lbethune wrote:
Hi Brent, I love the mastered version of the tune. It sounds quite good. Let me give this one a shot in terms of the anaysis.
The compression on the track sounds fantastic. It servers to bring out the vocals, the bu vocals as well as stabalizing, placing and fixing (securing) the level of the echo repeats and reverb tails. I suspect you messed with the threshold for a while. Did you use a multi band comp?
There sounds like there is a bit of Maximizer in there. There is a brightness and clarity that is not in the original mix. Might just be eq or might be both but I can hear it and it is nice. Kinda like a BBE on guitar.
I am going to go out on a limb here and say you used a stereo imager on the track too. It might be the combined effect of the comp and the maximizer/eq working on panned echo and reverb tails but the master sounds.....wider that the mix.
Am I close?
P.S. Sorry I missed the gig. These guys sound pretty good.
Hey cool Larry! Thanks for checking it out - glad you like it!
The vast majority of the compression happened during tracking and mixing (I tend to use many instances of relatively subtle compression. There was also a Waves SSL Comp on my 2-Mix) - Noah the engineer that mastered this doesn't use more than a db or two overall when mastering and never uses multiband compression. Most of the level just comes from the gain staging of his (amazing) gear and then he hits a limiter at the end, but again it's only a db or two.
He does do the work in M/S so he has separate control over the center of the image and the sides. He has a widener in this one Dangerous box (I'm talking the brand here, not the risk!!), but he also sometimes brings up the level of the sides to make it sound wider. Sometimes he makes things too wide for me - I feel like width can detract from the power in a mix, but in this case I think it works...
No BBE, or any other funky box like that! Just the best EQ's on the planet - Neve, GML, Sontec.
As for the ambience in the track, didn't use a single delay or echo on the entire disc - the band didn't like them. If you hear reverb on a guitar track, it either came from my Twin Reverb or EHX Holy Grail pedal. There's very little artificial reverb on the mix - the vast majority of ambience was recorded from the room. I used a teeny bit of SPX90 on some of the lead vocals, and on a couple of tracks used the Holy Grail pedal again in the mix on some selected backgrounds to help them sit, but that's it - everything was recorded really roomy so most of it is natural.
And no I didn't use any widening on any of the tracks - I find that if I record with a lot of the natural ambience of my studio, it ends up sounding really 3D... great room!
They are a fantastic band, and the buzz is building for them. We had a great time making this, and the response has been fantastic... hopefully you'll get to see them live at one point...
Thanks again for taking the time to listen and comment!
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Brent Bodrug
Producer-Engineer/Songwriter
www.slyfichapel.com
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Joan wouldn't want to hear my bad 3-chord jams all night either... 
