Answers In the Silence

I have been working on this one longer than I care to admit.
 
I had the guitar riff for a long time. I had the main idea almost as long. For the life of me, I could not motivate myself to finish the lyrics. It just kind of all came together in a sudden rush a couple of weeks ago.
 
 
Let me know what you think of this mix.
 
 
Answers In the Silence
 
http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=11570037
 

Very retro, Michael.  Your voice reminded me of early Ray Davies, but the guitar reminded me of someone who's name I don't remember at the moment.  The mix sounded pretty good, but I detected the lack of some hi mid range which gives it a somewhat muted sound as opposed to sparkling.  Still, a cool song.

Appreciate the listen Wookiee, really glad you liked this one.
 
Lynn,  I’m not at home right now, but later, I certainly can try panning the guitar a little more one direction, if I remember correctly, it is pretty close to center.
 
Phillip: thanks for listening again.  At your original suggestion, I bumped the vocals up just slightly in the verses and chorus area.  I think I have all the vocals sitting pretty good now.  I also, per your suggestion, played around with the ending by adding a delay to the main guitar riff to see what it would add to the final bars where everything kind of breaks down and falls apart.  I automated the delay with an envelope and played around with it all evening.  I just could n’t get it to seem like it was adding anything better to the song, so I reverted back to the original.
 
On the Master Buss, again, I am not at the DAW, so I am going by memory.  I am running pretty much all Sonar Pro Channel toys.  I have the Concrete Limiter as my final plug, so of course I have turned the Pro Channel to the post effects bin position.  I am using the Pro Channel EQ in hybrid mode and rolling off the lows and a little of the highs.  At the top of the chain, I have the SSL compressor engaged to be just barely on and act as a little glue.  I mean the light barely flickers every now and then.  The only effect that I can remember being in the fx’s bin is Ferric for some saturation.  I think I am using the modern tape preset and then tweaked to taste.  Not much outside of Sonar.

MakeShift

Phillip:

On the Master Buss, again, I am not at the DAW, so I am going by memory.  I am running pretty much all Sonar Pro Channel toys.  I have the Concrete Limiter as my final plug, so of course I have turned the Pro Channel to the post effects bin position.  I am using the Pro Channel EQ in hybrid mode and rolling off the lows and a little of the highs.  At the top of the chain, I have the SSL compressor engaged to be just barely on and act as a little glue.  I mean the light barely flickers every now and then.  The only effect that I can remember being in the fx’s bin is Ferric for some saturation.  I think I am using the modern tape preset and then tweaked to taste.  Not much outside of Sonar.

Thank you so much for sharing what you did ... and your mastering chain ... which makes this so incredibly solid and rock-awesome to my ears (on the k701 cans).  The comp sounds transparent, the mix timbres are crunchy-dynamic ... yet gel'd throughout ... from beginning to end.  To my ears, nothing sounds arbitrary nor out-of-place.  Aside from my loving your song, my hyper-crit-ears love your mix in its entirety.

Foxwolfen...much appreciated!

Yea Philip, this one came together really well for me.  I really took much more care in the tracking stages for this song.  It has taken me years to get it through my head... good stuff in... makes mixing much easier.  I had been playing around with this riff for 6-8 months and just could n't make anything lyrically come together how I wanted.  Then, suddenly in a rush, it all just poored out a couple of weeks ago.  Funny how that works sometimes.

Daryl, thank you man for the kind words.  I have heard that comment about the Kink's now here and at the other forum site I am running the song on.  Too Funny because I was never much of a Kink's fan and it certainly was not intentional....but hey....they are good company to keep.  I guess I need to sing in this register more often.  It's getting up there close to the highest I can control.

Thanks for the listen Herb.  Not exactly the band I wanted to band I wanted to be associated with on this song.    Originally the riff was just a little different, maybe a little slower.  It had more of a Hendrix feel to the original.  When I started adding the bass, I came up with a slightly different groove and it flowed so naturally on the bass that I changed it for the final song.

Its been a really busy weekend so I have not even had a chance to try Lynn's suggestion of panning that main guitar a little. Hopefully I can get back to tweeking both of my songs next week.

So, I took a little break from this song.  I needed to seperate myself from it for a little while.  I have also been remixing several songs lately and working on some changes to another one that I have had up here at the same time.  I have taken some of Lynn's advice and did some rework on panning to spread out the song a little.  Lead vocal, bass and kick down the middle, everything else panned to taste.

Rimshot, I may still come back and double the guitar, but if I do, it will probably be done somewhere else on the neck.....which means I have to learn it first.  My biggest issue is I am running out of time before I go on a 4 week business trip to Vegas.

Any way, I think some panning changes have made everything a  little wider and sound better. 

Hey Warren, thanks for listening!

That is actually what I was working on.  I was reworking all of the panning from left to right in hopes of seperating the parts a little better.  There really is n't a rhythm guitar in this track, what I would call rhythm anyway.  The song is basically a bass riff repeated by bass, guitar and piano.  Much like...say... Day Tripper.  First the guitar plays the riff, in comes the bass, followed by the piano.  If I was going to add a second guitar to the riff, I would probably go higher on the neck to get a harmony type sound going.  I may do that still, I am just running out of time before I go on this long 4 week business trip to Vegas.

Anyway, I am curious to know if reworking the panning, not having everything as close to center has helped some of the seperation of instruments.