Reply To: The Mandelbrot Set 3: Creepy Monkey Underpants
Rob, listened a few times to your mix on a few different systems. I like that it is simpler. The instruments seem a little too loud to me. There is less reverb so things sound a little more up front. You’ve dropped most of the theremin including the intro “heartbeat” which I kind of miss. I guess I’m not really opposed to using JoCo’s drums except that it seems like we’ve been pretty dedicated to DIY.
I think you dropped my higher voice part on the chorus. That sounds fine to me, I can hear Caleb (and my low part) better. I think you are using an older version of my lead vocal with fewer tracks? It makes me wonder if it would be helpful for me to drop a couple of tracks and give my own tracks the flex-time align treatment to try to tighten them up a little, or whether that would make my pitch flaws more apparent.
The timing here and there is ugly to my years. The shakers are out of sync with the drums, and some of the vox parts misalign, and the vox and bells misalign. That makes me cringe a bit. To my ear things have to align really, really well or it just jumps out at me. Hence the tweaked versions of Caleb’s tracks. Sorry these were not uploaded earlier. I kind of stopped uploading every track because there were getting to be so many, and I was constantly changing up their volume automation. (That, and no one seemed to be asking for them, there are a lot of them, and it can be kind of a pain to “unhook” all the FX and automation to export a plain track… and what exactly does that include, i. e., compressor or not, volume automation or not, panning or not, edits or not, FX or not, time stretching or not?).
I tweaked my mix 9 to remove most of the reverb, and I think it does sound better that way.
I’d recommend using the time-aligned tracks, and I’d vote against using JoCo’s drums. If you want to try it, I could make you a lead vox track with fewer parts.
Any other opinions? I feel like on this project we’re suffering a bit from lack of more feedback from the group, so it is less apparent when a track is on the right, um, track or not. It’s also kind of disappointing to me that JoCo has not mentioned the completed “My Monkey” on the front page; I feel like that is a big part of our “payoff” for finishing a cover. Would it be rude to mention it to him again?