Slow emotional song

Song sounds good. I am not an expert, but here is my input on the mix:

The kick sounds left heavy. I have heard that it is supposed to be center with bass and vocals.

Lead melody line in my right speaker seems a bit thin, or out of tune, something sounds slightly off from the quality of the main gtr in the other speaker.

Really liked the volume control or backward gtr bit about 2/3 into the song.

Good song, well recorded.

Jeff

sounds very nice. I agree that the kick is too left channel heavy. for my tastes, I might try panning the background vocal at least a little to the right, maybe even hard right just to mess around and give the song even more space. the right channel needs some attention. I like where you have the organ. maybe add another guitar on the right channel to make up for the detuned dulcimer. other than that there's nothing to really fix here as far as my ears can tell. the actual recording quality is very nice. also, all the instruments come in crystal clear. great job on capturing the performance and getting good sound, tone, etc. out of everyone.

Hi,

I could only listen on headphones but really enjoyed this tune. Will give it another listen when i get home. But good track

What's your mixing environment like...do you mix on speakers as well as headphones? I find it nice, if/when I can, to mix my songs on both. Assuming you want to please all listeners, you'll want to make sure your music sounds good on both. You can't always get a full picture of what's going on in the stereo field with just a set of speakers, so it helps to reference your mix on headphones as well.

As for Autotune, I have no experience with it, or with dulcimer for that matter so I can't really offer up any advice there. My understanding is that subtle use of autotune will clean up any slightly off notes, so I'm guessing it couldn't hurt.

My mix environment is a 10x11 room with 8 feet ceilings. I have bass traps in the corners, the monitors about 3 feet apart, and the whole front wall covered with high/mid absorption, as well as the side walls covered where first reflections would be created. I have a pair of the "Extreme Isolation" headphones but I haven't used them much to mix. I guess I should check the final mix in that to get a better stereo image and be positive of what is going on in each channel...is that what you mean? I believe the frequency response for those headphones is 20-20,000 hz. I will mix down a file with the dulcimers autotuned as soon as I can and let you know when I upload it.

Thanks for the tips,

Brandon

Nice harmonies. I had a strange feeling though that the song was ready to cave in on itself. Same feeling I get with a lot of Todd Rundgren songs. Is it the timing of kicks and bass? Not sure. ON my head phones teh guitars sounded a little bright. That may be how you like them, did you eq mids out and boost highs? Just curious, I tend to leave my guitars alone and just cut a wee lows. But what do I really know I'm just a fiddler .

Hey guys, thanks for the added thoughts.

Hale, on my distance between monitors, this was just a distance I was told by Auralex when they did the analysis of my room (I submitted a form to them of all my dimensions, etc). They said this width of 3 feet (and height of 55 in. on the tweeters I might add) would upset less room modes for the dimensions of my room. I think that it also comes into play about how far each speaker is from the sidewalls. I used to have them further apart, but moved them closer as they recommended, and it seems my mixes are getting better now...I will keep in mind to always reference on the headphones to make sure of panning issues, though. Thanks for that advice.

Kiwi, for the guitars, they are pretty much left un-EQed except rolling off a little lowend, maybe to around 100 or 150, to stay out of the way of lower end stuff. For the electric guitar, it is raw from a POD XT (I forgot the settings we used), except for rolling off that low end. The acoustic souding stuff is actually 2 tracks of a dulcimer. The one I have gets a real ambient sound when recorded, so that is probably what you mean about the brightness. I kind of just stumbled onto this sound and liked it a lot (unique sound), so I kind of meant to leave it that way. As far as the song caving in, is that a good or bad thing? I'm not sure what you mean by that since you referenced another artist's songs sounding that way and I don't know anything about him.

Mitch, thanks for listening. let me know if you get to check out the mix on some better speakers. As far as the emotion, we almost didn't get it to the effect you hear in this mix. We did the vocals, and then I put on a pair of headphones to hear what the singer was hearing, and I noticed I could not hear him that well when he was singing. I asked him about the low volume and he agreed, but just didn't think about it on his own. I guess it goes to show that I should do that everytime (duh haha). Once I adjusted the headphone mix for him where he could hear himself really well, he hit this performace in this one take. I guess it is also interesting to point out that on the vocal for this song I didn't use any compression at all, only cut some lows to filter out the muddiness.

Thanks for all the great replies so far. It really is awesome to see this board being used to help others and see that there are still people out there like yourselves.

Best,

Brandon