+1 to batsbrew. I have only listened on a cell thus far which is a good litmus test, but the vocals are low with competition. Harmonies can be overridden by the main content if space is not made for them (the BGV are very low). Bear in mind this is mono on a crappy speaker.

I will take another listen when at my DAW, but wanted to chime in quick so not to lose the post.

mettelus
+1 to batsbrew. I have only listened on a cell thus far which is a good litmus test, but the vocals are low with competition. Harmonies can be overridden by the main content if space is not made for them (the BGV are very low). Bear in mind this is mono on a crappy speaker.

I will take another listen when at my DAW, but wanted to chime in quick so not to lose the post.

Thanks. Glad you brought up the harm vox. They were a problem I intended to solve and I left them centered because I was not sure how to proceed. Essentially there is the single main vocal then a single harmony vocal throughout.
 
The solution I've been thinking of was cloning and Haas effecting the harmony to get it out of the way of the centered main voc.
 
Those little accent background vox are a series of 14 distinctly recorded vocal track (7 high and 7 low) which of course has been a brain bender for a n00b like me. I had some other plans for those too but they are currently just scattered "evenly" across the stereo field left and right (so yeah... figure that one out, lulz... love 'em though).
 
Also there are 2 distinct rhythm guitar parts both doubled and panned left/right throughout. Some solos are single tracked. Soome are doubled. Some are quadrupled. Some of those are harmonies, some not.
 
There are two bass tracks (cloned MIDI, first set to low, second set to click grit).
 
Drums... well that's a whole other mess.
 
MIDI synths and sounds and whatever...
 
Then the MOUNTAINS of effects and settings and busses and wooof...
 
It's a huge project. I can't even believe I managed to get this far. lulz... but that was the point. Forcing my little pea brain to figure it all out.
 
I don't have it all figured out of course but damned did I learn a lot (and hoping to learn more).
 
Heheh.
 
Anyway... I should probably stop typing for the day. This pea brain's getting mushy.
 
Thanks guys. I'll be back.

Hi beeps. For matsering it is fine in terms of levels. It seems to be sitting around -16 dB rms and it gets up to -14 dB rms after that loud hit around 2.20  So there is room to get a little louder.
 
I think it is very full on and there is a lot going on. (great though) Vocals are a little buried. The drums sound is a little drum machine or mechanical like so I would be trying hard to still keep that feel but somehow make the drums much more real. The thing with the drums is that feel is so fast and intense it will be harder to manage everything else and fit everything else into the drum feel. But it should not stop you though. It is almsot as if the drums are taking up the whole space. But because you have so much extra rtuff going on, they are being pushed back a little. This type of music and feel is hard to get it all in there. Not easy to mix a track like this.
 
I am just wondering if there is a way to edit the kick groove and drop some of them out (creating a little more space) but still create that intense fast driving groove at the same time. Not sure. If I were mixing a track like this I would get the drums and bass and vocals happening right up front and in your face then get the guitars in after. What I notice on the best heavy metal type tracks is despite the guitars being loud and in your face the drums never seem to get lost either.
 
It is 44.1K and 24 bit on my system too. Great track though and it sounds like you have spent a lot of time on it too! Thanks for sending.
 
 
 
 

I have the song made with EZmix
 
So... what are you pro people say about Toontracks EZmix?

Jeff, brother... you have made me a happy Beeps. You are describing some issues that I was aware of, made plans for (and learned how to enact them) but have as of yet implemented like the "lazy" dumbleturd I am.
 
Particularly the mechanical drums thing. The drums are of course MIDI generated as is the bass part. Since they are both MIDI and rather mechanical they are likely triggering TOO spot on and thus kind of cancelling each other out a little (despite my efforts to EQ them out of the way of each other). Of course live performances wouldn't suffer as badly from that (I think). I was going to ache over humanizing the drums so they scatter ever so slightly (and the bass too). I wasn't really going to remove too much aside from altering some of the performance (based on my personal drummy dummy experience/taste) but left the original composition intact for this exercise.
 
The other thing I was contemplating was (on top of the humanizing) was maybe adding some very subtle "ducking" between the kick and bass and maybe even rhythm guits... or even going ultra crazy if I could figure it out and applying ducking ONLY to conflicting frequencies (so the kick would only knock down the volume of the most important freqs it resides in of both the bass and maybe guits instead of lowering the whole level of those tracks).
 
Of couse that's some lofty shiz for a n00b to accomplish but it is some stuff I was thinking about.
 
With the vox... yes, I should have done what I set out to do with those so they could stand out proudly without just sticking out oddly (which was the dillemma I was faced with in the mix). Problem is they are too dry as it is I think and I need to get a proper stereo spread on the main harmony so it's not scrapping it out with the main vocal... then they can both come up a bit and then the background accent vox along with them (which sound weird too high in comparison to the main vox obviously).
 
At least that's my muddled thinking on that problem but I think it will require inserting a delay bus (which I should have done already but was hoping my reverb busses were handling it... they aren't). The thing about a delay bus is I think it will be epicly useful for some of the lead guit parts too so I don't know why I've been dragging my feet on that. I got a little obsessed with the "church bell" break down I think (LOTS of problems there and I'm still unhappy with that section) and got a little impatient.
 
Anyway... thank you for the ears and eyes on this, man. Very helpful. I'm gonna see what Danny's up to tomorrow maybe and get him to rip me a new one on this (or maybe wait until I fix a couple things first).
 
If however this is almost reasonably passable as a mix for mastering (despite the low vox) then at least I know I'm going in the right direction in general.
 
My concern was I was fooling myself and that there was no WAY this was close to a useable mix.
 
