The Dressing-up Box - AndyR Original

[AndyR]

Just replaced the file with a remix.

I've been real quiet lately - and this song is why. It was such a millstone round my neck getting it done, and it didn't sound like I wanted it to, and I didn't know why... I haven't been able to face the recording gear, or even the studio since then (been playing guitar a lot instead!). When I went in to fix this today, I found the ash-tray still had a single lonely butt in it from the day I finished the first mix, all the way back in September last year

The other day, I figured out what was wrong with it - I'd mixed the vocals too loud! Really, that's all it was. You build all this nice stereo, and it's rocking away... but if you make the vocals too loud, you remove much of the dynamics and make the track more mono... And seeing as this thing is so long, it needs all the help it can get!

I'd also got a comment elsewhere that it was a bit bass-heavy. I had intended that the bass was "up in the mix", but on certain players I could see exactly what he meant.

For the remix I went back to the original band mix (no vox), and rolled of just a bit of bottom end (-4db shelf at 50Hz). Then I mixed the lead vox and backing vox back in a notch or two lower than before.

That's all it took, and suddenly the thing rocks a bit more and jumps out of my various speakers like it did for all those hours I was working on it before the original mix!

*SIGH* Now I can get on with recording something else

[bruno]

Still sounds excellent to my ears. Spending that amount of time would drive me insane, but you can hear the quality in the end result. It reminds me very much of something Kip Winger would produce (his solo stuff e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtQYTsk-adQ ), no bad thing in my book.
B

[Ferryman]

Wasn't on here when the original was posted but glad you bumped it with a new mix otherwise I would have missed it. As usual, a wonderful progtastic epic with many depths and wonderful arrangements. Your vocal performance is excellent on this, so powerful yet superbly controlled. Love the way it builds and the guitar work later in the song is superb. Fabulous all round and a really enjoyable listen. Well done, very well done.

Very interesting to hear what you have done with the mastering. I now have to wear hearing aids, and I have a special setting for listening to music which gets my ears back to a perfectly flat eq across all frequency ranges (I have high frequency hearing loss). It also has no compression or other clever effects like the speech settings which filter out background noises and focus on certain frequency ranges. So when I listen to stuff on my studio monitors I have pretty good hearing now. One thing I notice with a lot of recordings on the site is that there is a lot of high end noise that is not noticeable when I listen through headphones without the hearing aids. Sometimes this can make tracks quite hard to listen to for me on the monitors because I am getting all the high end that most people aren't hearing. Your track sounds great to me because of how you have mastered it.

If you want to get into mastering more seriously, I would recommend Izotope Ozone 6 (the cheaper edition), a mastering suite that runs standalone on a PC (so you do not need a DAW in which it can run as a "plug in"). So you can take your final mix from the BR 1600 and you have a nice standalone mastering tool which has very sophisticated EQ, limiting and a lot more. I've just got it and it seems to have a lot of potential.    

You did this in 5 months? Seems like rushing things a bit to me  

[AndyR]

Your post made me smile, Ferryman!

It made me go back and reread the thread - and discover that I've missed a stage out of this new mix... I forgot to clean the top end while mastering it!! Oops... I might revisit it later.

There is some horrendous hiss on one of the guitar overdubs on the second verse - but it doesn't seem too obvious on this version... However this version is slightly livelier in the top-end overall than I was expecting, which was confusing me during mastering... I suspect missing the top end cut has done this...

Perhaps I need to read my own instructions next time! (Or perhaps not...)

[Ferryman]

Your post made me smile, Ferryman!

It made me go back and reread the thread - and discover that I've missed a stage out of this new mix... I forgot to clean the top end while mastering it!! Oops... I might revisit it later.

Please do, it will sound even better!

[AndyR]

Your post made me smile, Ferryman!

It made me go back and reread the thread - and discover that I've missed a stage out of this new mix... I forgot to clean the top end while mastering it!! Oops... I might revisit it later.

Please do, it will sound even better!

Well... I gave it a go in the time allotted to me this evening... Some improvement, BUT the result was quieter and lost some oink... And I prefer the one we've got here so far...

So I've turned the machine off again for the evening - might give it another go tomorrow night.

[andy casson]

This is astonishingly good Andy, and glad it got bumped otheriwse I would have missed it aswell. It is such an accomplished song - arrangement, instruments, and the vocals are really superb - fantastic listen fella

Andy

[Glenn Mitchell]

Great stuff Andy! Love the contrast and the huge sound. Fine Vox. Nice bass, piano, hell all the parts are tasty.

[Gnasty]

Coming back to this epic piece. I think it sounds perfect now.

 I have trouble with low end  too. I think i went too low on the one i just finished. I think it`s good to take a break which i never seem to do. I don`t think this should trouble you. It`s amazing, so get cracking on another. 

[ODH]

jings crivvens and - what was the other bit?

Mighty and multi-dimensional.  Mighty dimensional.

I'd totally missed this and got it through the 2014 jukebox submission thread.

You wail, man!