Feel The Fire (final mix)

[dasilvasings]

Hi Gary,

I went back to hear your playlist, and I came across this pearl! Excellent. I love the fact the drum machine is so high when comapred with the rest. Makes it very mechanic as complete opposition to the organic guitars. In some aspects, very Gilmourish!

Also liked your Magnolia too. I have to listen again!

Cheers!

[IanR]

I like this

Personally, I'm happy with the vocal up that loud, I like the effect it has when it comes in. But I can see how it could be brought down a tad.

On the distorted guitar, it does need more "prominence", but it might not actually need a lot more volume.

I actually like it as it is, and I don't think you need to mess with it. It's a really good listen.

But!! () I've typed a load of guff below that you might like to experiment with, either on this or next time (apologies if you already know some or all of this stuff)

One of the things that makes this guitar seem less prominent is that it doesn't seem to have the lush reverb on it that the vocal does.

One good trick is to use the same reverb/echo settings on the lead vocal and the lead guitar, but use different ones on the other instruments. So when it switches from one to the other, you're tricked into imagining a spotlight moving from the singer to the guitarist and vice versa.

But i'm not sure that will help on this one.

The other thing is that this guitar is panned over to the right. Nothing wrong with that, but we've just been listening to the upfront vocal, he's left the room and suddenly the action seems to be off to the right...

Now, I've got a feeling that you don't regard this guitar as "centre-stage", and I think you're right in this case. I'd happily put this performance centre-stage, but I like how the singer leaving leaves an empty spotlight... And there's actually another, cleaner, guitar off on stage-left doing interesting and complementary stuff...

So there's another trick you could use to "fill" the stereo and the listener's interest as the singer leaves - but it's a bit tricksy if you're using the MBR. You want to get the "reverb" of the distorted guitar over to the left (and possibly the reverb of the left hand guitar over to the right).

Depends how you've got it all recorded, but one way of doing it is like this:
1. Make a copy of the lead guitar track
2. Pan the original where you've got it now
3. Pan the copy opposite, usually all the way
4. Set the original as loud as you want with little or NO reverb
5. Set the copy as quiet as you can with LOADs of reverb

Listening to these two (original and reverb) on their own should sound a bit daft. But stick them in the mix - especially if an instrument on the other side is reverbing back - really opens things up. It fills the sound without adding more parts, and lets you put more reverb on without muddying everything up.

I just listened again to see if what I'd written made sense, I think it does. But what I also noticed is that the clean lead on the left sounds louder than the distorted one on the right. Without messing with anything else, taking a little low end off of both of them and then raising the volume of the distorted one just a little bit will balance them a bit better.

If it was mine, I'd still have been tempted to fiddle with reverbs after the singer leaves, though (no, actually, that's wrong - what I'd actually have done is record a bunch more instruments trying to fill the gaps I could feel, wondering why it wasn't getting better  - don't mess with the sparseness, that's what makes this one happen)

 I love this site.  I love how people like Andy go to so much effort to advise and help others to learn.  I have learned soooooo much from this place.  its truly amazing.

Also, Ron Wood recerded a song called "I can feel the fire" on his first and best solo album in about 1975.  Gary, this song was a lot different to that.

Ian

[JMD2010]

Now that's what I call ATMOSPHERE.
Some of that guitar reminds me of Roy Buchannan and that's got to be good.

John

[Black Mary]

This is a beautiful composition. I can't hear anything to pick up on with the mix personally. The laidback feel of the vox and guitar leads is haunting & the mix is wide like it should be for this type of track. Great chord sequence in the first place. Love the slow attack on the lead. Your tone is perfect for this song. Really mellow but sustained. It's spacious & not rushed at any point. You've got a fantastic song here.