LongBoxofChocolate Posted December 12, 2015 Share Posted December 12, 2015 Hey everyone. This is my band's take on the ever-popular Dragon Roost Island. We believe it is a fresh approach to a tune that has probably been covered to death, so hopefully you enjoy it as much as we do. As always, the vast majority of instruments were recorded live, including the ocean drums! We also just overhauled our hardware setup, so any production critiques are more than welcome. Thanks for listening! source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRWq53IFXVQ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
APZX Posted December 13, 2015 Share Posted December 13, 2015 I gotta say this is quite a bit of fun. Great mood, energy, feeling, etc . . .. Instruments are well recorded, the spectrum is quite nicely filled out. I mean there really isn't a lot to complain about in those regards. Everything is discernible in the mix. Having said that I feel that mix falls a bit short. There are certain moments that are simply fantastic like 1:16 - 1:36, 1:39 - 2:04, 2:09 - 2:16 as just a few examples. Everything just gels and it just works fantastically. However, there are moments where the track just doesn't live up to those like 2:19 - 2:27 or 3:42 - 4:22. The mix falls in on itself at those moments. The drums lose all their power & impact. It is at those moments you want the track to really come out and be driving. It is clearly evident by how they're played. I'd be more forgiving if there was more going on that required more spectrum & power. But really that isn't the problem. The way this is composed & voiced tells me that this shouldn't be the case. Just my observations. But seriously this is a really fun cover. Lots of great moments and honestly I can mostly overlook the mixing bits (there is quite a bit more than what I commented on, but that is neither here nor there right now) because it is just that much fun. Edit - Seriously, this track is so good I can almost overlook the mixing issues. That is really saying something for me. LongBoxofChocolate and HankTheSpankTankJankerson 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
timaeus222 Posted December 13, 2015 Share Posted December 13, 2015 This is really good! For the most part, I think this is in pretty solid shape, but some things still bug me. - 0:40 on the first listen felt kind of odd, just having the guitar there with the ocean FX. But it's not a big deal on further listens. - 1:16, when the flute comes in, the tone seems a bit distorted. It's more easily audible at 3:30. Maybe it's something to do with the material that it's made out of, but if you notch-EQ at around 10000~14000 Hz, that would be where I'm hearing it. It's only audible when it's exposed though, so it's not a huge deal, but it's an easy fix without compromising the tone overall. - The kick drum gets lost in basically the entire track. Sometimes I barely notice a thump, and in the more crowded timestamps (2:17 - 2:27 and 3:41 - end), it's just buried. You can help that by either boosting near 4000 Hz to get more high-end "click" in there, or (hopefully you wouldn't have to, but) re-record it. You could also raise the volume on it a bit, too. - At 3:41 - end, the track is noticeably overcompressed. The bass lacks definition there, the kick is super muffled in context, and the toms at 4:05 are buried. If you can get the bass to be more powerful there, and get the kick and toms more audible, that would really help the impact that has. Other than that, this is again, really solid. Probably has a good chance of impressing the judges' panel, but I do think the drum production would be a problem. If you can do a quick fix on the flute tone, that would be great too, but yeah, mostly the kick and toms that are the main issues here. The arrangement is well-personalized and has good attention to dynamics. Good performances too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HankTheSpankTankJankerson Posted December 13, 2015 Share Posted December 13, 2015 11 hours ago, timaeus222 said: - 1:16, when the flute comes in, the tone seems a bit distorted Yeah, man! Thanks for the informed criticism! Notched EQ is something we haven't accessed before (as far as I know). The flute is a Dizi which is a Chinese bamboo flute. It has a piece of rice paper over a tone hole that buzzes the tone the flute is playing. The principle is close to that of a kazoo. The gringo version is to just put scotch tape over the tone hole, but that seals the flute off and chokes out some higher frequencies. ANYWAYS, What you're hearing is a characteristic of the instrument, which we thought would bring some charm to the track. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LongBoxofChocolate Posted December 13, 2015 Author Share Posted December 13, 2015 Thank you both for your comments! 12 hours ago, timaeus222 said: - The kick drum gets lost in basically the entire track. Sometimes I barely notice a thump, and in the more crowded timestamps (2:17 - 2:27 and 3:41 - end), it's just buried. You can help that by either boosting near 4000 Hz to get more high-end "click" in there, or (hopefully you wouldn't have to, but) re-record it. You could also raise the volume on it a bit, too. - At 3:41 - end, the track is noticeably overcompressed. The bass lacks definition there, the kick is super muffled in context, and the toms at 4:05 are buried. If you can get the bass to be more powerful there, and get the kick and toms more audible, that would really help the impact that has. To be honest, we've been struggling with bass frequencies and compression since day one. I think a lot of it can be attributed to our recording space...we're still in the process of trying to outfit the room for more accurate monitoring. Do you have any tips for dealing with this specifically? We must have bounced 4 or 5 iterations of the song with different bass levels to try and dial in a reasonable balance. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
