Call Me Gone - more mixing.

BayouTexan · September 23, 2021 at 10:55 PM

First off, I love playing this song. I hope to play it one day in front of a crowd with a proper singer, bassist, and drummer. I am coming up on my 3 year anniversary learning guitar in November so I am really pushing myself. I guess when your wife comes in to start dancing to your songs instead of closing doors and putting ear muffs on then I should feel pretty good what I learned so far.

I skipped over fixing the boo-boos in the double-tracked guitars so bare with me on that. At least my playing has gotten much tighter from a few months ago. I did some serial compression on the guitar+transpose for the bass part which seemed to help a lot. I used JIA JTM45 profile which is one of my most favs. I used Brass Driver Big P for the bass. I used my Schecter Sun Valley with EMG retroactive pickups.

I was using my desktop speakers after rendering to see how it sounds on regular speakers but found using my studio headphones instead would let me hear better if the bass and drums were balanced.

Point out some critiques please. Maybe I could use a little volume drop automation on guitar's G, F#, E chord part so the bass would be more pronounce there, or vice versa?? I would put more drums fills in it next time.

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Per · September 24, 2021 at 2:58 AM

Congrats on the three year anniversary. Nice riffs. Your mixes are getting better too. If you want the bass to be more pronounced on smaller speakers there's two tricks that can work. The first is to simply raise the mids, smaller speakers have a lot of drop-off of lower frequencies so it doesn't matter how much you crank the low end it'll never get heard because the speaker just can't reproduce it.

The second trick is to octave up the bass. So as you're octaving down from guitar just leave the original guitar in there as well. Then you mix it all the way down till you no-longer notice the octaves sound on your nice monitors. The result won't be the higher sound on smaller speakers it will just push the higher frequencies and harmonics enough to make the bass push forwards.

Personally I'd reduce the chorus effect mix a little. It's a great effect that thickens up a sound but it comes at the cost of the body of the sound and additional little wolf frequencies that aren't always desirable the whole time. Really best for moments of lead. Anyhow, great work, keep em coming!

BayouTexan · September 24, 2021 at 4:30 AM

My regular desktop speakers are Planar-type so the mids and highs are boosted compared to maybe a normal desktop speaker so if I want to listen to a "rendered" mix/song to hear how others would hear it then they may not be a good choice to use (but I personally love the sound of them for a computer and gaming) so I figure using good headphones will be a better reference for that-- since I can plug into different peripherals around the house and check the render.

I will try out that octave technique you mentioned.

The chorusing is coming from a subtle flanger in the effect module. I love that effect and how it sounds so that's going to be difficult. LOL.

Up next: I reviewed how to tighten up the kick and snare drums in SD3 today to get rid of some of that sustain and add more punch, so, I will apply that next. I'm working on a mix with a slow verse fast chorus tempo change and I am going to have to do all drums by hand on it (no SD grooves match up well).