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EinelTheFox58 days ago (2 edits) (+1)

I've got goosebumps while listening. Such an haunting noire atmosphere sprinkled with very cool sound design.

While the actual sounds are quite impressive, I feel like the reverb sticks to much like a blanket and diminishes the overall good mix. My advice would to be to add some more predelay and also EQ the Reverb directly. The good old Abbey Roads trick was to cut the Bus-reverb at 300 and 6k. So the reverb was never able to overshadow the original mix. Might be something woth to try. I kind of also feel like the use of stereo widener was used a bit heavy handedly. Eventhough it might sound contratuitive giving the mix a narower soundstage might benefit the mix and give it a realistic room with more puch with a more "in your face" character.

I might wanna add, that this is not a general critic of your work. I feel like it is one of the strongest entries I've seen. However I feel like there could be something added to its furthor glory.

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TurtleBox58 days ago

I sort of wanted to create the sensation of listening to this through damaged equipment, I unfortunately couldn't really settle on what type of equipment to reproduce, so I kind of just thought it'd be nice to create a setting in where this could have been recorded acoustically and went with a  "concrete basement" kinda sound. I wanted everything within the mix to feel a bit wide and large but also claustrophobic and contained. I wanted it to sound like some instruments were closer than others to the mic and not just panned.

I don't personally know if I achieved that perfectly, I don't think I did. I know I didn't have a lot of time to mess around with mixing and don't recall if I mixed the reverb individually for each track. "Was it a cat I saw" was mixed with the most attention, since it was already a really low end heavy sample that I had to make a lot of cuts with in the pad sections so it wouldn't create those sort of over the top airy pads, super washed and thin.

I think a big problem, not for me but general listening and stuff in jams like this, is I'm insanely obtuse when it comes to where I want effects in the chain. This comes from playing a lot of Shoegaze, lol. I'll happily put a reverb super high priority in the mix if it gives ME the sound I'm looking for without much consideration for things like general listening, this is where the high compressed drum loops I make come from, that sort of "I really like this because it scratches my brain where I have headphones on." 

I thought about doing two more tracks, one to open the album and one to close, both working as palindromes individually and when combined. Unfortunately I had such an awkward weekend. The Sample CD all the sounds heard in this submission had JUST come out the night before this jam opened and I sort of just rushed to really get together a showcase of everything within the CD while also creating unique and original tracks. 

From one composer to another, what would you have added to contribute to the furthering of it's glory? 

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EinelTheFox58 days ago

Maybe my intentions got somewhat lost in translation. I kind of don't wanted to criticise your mix so heavily. I just felt like these were some points where I felt like it could be improved on, since it overall sounded pretty decend. That was my "try" on adding to it. Sorry if I overstepped here or gave a bad impression.

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TurtleBox58 days ago

You didn't give any bad impression! Your feedback is beyond appreciated, I'm just giving some insights and trying to have a chill discussion. your feedback was so well spoken that I might have replied a little to in depth and I apologize if I came off offended or defensive. 

I would genuinely love to discuss your thoughts on the mentioned things.

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EinelTheFox58 days ago(+1)

😮‍💨 Glad I didn’t do you any discomfort. 

 As for your approach. It depends on how old the gear might be or through witch system you wanted to play through. Every Soundsystem has its own idiosyncrasies. Vinyl gets scratchy and has system wise a pretty steep cut in highs and bass and warbles in speed and pitch by quite a margin. Cassette looses its dynamics and some bandwidth, though mostly highs and flutters in short bursts. So maybe it’s best to work out how you wanna break it.

Overall, some Distortion in the mix bus, that is added in parallel might give some grit while not overdoing it. Maybe also adding a bit of Tape simulation or Vibrato could add something.

 

As for the positioning. If you want to be an ultra-stickler, you could have multiple instances of the same reverb. All but different in the pre delay. Reason is, that the sound merges more with the room the further back it is to mic or listener. So the more far the sound the lower the pre delay. Also, some instruments loos some fidelity in highs and lows. So having some high- and low-shelves cutting by a bit might add some Depth grading. Also having those reverb instances globally as an effect bus and every track having a separat send adds some cohesion.

Like I’ve said before, maybe adding a stereo widener might hinder the mix more that helping. Most widener destroy the stereo field or cut the mid in the stereo. The best advice I can give, is less is more. Also, it might help to watch the mix in different terms. Maybe the sound stage can be formed like a real stage (positioning instruments like on the stage) or in LCR (fully panned left, center or right, it was mostly used in the 70s) or Mid/Side (mono and stereo difference). Especially Mid/Side can add a lot of depth (like cutting the bass at 200Hz for the side mix to have it in the mono sum and have a fat sound).

I can defenetly relate on the heavy reverb use. I needed to somewhat wean my use of it a bit and learn to cut it a bit more. General rule of thumb nowadays is to mix it like I want it, and like said earlier EQ it, and the cut it by 3db further. Reverb can be a b**** to mix. Generally if you notice it it is most likely to much. But it’s right if you cant tell if it is on or not. If you the just bypass it, it is like magic and you will miss it. It could be also a problem with some headphones. I had some Audio-Technica R70x that were great but sucked every reverb tail, so I drowned everything. Nowadays I use some HiFi-Man Sundara, they are planar driver headphones, that are higher resolution and can recreate those tails. Also transients are more true to life.  

I hope that might help somewhat. If necessary, I might need to add my Discord-account for some further nerdery ^^.  

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