timaeus222 Posted December 13, 2015 Share Posted December 13, 2015 I'm not sure how you prefer to work with a limiter (DAW or hardware or both?), but I would try to find a more tolerant limiter; one that pushes down less on loud peaks generally asks you to be more careful with your levels to avoid overcrowding, but nevertheless, the more tolerant the limiter (the softer the knee), the less overcompression issues you can get. The knee is basically the degree of the tendency in a limiter to react to loud peaks. I've been using the free TLs-Pocket Limiter VST for 2 years now and haven't turned back to FL Studio's default Fruity Limiter since! Or, a nice commercial one would be FabFilter-Pro L (~$199). Once you don't have to fight your limiter for headroom, raising your bass and kick volumes shouldn't be as much of an issue. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
APZX Posted December 14, 2015 Share Posted December 14, 2015 13 minutes ago, timaeus222 said: I'm not sure how you prefer to work with a limiter (DAW or hardware or both?), but I would try to find a more tolerant limiter; one that pushes down less on loud peaks generally asks you to be more careful with your levels to avoid overcrowding, but nevertheless, the more tolerant the limiter (the softer the knee), the less overcompression issues you can get. The knee is basically the degree of the tendency in a limiter to react to loud peaks. I'm sorry, but that isn't what a knee on a compressor is at all. The knee on a compressor is directly related to the ratio and deals with how gradually the compressor applies gain reduction via increasing the ratio to the incoming signal in relation to where the peak is compared to the threshold. So, it would sound like it is applying less compression because in general it is applying less compression on incoming peaks until the signal is at the threshold where the compressor is applying full gain reduction, but it has nothing to do with the tendency to react to loud peaks. That is still strictly the attack, release, threshold, & ratio. What the knee does is help blend between full compression on peaks versus low level peaks being slightly compressed. LBoC, It is kind of hard to give you any advice on how to cope with this without actually having the multitrack or uncompressed (i.e. no master level processing) version of the track. What i can say is that you've got too much going on down 150-400Hz. There are just too many instruments down there eyeing for your attention. Additionally, the bass is actually quite soft and could really use with some EQ to really bring out some of the finer details. From what I can hear if you were to say let the bass take the low end (sub 60-80Hz) and if you clean up the mud some and then let the kick run the 200-400Hz area that will help give the track some low end punch. If you still find there isn't enough detail in either of the instruments then start looking quite a bit higher in frequency. For the kick try bringing out the beater at like 5-7KHz. For the bass try bringing out the strings in the 2-3KHz range. That is at least one option. Another option is to actually sidechain the bass to the kick. There are some other options if you want to explore them, but I'd really just try and start with the old classic of letting either the bass or kick control the low end and then selectively controlling where each has dominance in the spectrum to bring out the qualities you want. On a really serious note don't be afraid of getting really heavy handed with EQ when doing this either because that may be your best course of action. Another thing to look at is using compression to do some transient shaping. Listen to the kick in the beginning. It is played quite softly, but it still has a good amount of bite to it at the beginning. You can use a compressor to really control how hard the kick hits. The same applies to the bass with compression. You can gain a lot by just compressing the bass. Don't be afraid of compression; it isn't evil. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LongBoxofChocolate Posted December 14, 2015 Author Share Posted December 14, 2015 Thanks, I'll pass this along to our drummer/sound guy. Currently we've got all the live instruments running through physical pre-amps and software plugins in Protools, but he could go into more detail about that. To my knowledge, the drums are equipped with a gate and compressor, but no limiter. I'll ask him to make an account. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
timaeus222 Posted December 14, 2015 Share Posted December 14, 2015 11 minutes ago, APZX said: I'm sorry, but that isn't what a knee on a compressor is at all. The knee on a compressor is directly related to the ratio and deals with how gradually the compressor applies gain reduction via increasing the ratio to the incoming signal in relation to where the peak is compared to the threshold. So, it would sound like it is applying less compression because in general it is applying less compression on incoming peaks until the signal is at the threshold where the compressor is applying full gain reduction, but it has nothing to do with the tendency to react to loud peaks. That is still strictly the attack, release, threshold, & ratio. What the knee does is help blend between full compression on peaks versus low level peaks being slightly compressed. I was simplifying the concept (hence the "basically"). Besides, I linked to a source that already describes it in detail. The important part is that it is relevant to fixing overcompression (never did I say compression was inherently "evil"). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LongBoxofChocolate Posted December 14, 2015 Author Share Posted December 14, 2015 2 minutes ago, APZX said: What i can say is that you've got too much going on down 150-400Hz. This is good to hear. I asked our drummer and that was his suspicion as well. I actually suggested some very subtle sidechaining already, and it's definitely an improvement over older versions. I will make sure he reads this. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
