Hi,
Just finished mixing this song.
Let me know what you think. Some of the gear we used (adk hamburg, cad m179, safesound, sebatron). I have more info. on how it was recorded on our website.
http://corrientesmusic.com/EVT_recordings.html
thanks,
evt

Nice hooky Abba sound you have there. The balance is pretty good , I like the contrasting stuff. The hats are a wee bit shisshy I think, but it sounds pretty well mixed, just crank the master up a bit, I think you could use a bit more "push"

Really like:

The melody

The trem guitar, nice stereo bgv's and electric piano and finger snaps just b/4 bridge - very good arranging, putting the guitar and piano in different registers, really helps separate them.

Drum programming is effective, though midi drum sounds themselves need work to sound less like midi drums. Try playing them thru a speaker into a good sounding room in your house and recording that sound with a pair of mics 10 feet back. Mix it in with your drums. Sounds much better than digital reverb on midi drums (digital + digital does not equal real).

Overall lacking:

Bigness - vocal, bass, kick and overall mix sound small. Bigness comes through having different instruments in different ranges with different tones. Part of the need here is because you're using a 4 piece "band", so each of the sounds need to take up a bit more space. Most noticable is the lack of "air" around sounds.

When you record a real guitar amp with mics you get a bit of 3d effect to the recording. When you record everything direct you get this dry, 2 dimensional sound that you have to run through reverbs and stuff to make it sound better. All the great recordings of our rock and pop roots (Beatles, Motown, Phil Spector, Beach Boys) were done with real musicians in a nice sounding room all playing at the same time. The resultant microphone leakage was an inherent part of the sound we all grew up with. To get some of that leakage in a small project studio requires a bit of creative technique, the first of which is to record amps with close mics and ambient mics, blending them to give a "larger than life sound".

You're definitely on a great track, with good musical instincts and ears. So, in the words of Eric Clapton, "Keep on growing".

Hi,

Guitwizz:
thanks for the feedback
the drums were programmed on an electribe es-1 sampler using individual drum hit samples (the the samples themselves weren't the greatest). I just picked up drums on demand and am hoping they will help me out with the mixes (I tend to have a problem with drums).
I am going to bring the songs to master once the rest of the album is finished so I try to not run it hot so the mastering engineer could have room to work with.
It's funny I never even listened to Abba but I saw them on album covers and they look insane! lol

S. Cruz:
thanks for the feedback
I have been doing what you mentioned. I have been using a studio projects b1 and using it to mic the drums played through my tannoy reveals. Although the distance being more like a foot and a half out in front of them in the middle and about a foot above. I don't have a treated room so any further would just pick up to much from the room sound. But, on this particular song, I didn't think I should do it because it sounded ok, I ran out of tracks, and the drums were actually sampled from real drums (not by me though, I got the samples online somewhere for free). I'm hoping the drums will sound better once I use drums on demand.
Also I've been reamping the guitar and mic'ng my blues jr amp with an sm57 and that's been helping. I did do that on this song.
Bigness: I don't know what else to do really. This song didn't have too many different parts (instruments) to work with in arranging their parts to fill different registers. I am going to bring it to be mastered. The air part is hard because of the room i'm in, but reamping has been helping.
I agree for sure. I love all those recordings beachboys etc. I wish we had other musicians to work with, and a nice treated room to record in. It's only me and a bass player in a crappy little room in a n apartment.
I do have to work on micn'g the amp with close mics and ambient micn'g. I have tried in the past and it did sound good, but I was new to it so I thought I should just focus on the one mic until I got that down. I am going to start using two mics though when micn'g up my amp.

thanks for the help
I will keep everything in mind.

I was told that I recorded the vocals from to far away and too much of the room sound was picked up. So I next song I recorded I tried to help out that situation. It made a huge difference. I didn't finish mixing the song yet, but I'll post it when I finish.


evt

corner1.gif (64 Kb, 3 downloads) this is how i set up my little corner area for recording vocals

Yeah, you want to close mic vocals or anything you want upfront in the mix, and conversely, distance mic things you want to sit further back. This is the purpose of ambient mics. When you close mic everything you lose the potential depth (front to back) of the mix.