Give me tips on this mix (real drums, real amps, my band but I´m not mixing)

[DanLights]

This is my band´s demo, we recorded it in a local studio back in venezuela a few weeks before leaving. The guy´s initial mix sucked total ass, he recently sent me a new mix which sounds much better. The first one had the guitars making noise everywhere, masking from bass to keys, and the kick drum sample wasn´t to our liking

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/954292/Ad%20intra%20-%20We%20arent%20mix%202.mp3

To give info and credits, song is "We Aren´t Ready To Take Off" by Ad Intra
Music and Lyrics by Yessika Marquez (guitarist and my girlfriend)
Bass and Vocals by me
All guitars by Yessika Marquez
Drums by Juan Gonzalez (our old drummer)
Keyboards by Yessika and myself all in midi (programmed with my mouse)
Recorded at La Cabaña Studios in Barcelona, Venezuela by Isaias Guillarte, being mixed by him but just might be mixed by someone else haha

Drum is all mic´d with I don´t remember what except for kick drum which is straight triggered into midi
Bass is "DI" with a Pod (he insisted on the Pod for DIing and I´m still not convinced that it was all bypassed, it sounded pretty bad)
Guitars are a Gibson Sg stock pups >> Boss ME-50 >> Crate 120 watt combo amp. Both lead and rhythm sounds are from the ME-50, the amp was mic'd with 3 mics, two up close and one more room-ish

 

[Skinny Viking]

sounds like some small editing mistakes in the beginning. Guitars are VERY small compared to the drums .. kick drum has a very sharp, clicky thing going on without enough body and seems to poke out of the mix in the wrong spots (bad compression setting?)

Heavy vocals are cool, just a little muddy sounding at times. Probably need a small boost in the upper mids somewhere to give them some more "teeth"

Might just be the shitty speakers I'm listening to right now, but is there a tuning problem somewhere around 5:00 between the keys and the guitar?

I think the guitar sound works pretty good for this actually. Has kinda an old Paradise Lost, My Dying Bride vibe going on

Cool song man ... the mix needs some tweaking though. Maybe you should try having someone here mix it since you aren't planning on doing it yourself?

 

[DanLights]

The paradise lost and my dying bride vibe, is a true compliment to us, specially my dying bride is one of our biggest influences. I personally don't like how the vocals sound.

I'm still thinking of giving it a shot myself, problem is I don't have an appropiate enviroment here and my laptop isn't powerful enough to handle it. I still don't have the session data, when I do I'll think what to do with it.

Thanks for the compliments dude! And I'll check out that tuning issue with the piano, I have all the midi data for the keys so if there is a tuning problem it can be fixed

Edit: forgot to mention, clean vocals are done by a guest vocalist, a kid who sings in a grunge band in Venezuela. not me

 

[Skinny Viking]

I think the vocals could work out fine, they just need to be mixed in better ... maybe a few little tricks to make them stand out better

If you're not sure about whether or not you want to mix it yourself, might not be a bad idea to upload a small section of the song files and let some people here take a crack at it. I have a feeling if you do it yourself or if someone here were to do it for you, you'll be happier with the end result

And yeah, the piano thing ... like I said, I'm not entirely sure but something in that spot sounded a bit weird to me. Don't know if its just a harmonic clash between the gats, bass & keys or if something is actually not completely in tune

Keep us posted as this develops

Cheers!

 

[DanLights]

Thanks for the interest Carlos, I'll wait till I get my hands on the session files to work with it, meanwhile I'll see what this guy can do with the mix, but knowing him and previous works he's done I'm convinced this is almost as good as he can get