Track for album - need feedback

Kamaleon

Experienced
honest feedback on the mix please if you can. using head phones and need to get it close as possible for when i get to use the monitors

thx heaps earthfriends

 
ok, i didn't like the organ on the offbeats in the second section...it was kinda like an icepick in the forehead...maybe at a lower level it might still work though

i think there's too much reverb on everything and it's making the mix lose it's punch. it all sounds a bit distant. if you can have a listen with all the reverb taken off and then just add in a little here and there as a way to create depth, it might help a bit. perhaps try a bit of delay on the lead guitar instead of reverb, so it sits more at the front of the mix. find a reference, maybe something off Fire garden, by Steve Vai? and you'll hear how much more "meaty" his mix is...

just my opinion and obviously the lead playing is completely brilliant :)
 
*honest feedback on the mix please*

I honestly don't think the reverb is too much, if that is what you're going for... BUT there are no mids... Where are they? Did they escape to planet Vulcan? ;) Seriously, if you're mixing on headphones the phones are probably too focused/hyped in the mids tricking you to turn the mids down to get an even and balanced mix - while in fact you're not. Drums are a bit too static, the hi-hat needs more programming. Use humanization in your DAW. Bass needs more sizzle, less low end - maybe add some distortion to it. Try to not have the organ and synths play through-out the song. They take space... Create dynamics with them coming in and out of certain parts of the song. Too much and too slow mix bus compression/limiting. There are no dynamics here... Well, you wanted honest feedback on the mix... ;) Send me the stems if you'd like, Joel. I'd like a go at mixing this if possible.

Killer guitar playing though! :devilish:
 
Last edited:
thank you kindly all this is exactly what i wanted. much appreciated

get back to you chef bout the stems
 
Very nice, I like it a lot. In the following comments, I will refer to the roughly quarters of the piece as sections A, B, C, and D.

I like section A. It has some interesting melodic and harmonic stuff going on and establishes the main theme. Most importantly, for me, it built a lot of anticipation as to what would be coming next.

For section B, I'm going to go ahead and disagree with the criticisms of the offbeat organ/synth part. I thought that they raised the intensity of this part nicely, and there is no reason that you need to fill out the mix with guitars instead of synths.

I would actually consider putting section D after section B. While D certainly has enough going on to be interesting, it has a more laid-back feel than parts B and C, so putting it between them would help make those sections stand out more by contrast. I would also consider switching up the drums for this section (possibly playing off of the nice bassline) and emphasizing the less driving nature of D.

I can hear what The Chef is saying about the mids in section C; it doesn't have the easygoing feel of section D, so the hole in the mix seems a bit out of place to me. Especially if C was the last section, it could stand to have a rhythm guitar part filling out that space. Add in some more activity on the drums in this section, and it would work nicely as revisiting section B, but bigger and more aggressive.

Please post here to let us know when you finish the album!
 
this a portion of the track, couldnt go any further knowing the mix was like this .. sometimes i mix myself out of a mix.

after part D comes part B in a different key and on steroids
 
Awesome playing and thanks for sharing. I agree more mids would help it come alive and bring it to the front of the mix.
 
Great galloping gobs of goat shit!! That was AMAZING PLAYING..!!!!

When I grow up, I wanna be able to play like that!!!!!!!!
 
Fantastic playing and feel - I would buy this!

As to the mix - doesn't actually feel mixed yet... As others have said there is no low-mid weight at all. The Kick and Snare should be pinning you to the wall and attempting to remove your organs. The snare lacks punch and the kick has an annoying wooliness instead of low weight. Plenty of work still required in the compression and eq departments. The arrangement is great but the section transitions need to be a bit more developed, either flowing better or cutting harder - always moving forward of course. In fact the drum kit sound needs to change between the sections. The off-beat organ stabs are great but they seem to be in stereo and have a bit of spread making them hard to localise- I'd prefer them sharper, shorter and in mono.

I love the track but the intensity of the mix needs to match the intensity of the playing.
 
Last edited:
1st - thanks to those who took the time to comment and give feed back, much appreciated and a FREE! copy for you on completion!

2nd - this mix totally fucked

3rd - in the 3 weeks ive switched DAW's and interface, basically a whole new set up and everything is fucked up cant get any good sounds, my patches sound like shit once recordedm drums sound like shit
clients are complaining about the mixes now saying what the fuuck????... bad times..

Black hawke down!! mother ship down!!!
 
I think you could let the drums be more as an "instrument" between 129-150 something. Let go of that typical drum beat and pherpaps use mallets or more or less just cymbals - at least not use the snare for a little while?
 
just listened to the new mix...definitely much better! but i agree with vinnierice that the mix isn't really matching up to the intensity of the music...

just a note on your recording problems - having switched daw, i'm wondering if you're somehow recording the direct feed from your axe/microphones and also a feed that's running through the computer, so you're getting two audio streams with a tiny bit of latency separating them being recorded at once? this would explain why your patches and recorded drums sound bacd on playback. you could probably test this by setting the audio buffer really high, so that the latency between the streams becomes audible.... not actually sure how this could occur, but i don't know anything about your setup. changing daw's shouldn't really affect the sound quality in any noticeable way, but changing audio interface might, especially if there's a driver problem (i know there are some serious problems with mbox drivers at the moment), or there's a problem with audio routing.
 
changed formats also, i was using reason now abelton, so ALL the plug ins are new.

either way, il finish what ive started
 
Back
Top Bottom