hello Nate, how are you???

ok so you have a very nice balance, especially in the choruses there is nothing that comes on top and vocals sits really well in my opinion. good job!

vocals alone I feel like they sound a bit boxy? like they need a bit of air, like most of todays vocals. so I would just grab a de esser to tame sibilants and then recover that with an eq boost on the high end. do it and youll see what I mean! you will instantly hear clarity and airiness, as if they were covered with a blanket or something and are now free.

what compression setting do you have on your master channel? shaping sounds very good but I would recommend not to overcompress especially on the master since it can either make or destroy the entire mix. try to go easy on it and compress at max 1 or 2 db MAX, works for me at least that way.

nice choir towards the end. Again, overall your mix balance is really good and enjoyable.

What do you think? :) thanks for your mix I really enjoyed it

Hey Adrian, thanks for the comments! I agree about the vocals, I was struggling to figure out how to really make them shine. I have a de-esser on but I'll try to hit it harder and boost eq like you suggested.

Master chain is a few stages, all hitting mildly - Black Box, Brainworx Townhouse, UAD Shadowhills, and then Ozone. I'll back it off some more. Thanks!!

Hi Nate. Good mix! I find the sound of the toms sound little bit thwappy, if that makes sense. Maybe too much mid-highs on them, not sure.

Really nice bass guitar tone!

There is some background noise during the quiet part of the outro at the very end. At first I thought it was intentional, but then it suddenly cuts out around the very last note of the song, so now I'm not sure. If it is an intentional effect, I would suggest fading it out gradually while the piano plays.

Thanks Eric! I hear what you mean about the toms, kinda boxy sounding - I'll see if I can figure out a way to temper that, I mostly used the overheads/room for the toms, not much direct at all. Maybe I can duck OH/Room and use more of the direct when the toms play.

And yeah I'm sure what that noise is but I hear it too, I re-amped the bass through a real stack so maybe I forgot to trim the tail end of it. I think I hear the sound of me hitting the space bar before it cuts out. Good catch!

Hey, Nate! There's definitely too much highs in the vocals and it's lispy at the same time (deessers would do that), and a bit too much highs in the overall balance. Also the hi-hat is waaaaaay too loud (I know it already sticks out cause it's just a very loud cymbal in our drummer's set, but there's ways to tame it, even automation if it comes to it). The energy of the mix is nice though, and I think you handled the complicated dynamics pretty well! Thanks for taking the time to work on this song!

Hi Nate,
Now that you have mentioned you are a drummer, I definitely recognise that in your mix. Myself being a bass player got comments all the time about mixing the bass too prominent, for the first six months of posting here.
You know where I'm going with this. Although, to be consequent you could have automated the drums through the cause of the song in order for them to stay on top, because in the second half of the song the drums get overwhelmed by the orchestral force.
And a very strong point I want to make is about the sibilance and de-essing. I have learned the hard way that there is a limit to what you can do about excessive sibilance. A normal amount of sibilance can be tamed by de-essing, so there's a significant difference. I am stressing this to prevent you from waisting time and effort and a lot of frustration trying to fix something that can't be fixed. Like I said in my post, the only fix is to prevent excessive sibilance in the recording stage. Since the mixing challenges at this page have this flaw in more than 50% of the time, I commend everybody not to waist time trying to fix it. Same goes for frequency imbalance caused by room sound, which is also totally impossible to correct in a mix, with the same frustrating waiste of time.
You will see, if both these flaws are absent, mixing is like a walk in the park.

But I digress from your mix. Let me say that I don't have more to say, because this genre isn't really my thing.😉

@Alexandra Kharazian Thanks! I hear what you mean about the hihat, I'll automate the cymbal overheads/rooms since I'm not using any of the direct HH mics at all. I'll back off the de-esser and see what I can do about all the highs

hi nate! for me, in the beginnig there is a bit too high freq on strings. I like the reverb on vocals but...i need to ear a bit too low freq on key. There is a bit too much hat for me (i know ... room/over head had too much hats), For me, in general, there is a bit too much saturation