Hello everyone,
This is my first participation to a MC here, and I want to thanks the Mix-challenge team and the artists who provide the materials. This song really was moving me and it was a pleasure to mix it. I'm french so sorry for my english.
CHOSEN DIRECTION
As a mix engineer, I value the "emotion first" approach.
I listened to both the commercial release of this song and the references provided. As "being creative" and "we want to hear where this song could have gone" were part of the brief, I took a different direction than the commercial release, without (I hope) betraying the original emotion of the song.
And I feel the song as being a deep dive into love despair, angriness and resentment. I feel the climax around bar 130 and I wanted to emphasis the feeling of "falling" into this emotions (Like... well... waterfalls... genius Berenger.
)
I have this strong feelings when I listen to post rock / post hardcore band like Caspian, Russian Circles or This Will Destroy You, and they share common sound similarities with your provided references :
- Roomy yet Powerfull and deep drums
- Use of large reverbs
- Careful treatment of distortion on guitars
For the deep dive feeling, I couldn't get Again by Archive out of my head as a reference.
So the direction was this : Giving the song a strong, deep and roomy rhythmic sound and driving the "fall into darkness" with extensive use of delays and filters on vocals. Hope it will please you.
PROCESSING
Drum
Phase correction and track selection.
I start mixing from the room mic. The room feel to small and bright to me so I build an additional room track with an IR1 and mix it with the actual room mics. It result in a bigger and darker room sound.
BTW, your MS is incredibly good, well placed, well balanced.
I also decided to make the kick roomy and deep
I also use a NewYork Bus which is injected with different tracks depending on the part of the song : deeper and more present kick and snare on verse for clarity, more room and cymbals on chorus and high energy parts.
Bass Sound
I really liked the idea of a chorus on bass but I also wanted a strong distortion on high energy parts. The provided tracks lack some mid range to achieve this sound so i choose to :
- reamp the di track into my SVT Classic Amp to get a clean track with strong mids
- create a chorus track from it that I open during verses
- create a distortion track that i open on chorus and high energy parts.
Chorus bass appear on verse and distortion on chorus and High energy parts.
Guitar Processing
I realize that for some reason all the "MEJ" track was phase inverted which deeply affect the guitar tones. I corrected phase. I choose not to use Room mics. Layering of gtr was achieved by mixing each mic in a different way from a darker sound for rhythmic gtr to brighter and more present sound for arpeggio and melodic guitars.
I only reamped the chorus melodic guitar because I wanted it to pop out of the mix and needed a both bright and clear crunch without to much highs.
Vocal Processing
Well vocals were quite a challenge here : I wanted it and the melodic guitars to alternate in the front of the mix, but I also wanted to keep the etheral feelings of the references.
Usual process for vocal : some EQ, some comp, some 1073, some 1176, some infinite delay, with distortions and filters and automation... Well I can't describe all the things I've done, here it was more about feelings.
Hope you will enjoy this mix. Hope I didn't went to far from what was expected. Hope that hope is enough.
Here is a link to the mix : http://bit.ly/mc070waterfall
I see lots of people showing screenshot so I assume it was necessary, here are some screen of the session :
Vocal automations :
Vocal Chain :
Bass Processing (after reamping) :
Drum proc (too much here to show so i just didn't open any plug, if you want detail feel free to ask) :
Aller ! Bisous !
Bérenger.
