This song was tricky. A lot of editing of the arrangement was needed because some tracks were edited after. I don't like the task of comparing my arrangement to the artist demo. This is production task, but it was necessary. There was a lot of garbage to clean up in the vocals and vinyl scratches.
I used the Prodigy track Spitfire as my reference. I wanted dirty drums and vocals with little distortion, too. For the bass, I re-amped the DI and balanced the other bass elements.
very nice mix!! your mix definitely sounds kind of electric? and also very energetic, so if thats what you aimed for, congratulations!!
I do have to mention I can hear some over compression going on overall, can you clarify if you did bus compression? if you did, need to be very careful not to overdo it and slowly but surely carve that gluey sound which is the perfect balance between loose and over compressed :)))
also maybe there is too much reverb on the drums, which is cool but can sometimes create a mess over an already messy song like in this case :)
in my mix I also put a really heavy reverb on the vocals, but I carefully try to make it become part of the song's background and not protagonist. MAybe try some low pass filter on the reverb and you will realize how it starts becoming part of the atmosphere :)
Hi @Adrián Quirozán sorry for the late reply. It's been a rough week.
You are right; both issues were caused by over compression. Not on the drum bus, but on the overheads.
I was trying to achieve more distortion, but I didn't realize the impact on the room space or the masking at 200–400 Hz. The result of mixing in one day without letting my ears rest to listen again next day...
Usually, my reverbs are just early reflections to simulate the room. That's why, when I read your comment, I could clearly listen the mess on the overheads. My idea was to use late reflections with the distant mic tracks and over compress the overheads. At first, it sounded nice. Then, after further processing, my ears didn't hear the problem.
Thanks to you, I did more research and testing to achieve the right compression balance on the overheads.
@Hans Van Rah usually what I do when I want distortion on the drums is set up a parallel send with a dedicated saturation plugin, which gives me a lot more control. It's useful because I can put an EQ before the distortion and take out the stuff I don't want, or I set set up emphasis and de-emphasis EQs by having equal-but-opposite boosts and cuts before and after the distortion. Just be careful with high and low pass filters; don't use more than a 12db per octave (and ideally 6db or a shelf), since steep slopes will cause phase issues.
@Damian Oakes me too, but with the plugin mix knob or with outboard gear. I did that on the bass drum and snare plus parallel compression on 3 aux channels. 1 for the BD, 1 for the snare and 1 for the BD and snare together.
But I was not looking for extra harmonics. I wanted to push the existent harmonics/overtones with the compressor, but of course the ambience will be squashed and more noticeable by overdriving the compressor on the overheads.
1 props
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