I noticed is the vocals are kinda prettier on the new mix they`ve lost that rough honest tonality that they had on the old mix (don`t get me wrong I still love the song) Did you retrack the vox?

Hey thank you. New mix posted if you want to check it out.
Thanks again,
Lawrence,

Hey Danny:

Thanks again for taking to time to help me out.
If I may be so bold as to ask you to listen to these just updated mixes.
I think I'm real close. I think, lol

Thanks again.

Lawrence,

Hi Lawrence,

Unfortunately, I'm hearing the same stuff in Bleed. As soon as your chorus hits, those guitars are gone. The back up vocals just seem to be sharing a close pan field and are cancelling out the rhythm guitars to where they are barely audible and all I hear are vox, drums and bass...with a few little bees in the back. Not to disagree with Robert in his opinion, but I don't listen to mixes and make judgement calls through headphones. They not only paint a false representation of pan fields, they would be the equal to having a set of monitors side by side to your ears...which would never allow you to make the right calls for pans. I listened to the material in a corrected environment using Adam A 7's, NS 10's, Genelec's, and Altec Lansing pc speakers. The core of the sound and the artifacts I reported were the same on all of them.

The pumping in "I won't Wait" is now gone...so Robert must have heard the remixed version. This is really well done now. Subjective, but I still feel the electric rhythms could be raised a bit.

One of the challenges I had while learning to mix was to get the rhythm guitars up loud enough to maintain impact. What gets me with your mixes is, you don't have anything in the guitar tones that I would call "problem areas". My issues on my guitars in the past were a bit too much low end and mid range congestion because I was warming up the sounds too much. Now that I know what I'm doing, I can make the guitars in my mix totally rip your heart out to where they will be considered too loud, but you NEVER lose the other instruments behind them.

That's one thing you will notice about major releases as well. They can make instruments so loud they are too loud, yet nothing is buried in the mix and remains audible. This is where we need to get your rhythm guitars in my opinion. We don't want them so loud that they are killing everything else, but listen to pro material done in this genre, Lawrence. You NEVER lose the sound of the dirty guitars in a mix no matter how much music is going on behind it. You hear every riff, lick and chord. At times, though your guitars are semi-audible to me, we totally lose them in spots.

For example, and this is important to keep in mind. If I was auditioning for your band and you gave me these demo's to learn from, there are parts on here that I would not be able to learn because I simply cannot hear them. See, you know the parts because you mixed this or may have even played the parts. You know what it should sound like and you know what part is coming next. To someone like me who is not as familiar with the material and doesn't know what is coming next, I'm sometimes looking for a needle in a haystack to hear the parts. I always keep in my mind while mixing, to mix for the first time listeners. If I struggle to hear something that I wrote or know by heart, chances are they will too. So I think you're in better shape with these mixes for sure, but me personally, I'd still get those rhythms and even your lead guitar a bit more out in front. This is all subjective...if it sounds good to you, leave it alone...but if you really hear what I hear, try a few experiments...maybe compress the rhythms a bit more to make them tighter so you can make them louder. I'd definitely get those back up vocals out of the way though as they still seem too close to the rhythm guitar pans and nearly cancel them out on my end. Hope this helps....best of luck. :)

Hey, thank you. It's much appreciated. Yeah I needed to not listen to these for a few days, I'm gonna update the mixes & re-post shortly.
Thanks again,
Lawrence,

I love this one too.  Sounds superb to me, but I'll defer to the guys with the ears and knowledge. :)

I am listening on cans so...  Here's what I got from Bleed:
Hats are a little high, and I'd want the snare up a bit.  Great song & performance.  I think the panning split i so extreme that it's a little distracting to me both on the guitars in the verse, then the vox in the chorus (where I would try leaving the dominant line at 0 and pan the back vocals out out about 70% to one side).   Nice work here.