Cheeers!

Jarsve
I have the song made with EZmix
 
So... what are you pro people say about Toontracks EZmix?

This is the composer BTW who allowed me to mangle his tune... and of course the original producer of the version I posted in post #3 of this thread.
 
Thank you again, Jarsve for allowing me to do this. You rock.

Beeps I think it is very passable and very close to a good mix and fine for mastering.  It is full on that is all and with these types of things there are more things to think about.  Danny would be a great person to get feedback from too.  I don't do too many mixes like this. (Just as well! )
 
You have done a lot of work on this and it shows.

Thanks, Jeff. I have definitely been aching over this one but mostly to sneak into absolutely every corner of Sonar as I could (while staying reasonably on task) and trying out a bunch of the mixing concepts I've learned here (and elsewhere).
 
As far as I'm concerned, if he'll have me, Danny will likely be my go to mastering guy if and when I ever get up enough momentum to actually need a regular mastering guy. He is obviously well suited to this type of material (which is a huge chunk of what I do). At this point I figured this particular track needed a good bounce off the ears of the kind forum folks... and I was right. Not quite as lost now which is awesome.
 
I try not to distract him from his busy schedule until a certain point. Wasn't sure if this was at that point yet because it's so damned hard to tell when you're buried so deep in something and are still finding your ears (like I am).
 
I might do a couple tweaks based on the vocal comments here and then go ahead on that. I was honestly mostly worried about the rhythm section being garbage or some nasty frequency masking/phasing.
 
Thanks again.
 
:-)

Hey Beeps, I sat down an listened to this on a proper system, and the vocals are clearer (go figure) - collapsing that track to mono via the phone had knocked the vocals down considerably. Jeff's points are good, and I agree that the levels seem fine, but it is very busy (dominated by drums/guitar). Overall this is very well done.
 
Regarding the vocals specifically, it seems the lead vocal is spread/"stereoized" which makes its competition with the guitar more difficult. R-Mix may be the best tool to get this across visually - if you look at the lead vocal track and find a shape that encompasses 90% of that vocal with the outside set to -60dB, then copy R-Mix to the master buss, you can hear its competition easily (it seems the drums are competing as well, but hard to tell).
 
This is not my genre, so not sure how the vocals are "expected," but things you may want to try:

1. Remove some stereoization and play with gain on the vocal. This may be enough, but not sure. Width unto itself is not bad, but it is competing with a lot of guitars. Again, R-Mix is a good way to "see" this.
2. For this specific situation, I would not get too heavy with mirror EQ, since it is "always on" unless you have a dynamic EQ available and will cut into the tone. I am more prone to ducking the guitars so that they would dynamically lower/return to make room for the vocals as they went. As you have multiple tracks of guitars at play, you may not need to duck all of them either.

 
 

Thanks, mettulus. Good ear. I actually used the Blue Tubes stereo widener thingie on the main vocal bus (which also has the main harmony in it as well). I thought it made the vocals fuller sounding but yeah... that may have been a bad idea (or have it too wide). Since the harmony is going through it too it might be exacerbating the issue. Maybe once I get the delay in there and split out the harmony I can yank the widener. Then again those actions themselves could cause the same types of issues. I'll have to futz with it. Maybe I should try some saturation on the lead vocal to make it fuller instead of spreading/delaying it. As I said that aspect was kind of half finished and honestly, since I'm not really used to mixing with vocals, especially female vocals (part of the reason I chose this as my "test" project), I wasn't exactly sure what I should try. I'm actually glad now they are low enough to have stood out because now I've got some good ideas to try.
 
I definitely like the idea of keying one set of the guitars to the vocals (and I think I know exactly which pair will get it if I go that route). As for the dynamic EQ thing unfortunately I don't own one of those (I'd like to get that Melda Spectral Dynamics one at some point) but I also know an Anderton trick of using the old Cake Analyst to write freq tracking automation that can then be tied to an EQ. It's a bit of a brain bending trick but I've always wanted to try it.
 
I am kind of thinking though that this version may be a little misleading without the 20hz hi pass filter on the master. On my local versions whenever I've cut out those low rumble freqs everything gets a lot clearer. As I said though I considered that more of a mastering task. I did kind of keep checking that as I mixed. I set up kind of a fakeout/light mastering set up on my premaster bus to see how it would respond to things like the hi pass, compression, tape sim, etc and as I worked I kept a/b'ing the individual effects and all the effects as a whole.
 
It started out that all those effects helped the sound. As I mixed and tweaked and fiddled they all became less and less helpful until eventually the mix sound better on its own... which I took as a good sign the mix was getting better (everyone keeps saying you want to do as little as possible in the mastering stage).
 
The only exception was that hard low cut. It always helped clear up the mix. Since I did cut out all the ultra low freqs on all the individual tracks it wasn't as bad a build up as on my previous efforts but of course these things still buildup naturally on a big project I suppose and I know that's just something you're supposed to do... and THEN use a bass maximizer or multiband comp to fatten up the GOOD bottom end frequencies (instead of all that useless below 20hz crap).
 
When I did actually do my own "master" though things started getting a little off kilter (some parts got louder than I wanted, others quiter than I wanted... like just some of the dynamics in the song got screwed up). The bottom sounded great though and when it was staying even as I intended it all sounded pretty crisp.
 
But that's why I'm not a mastering guy. I'm guessing it's a multiband compression type task (MB's still screw me up) or even some automation of the mastering effects needs to happen.
 
Anyway... thanks for checking it out. You've given me a lot to consider. I'm thinking I'd better get this version off to Danny as well just to see what direction he thinks I should be going in too before I futz it up.
 
Cheers!