Just got Slate Samples and re-mixed a track with them...

[Scissors61]

Just got my Slate Samples in the post this morning, so I thought I'd try applying them to an old track to see what I could do with them for a first try...

I only posted this song up here a few weeks/month or so ago, but I feel this mix sounds a bit more powerfull, so please tell me what yeh think!

Original Version:

http://scissors61.co.uk/music/richard milkshake.mp3

Updated version with Slate Samples:

http://scissors61.co.uk/music/richard milkshake new version.mp3

Cheers guys!

 

[Erik Monsonis]

I think the new version's kick has too much sub bass. Also vocals are too loud.

 

[PhilR]

Umm.

I listen to this mix and I start imagining a stream of mostly mono, very harsh sounding upper frequencies slowly drilling into my skull between my eyes.

No offense meant, but the sonic balance of this mix is NOT good. It's very fatiguing to listen to for any length of time and the stereo imaging feels very narrow with the guitars excessively wide yet with no real content in between. I can't really see this mix sounding listenable on any system other than a laptop/mobile phone. What exactly are you mixing it on?

 

[Scissors61]

Dandelium - Yeah man agreed, I've lowered the sub bass in the kick a tad, think I might need to do a bit more though...

Yeah vocals are too loud. I removed some of the EQ cuts that I'd put in them before to try and make them sound a bit less processed, but then forgot to turn them down...

PhilR - Cheers man, criticism is always handy. I have a pretty shitty habbit of making my guitar tracks too harsh. I think I' always scared of them sounding too dark, so I really over-compensate...

I don't get exactly what you mean about the mono thing dude...?

The main thing I don't get is that you say the guitars are "excessively wide"? Don't people usually pan guitars 100% L/R? Or is it just because there are no other varying degrees of panning other than L C R...?

I only usually tend to pan things L C R, which I'm fairly certain is atleast a relatively widely used technique.

What can I do to make things sound less mono?

I'll post another mix up soon-ish when I'm a bit happier with it!

Cheers for the help guys!

 

[PhilR]

Dandelium - Yeah man agreed, I've lowered the sub bass in the kick a tad, think I might need to do a bit more though...

Yeah vocals are too loud. I removed some of the EQ cuts that I'd put in them before to try and make them sound a bit less processed, but then forgot to turn them down...

PhilR - Cheers man, criticism is always handy. I have a pretty shitty habbit of making my guitar tracks too harsh. I think I' always scared of them sounding too dark, so I really over-compensate...

I don't get exactly what you mean about the mono thing dude...?

The main thing I don't get is that you say the guitars are "excessively wide"? Don't people usually pan guitars 100% L/R? Or is it just because there are no other varying degrees of panning other than L C R...?

I only usually tend to pan things L C R, which I'm fairly certain is atleast a relatively widely used technique.

What can I do to make things sound less mono?

I'll post another mix up soon-ish when I'm a bit happier with it!

Cheers for the help guys!

You should never take the LCR mixing thing purely on apparent face value. The real skill of mixers which use this technique is in using delays & reverbs, both mono and stereo, to spread the sound across the entire stereo spectrum.

Put it this way, in a mix with everything panned hard L C R, you should be able to disconnect one of your speakers and not hear anything that was panned hard to the opposite side yes? Yet try something like say, American Idiot by Green Day (Chris Lord-Alge is a known proponent of LCR mixing) and try this. You'll notice that you can ALWAYS hear the entire drumkit even in one speaker. Yet if one tom is hard panned left, surely you should only be able to hear it from the left speaker? Like I say, it's really not that straightforward.

Try this out just for shits 'n giggles. Set up a pair of mono delays as aux sends. Set them to a very short delay time (say 10ms) with minimal feedback. Pan them hard L-R. Now for everything you hard pan Left, send some of the signal to the Right delay channel. Play with the levels until you get a nice balance of sound which doesn't alter the subjective panning of the track. If you're doing it right you should be able to get a nice spread of sound across the stereo field without it sounding too tight (on the centre channel) or too wide.

My apologies in advance to anyone that actually knows what they're doing. This post is based entirely on my own mix experiments.

 

[Dexter_prog]

I am listening to it at the moment. The first thing I noticed is that volumes don't some to be leveled. I mean, snare sounds too loud, guitars are low, vocals somewhat in the middle, cymbals are hard to hear, etc. And also, for some reason, the mix sounds like it was an mp3 compressed at 128 kbps or lower, if you get what I mean. I think that if you fix the things people have said here you will get a much better mix, good luck with that.

 

[Tokyurot]

I think guitars are ok, but your whole drumkit sounds like it's in mono, perhaps you put some mono FX on drum bus?