APZX Posted December 14, 2015 Share Posted December 14, 2015 Timaeus222, I got that you were simplifying, but when the way you simplified it doesn't make any sense because it doesn't have anything to do with that. In general the knee of compressor can really be thought of like a car accelerating. You start at zero and then reach your desired speed. The ratio starts off at 1:1 and then gradually ramps up whatever you specified for the ratio. Also, I wasn't saying you're were calling compression evil. It just seems that a lot of folks view compression as an evil thing, and that makes a lot of people hesitant to use it. I wasn't talking about you and the overcompression issue you pointed out (which I do agree on) or anyone else for that matter. It was merely a comment to try and encourage the use of compression in a responsible manner timaeus222 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
timaeus222 Posted December 14, 2015 Share Posted December 14, 2015 Alright, cool. And thanks for being civil about it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
APZX Posted December 14, 2015 Share Posted December 14, 2015 1 hour ago, LongBoxofChocolate said: Thanks, I'll pass this along to our drummer/sound guy. Currently we've got all the live instruments running through physical pre-amps and software plugins in Protools, but he could go into more detail about that. To my knowledge, the drums are equipped with a gate and compressor, but no limiter. I'll ask him to make an account. Drummer/Sound Guy? Well that right there is yer problem *j/k*. Serious now, are the drums multitracked like overheads, kick, snare (over & under), room, hat, toms, etc . . ., or are they just a stereo track? This is important because it really limits what you can & cannot do to them. If you've only got a stereo track to work from then EQ is going to be your best friend to get the desired clarity. If it is a multitrack then the focus should really be on building the drums from the overheads. They're what give the drums most of their sound. The kick & snare mics are really only there to add to the overheads. The limiter Timeaus is talking about is something done on the Master Bus and not really on the drums in particular. Though this goes a bit beyond what you're talking about you can limit the drums for a little bit more "oomph" if you want. But that really starts going beyond the scope of this topic. I know I didn't mention this earlier but there are some strange choices when it comes to the space given to various instruments. I mean they work together, but it is just that they sound a bit disjointed from one another because some have reverb whereas others don't quite. It sounds like they were recorded in the same space which gives them some cohesiveness, but not enough for them to be considered in the same space. As I said earlier without the multitrack or an uncompressed version of the track I'm pretty hard pressed into giving you much more specific advice. As an aside I can get very technical when talking about mixing because it is something that I've decided to really focus on. I've mixed a few Rock tracks for practice before so I do know first hand some of the issues that are going on here. Feel free to PM me if you've got specific questions that you'd rather see answered in a more private manner or feel free to post them here and I'll do my best to answer them. I do know a thing or two about mixing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LongBoxofChocolate Posted December 16, 2015 Author Share Posted December 16, 2015 He's still waiting on approval, so I'll answer the best I can in the meantime... The drums are outfitted with a pair of stereo condensers (Rode NT5s?) as overheads, SM57 on the snare, and something on the kick and toms that I can't remember. Which instruments seemed out of place to you? I will concede that the synth leads are a little dry compared to the rest of the mix, but that was mostly intentional: any wetter and I'd be losing clarity in the more technical parts. Something else to note is that ALL the wind parts are doubled, but the guitars are not. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
timaeus222 Posted December 16, 2015 Share Posted December 16, 2015 If you're having trouble with "having to" leave certain sounds drier just to not lose clarity, then you should consider muting certain parts to see if they actually contribute to the overall soundscape. If you omit a certain instrument part, and you don't hear a significant difference, then it might as well not be there, because if you can't say that it contributes to a fuller soundscape, then it just adds extra clutter. Sometimes it's hard for an outsider to identify such things, so this would be something you'd have to check yourself. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LongBoxofChocolate Posted December 16, 2015 Author Share Posted December 16, 2015 Hmm I should clarify. What I'm referring to mainly is the melody at 1:39 and the harmonized arpeggios at 3:09. That synth is an essential part of the tune, but is probably the driest in the whole track and we felt that it was right to give it more of an analog flavor. Which leads me back to my question: what parts do you find to be disjointed? I have my suspicions but I think an outside ear is just as (if not more) useful in this situation. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
