Home recordings, would love some feedback.

[Elvis Valentine]

I second that emotion.
Really good.

[51m0n]

Cheers chaps!

Love that E.P, [b]huge[/b] effort to make the very most of every aspect of the performances (which were great), and to try and bring out the songs to their absolute best.

Kit is excellent (great writer, great pianist, really great performer and a great vocalist, and a complete perfectionist), and really knows what she wants, she has a difficult voice though (she is the first to say this), and we spent forever getting the result exactly just 'so'. Once the voice was cracked on each mix the rest started to come together, and there was time for some extensive work to really maximise what was tracked.

For instance on You Look So Good Tonight the little percussive vocal parts at the beginning were all in mono, so I sliced them up and spread them all over the place. Makes it all nice and bouncy, in mono it just cluttered up the lead, but it was far too cool to bin. The strings were made to sound more like a large orchestra section rather than a couple of players overdubbed once etc etc.

The drums on Little Toy Soldiers were a huge part of the sound of that track, that dead and over compressed snare (snare wires off on the recording too) at the beginning with the big reverb after it, that was what Kit wanted to hear there (but really wasnt what was tracked). If you listen carefully the entire drum sound changes completely three times through the track, there is the humungous dotted stereo heavily filtered delay on it through a quiet section, the reverse reverb on the snare etc etc then later it gets far less compressed and affected to drop the dynamic down super low. Then for the build up at the end it changes again becoming hugely bombastic but not so overly effecty. Lots and lots of automation through the track of all sorts of the parameters on the drums to get those changes to happen really seamlessly, took just for ever, one song with essentially three or four drum mixes, and the automation to and from each one. Bonkers

Then there was the bv's, there were only three or four tiny bvs in the original set of files sent over for all the songs, and I convinced Kit that she really should have ago at tracking some more and low and behold hundreds of lovely BVs turned up, which turned the whole EP from lovely band in the studio to a huge produciton sound. But there was a lot fo work 'fitting them in' to the mixes. Especially on Russian Dolls, there are something like 50 tracks of backiong vocals on that song, and you can hear every single one (kinda )

I cant stress how important eq and reverbs (there are three verbs on the lead vocal of each track alone, each for a different part of the ambience, all very very carefully tweaked to do exactly what I needed) are to making that lead vocal on the EP sound so big and smooth. And copious use of delays as well, and compression, so many different ways to use compression on there it almost scares me

It took 6 months of elapsed time from start to finish, and has been one of the most enjoyable and demanding mix jobs I've ever undertaken, I'm really proud of the result and the fact that people have only said good things about it!

There are so many more little mix gems in there, yet I only ever hear how great the songs are, which means its a great mix to me...

Edited November 13, 2012 by 51m0n

[xilddx]

Let me add to what 51m0n has said. Kit had a studio engineer mix one of the songs on the EP. I wasn't happy with it and said so. I put it up on here and asked for critique. Most of the feedback concurred with my own thoughts, and 51m0n PMed me to suggest he have a crack at a new mix. I had a chat with Kit and she sent him the stem tracks along with a LARGE list of requirements After an epic, biblical, exchange of emails between the three of us (mostly between Kit and Si) over the course of a month, we had 'You Always Did' nailed. It sounded fabulous and Kit commissioned Si to do the other three numbers on the EP. Another 4 or 5 months later it was finished.

As 51m0n said, we've had amazing feedback on the songs, the performances and the production on here, and we've sold a lot of EPs to Basschat members which is incredibly humbling and immensely gratifying. THANK YOU!

51m0n is fantastic to work with. His huge level of knowledge is one thing, his great ears are another, but the key thing that made this work so well was that he was very honest and open with his opinions and suggestions, you have no idea how much that helps. I will recommend Si to anyone on here looking for someone to mix their music, he's brilliant at it and worth every red penny.

Elvis, sorry for derailing your thread mate!

Edited November 14, 2012 by silddx

[Skol303]

^ Cheers for the insight, Si & Nige. Very interesting to read.

Really like the idea of slicing up mono vocals and panning them - I'm going to try that myself sometime. And that drum work you describe on Little Toy Soldiers made my head hurt! Wow. I've never thought of running that kind of automation on drums - I always just set up one chain of FX on drums for each track and that's it. I'm currently working on the mix of this month's BC composition challenge, so I'm going to have a go at something like this myself - I can see how this could be a great help in busy mixes.

Anyway, thanks again Si. Always good to peer into the workings of your mind! I've bought a copy of You Look So Good Tonight - couldn't get the song out of my head after hearing it - and it's already been added to my mix reference library, which is my own personal hall of fame! (no cash prize for that unfortunately). I'll be picking up the rest of the album shortly.

Superb. You should be rightly proud of it