First Mix! Thoughts and Suggestions Please!

[ThatGuitarGuy]

www.beyondfatemusic.com/storage/timeline_test_mastered.mp3
This is something that I've been working on for the past few days trying to learn how to mix to begin with...so this is my first ever job. I haven't gotten to the vocals yet but this is what I have so far.

Thanks to Elephant Audio for letting me bug him for the past few days! You've been an amazing help.

Any suggestions would be appreciated...I'm completely new to this so whatever I can learn to make things better I'd like to know! Thanks guys!

 

[xmarcelx]

Why is the max Peak at -14db? and 20s silence at the
beginning? You should fix this before encoding it as mp3 I think!
Doesn't sound bad to me but I'm no expert!
Without vocals this song is kinda boring to me and I have no idea what style it should be....

 

[ThatGuitarGuy]

because I don't know how to master, and the 20seconds is how it was tracked. I didn't get rid of it because its all in progress and I just wanted to get it up.

After all, this IS my in progress first mix.

All I gotta say is the style shouldn't be worried about. Just listen to it man lol. there are influences all over. It's definately progressive though.

 

[sparkyness]

Opening riff sounds like The Police's "message in a bottle".

Constructive criticism: Bass sounds weird as it's a busy line but it's very "woolly" sounding, perhaps a tonal change required. There's some sloppy playing and timing issues (all instruments) which is the first priority to work on before worrying about the mix. Most folks will notice that before they're concerned about tone. Suggestion is that this is retracked with tighter playing. Hope this helps...

 

[ThatGuitarGuy]

yeah, all of the stuff from the band is kind of sloppy and not played to a click (ugghhhh, the tracking dude isn't experienced in metal or hard rock i guess..) so there wont be any retracking...no time money and this is an abandoned kind of thing.

Any suggestions on where to try to get the woolly sound out of the bass? Anything that changes I can only do on the mixing board...no retracking.

Thanks for the suggestions!

 

[sparkyness]

Bass sound: suck out some of the low mids for a start (250k cut)....maybe a boost at around 1K to give it some character. Maybe try creating a duplicate track and running it through any kind amp-simulator plugin (guitar amp or SVT) to add a bit of high-mid/high end distortion and blending that with the clean track to taste.

Yep...can't do much about the sloppiness standpoint. The whole sloppy playing thing kinda defeats the purpose of playing prog-rock though. Prog-rock is all about virtuoso performances, but if they can't play in time, it's kinda defeats the point.

Have fun....

 

[JBroll]

Completely disagree about the prog-rock categorization - OSI and Porcupine Tree. End of discussion. Technical rock/metal is one thing, and in that case virtuoso performance is important, but tech and prog do not go hand in hand.

EDITED: My mistake, apparently my sound card didn't feel like telling me it no longer wanted to play at 100% volume, for some reason the hardware is capped at 30% output (which is why my volume up hotkeys didn't work, which is why I thought the thing was too bloody quiet. That has been fixed.) END EDIT. As for the clip itself, guitars could also be in tune on those bend and it doesn't sound like you double tracked. As for making what you could out of what you had, it could be worse but at least you're learning.

Jeff

 

[ThatGuitarGuy]

yeah it wasn't doubled up per guitar...actually theres two of one guitarist, and one of another...not because of inexperience tracking, but I had a melody thing going on that I wanted to track and figured I'd play more than just that part in case.

Thanks for the suggestion though! And I completely agree with the prog thing. Pink Floyd comes to mind...they're technical in other ways than playing a million notes a middle. I think these people are the mid ground though.