APZX Posted December 16, 2015 Share Posted December 16, 2015 This one gets a little hard to properly describe but I'll point out what I can. In the intro listen to the drums and how they have a particular kind of ambiance to them. Then at :40 when the guitar comes in it has reverb and space, but it doesn't match the space that the drums have. The tonality of the space is quite different and stark. Now, the way the track is pieced together works for quite sometime, but it starts to show problems again around 1:39 with the winds coming in and really shows up again at 2:09. Then at 2:36 it comes to light again with the bells. 2:57 is another example of the space of the various instruments not matching particularly well. Though at 3:10 things match up wonderfully, which could be for numerous reasons which include masking the issues or it could be the conversion to MP3 is wreaking some havoc there, but well that is how things go sometimes. 3:41 when the guitar comes in it just doesn't match at all with the other instruments. Now, let me be very clear about something. What I'm pointing out is quite a nitpicky kind of thing. Most people probably won't even notice and heck this track is so darn fun that I'd be surprised if anyone really notices unless they're looking for it. Now, you can have instruments with different reverbs; however, the reverbs have to be able to blend together in a harmonious way without causing any issues of space. This requires a certain attention be paid attention to the space being given to the instruments. It is something that for whatever reason really bugs me when it doesn't sound right. Sorry So, the drums are multitracked. I don't need to know what they're recorded with just that they were multitracked. If that is the case then you have a lot of options to treat them. Personally, I've always found with live drums that time spent doing the balance of them in mono with only one speaker on makes it much easier to come up with the balance and to detect any phase issues (doesn't sound like there are any). Some more options when it comes to dealing drums when mixing is instead of relying on a gate is actually automate the volume of the track so that it only plays when you want it to. If you need a little more "power" from the drums then you can use parallel compression to help with that. If you need some more "punch" from the drums then consider what you want to have more "punch" and use EQ, Compression, and Transient Designers to help give that particular instrument a little bit more. Also, consider buss level processing. A simple program EQ can work wonders sometimes. If you're cymbals are coming through too hard or something like that and you're finding a compressor is taking too much life out of them then use a de-esser. Think of a de-esser more as a HF Limiter rather than a de-esser. You'd have to tell me more specifically what you feel you're missing and I can give some more advice on approaches. Now, if you've got issues with needing to really dry out instruments in order to make them fit then you've got some volume, pan, and EQ issues to work out. Typically the reason for not being able to put reverb on an instrument is in really fast paced tracks where the reverb will cloud things up. In that case delays are normally used. Another reason is that the instruments aren't being given their proper place in the overall sound stage. When I mix I spend most of my time balancing the mix and basic EQ to enhance clarity of the various instruments in mono. This is before I even get into stereo. Everyone works differently, but it is something to consider. Having said that there are some things you can try with reverb to help blend the instruments a bit better together. Try EQing into or out of the reverb. Now, I'm mainly talking about a HPF and/or LPF here. The idea here is that there is particular set of frequencies that our ears are really going to be sensitive to in the reverb that give the real sense of space given by the reverb. Basically, send the instrument through the reverb like normal and then adjust the filters until you find a certain point of HPF & LPF where the reverb just pops. I cannot describe it any other way. You'll have to experiment. This isn't a new technique, but a rather old one. It is a way to eek out a little more clarity in the mix. It can help with cloudiness of instruments by allowing them to pop through more readily while taking up less spectrum. Another thing to try is actually sidechaining the reverb. When this is done it downplays the reverb when the instrument is playing but allows it come out more when it isn't. Again giving you more control to manipulate the space at will. I cannot really think of anything else to add currently. Sorry, that the post is a bit scatter brained. Been a long day for me. Feel free to ask more questions or really much of anything. I'll be around trying to figure out how to finish my track heh. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LongBoxofChocolate Posted December 16, 2015 Author Share Posted December 16, 2015 (edited) Wow, thanks. This is gonna take some time to get through but I'd like to experiment and apply this as much as we can. We just started working on an album so it's really important to us that we achieve not only a better sound but also a more consistent sound. Don't be surprised if you see us in the project forums come January... Edited December 16, 2015 by LongBoxofChocolate champion-level spelling Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LongBoxofChocolate Posted January 11, 2016 Author Share Posted January 11, 2016 (edited) Bumping for mod review. NOPE JK WE'RE GOING TO REVISIT THE MIX Edited January 14, 2016 by LongBoxofChocolate Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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