The Jongleurs Remix Project 2 - Just Say The Word

[Armistice]

Good morning / evening gentlemen

This is the second remix of this series. A bit of history is needed on this (and a few other tunes to come). The Jongleurs broke up long before the album was completed - as a live band anyway. Richard had had a child with his wife and there was talk of a second. And he'd (strangely!) fallen out of love with getting up on stages and playing to bugger all people. I was a bit more used to it. So when he pulled the plug we have maybe 6 songs in reasonable condition as recordings, a few others had been started, and some hadn't even been commenced. At that stage we weren't even thinking "album".

So I tinkered on for a month or so and then I contacted him again, when his second pregnancy was announced, and said "if you can give me 6 nights of recording, I'll give you an album, so that you've actually got something to show your kids when they grow up and they'll know it was a serious thing"... and he agreed - and it took more than 6 nights in the end, probably double that, be we soldiered on and I went away and mixed and worked out how to put an album out in the new digital world. And now he has a funny round thing to show his children. It would have been a real shame not to have complete the album as we had lots of people really like what we did.

This song was one that we'd played but never even started recording. So all the musical parts are me. Richard doesn't play a note - in fact his only contribution is two harmony lines - which he does in his own inimitable fashion and which sort of really make the song the thing of beauty it is... So there's less of the acoustic guitar interplay because it's me playing everything. He'd just strum the main chords on this anyway, he never learnt the intricacies of it, but his harmonies were always a standout.

The bass on the original recording was crap for a number of reasons so I've retracked it note for note, and I've put new drums in and generally remixed. Again I've been going back and forth with [mention]Bubba[/mention] on this for a few days now - and thanks to him for his great help - and we think it's ready for further appraisal. Thanks in advance...

[musicturtle]

I really have nothing to nit.

Mix is great. All the sounds are really good.

I have to say, this is one of my favorites from you. Love the main chord progression/riff.

[rayc]

The harmony of away on the left stuck out a bit as louder I THINK.
This reminds me of The Go-Betweens a bit.
The bass is "nicer" and sit well.
The drums are less mechanical though the originals weren't badly so.
The kick's a little toppy for my preference but sounds good.
GOOOOOD rebuild.

[Greg_L]

First off, I hate acoustic guitars, but you have on this maybe one of the better acoustic recordings I've heard. Kudos on that. The acoustic guitar sounds real good to me. Clean and present without a bunch of finger squeaks and noise. Good stuff.

I have one big problem with this mix and I think it's a bad one. The drums. They seem like an afterthought. They're small and tiny and shoved way way way in the back. I got nice wonderfully done guitars and vocals panned out and hitting me right up close from all directions, and then there's this tiny little pin-point of drums happening way in the back. Nice creation of distance there, but it screws up the balance to my ears. It's like listening to a band play in a master bedroom with the drummer out in the garage.

[TripleM]

Generally I thought this sounded good.

The acoustic guitars are kind of dominating everything else. They sound pretty good, but there is some boxy frequency in there somewhere. Like maybe between 800hz and 1000hz.

The vocals sound great. Performed well and they sound terrific.

I like the bass sound too.

The drums, at least in certain sections, get covered by the acoustic guitars. There are spots where the snare is really cracking and sounding great. Then there are spots where it's way back and not really driving the beat.

[WhiskeyJack]

I A/B'd with the original because that is what i like to do.

Vast Improvement. I am a huge fan of your vocals and how you go about setting them in a mix so no nits there and the acoustics also sound great. A Lots more life in them compared to the original offering.

I think i will echo others RE: the drums. they sort of come in and out of the song with the Acoustic and vocal swells in the jam. I don't know right off how i would go about curing that honestly though? I get that you guys are very much a acoustic and vocally driven / dominant artists so i get why the drums would be sitting under all that a bit. I just struggle a little bit with the in and out routine they (the drums) seem to play. They also seem to be quite raw and as is. I hear the whacks on the skins but i get no resonance. That may not be the right word for what i am not hearing forgive my ignorance there , but they just lack a little something that help them hold up in the mix. I don't know if you could compress them any more or anything but that may help? maybe not compressed enough?

[Armistice]

I really have nothing to nit.

Mix is great. All the sounds are really good.

I have to say, this is one of my favorites from you. Love the main chord progression/riff.

Thanks turtle... Apparently everyone else does though...

[Armistice]

Thanks gentlemen. The question as to where to sit the drums is always vexed for me, in this type of material anyway. I don't like them too far forward - and they're already more forward than the original mix... punk or rock this is not. Acoustic pop - so perhaps the drums tend to support rather than feature, is my way of thinking.

That said, I did a bit of forensic examining and I found some individual snare hits that probably needed to come up - back in the day I was probably more into trying to induce a sense of realism by varying the volumes more than I would now. I also found that in the noisier sections where there was no singing, the snare was a bit low.

Now I don't want you to think I wasn't aware of the volume swelling lots in the noisy bits - I was and had already done a lot towards matching the drums to it - see below - but the question is "Was it enough?" Anyway, I'm working on a new version but I want to really listen on a few different systems and send it to [mention]Bubba[/mention] as well for his take - and you're all not here for 12 hours now anyway, so I'll get it up here a little later on. I've done a little more volume enveloping in the noisy sections and a few other minor tweaks.

Out of curiosity I did a couple of renders to "see" how the waveform looked. First just the drums, then everything but the drums - so you can see I was definitely already ramping it up but perhaps more needs to be done.

JSTWDrums.PNG

JSTWNonDrums.PNG

[Armistice]

Okay - again, thanks for the feedback [mention]Greg_L[/mention], [mention]TripleM[/mention], [mention]WhiskeyJack[/mention], [mention]rayc[/mention] and [mention]musicturtle[/mention] and of course [mention]Bubba[/mention] who's been a great help off-board.

As per previous post I've done a bit of tweaking of the drums - hopefully this is closer to the mark...




Cheers

[JD01]

Ah, I didn't seen V4, so I did listen to the earlier one. Now I'm listening to V4, definitely sounds better.
While I didn't think the drums were bad on the earlier one they did sound far away compared to the rest of the band.
I recon you could add a touch more verb to the guitars to push them back a bit as they do sound very close - this might leave your vocal sounding really upfront though.

Or just leave this alone - there's nothing really wrong with it

[rayc]

The 1st chords seem quite loud - probably just the sudden, unannounced arrival.
Terrific song and capture.

[Greg_L]

Okay - again, thanks for the feedback @Greg_L, @TripleM, @WhiskeyJack, @rayc and @musicturtle and of course @Bubba who's been a great help off-board.

As per previous post I've done a bit of tweaking of the drums - hopefully this is closer to the mark...


11_Just Say The Word 2020 Remix v4.mp3

Cheers

I think that's better for sure. What I'm hearing now is that telltale printed in room sound on the drums that all sample drums seem to have. Particularly on the snare and in the overheads. Even if you bring them up front they still have that roomy sound burned into them. If you wanted to take this even further I'd suggest turning that crap off in the drum program, make the drums as dry as possible, and treat them with a separate, better stereo reverb. But honestly I also know that absolutely none of your listeners would notice the difference or care. So stick a fork in it, sounds good!

[Armistice]

I think that's actually me applying reverb via ReaVerb using one of those impulses [mention]Greg_L[/mention] - the samples are dead flat and the package has no effects. I did put more of it on the v4 mix.

What I don't know about mixing drum sounds could fill volumes. It was probably the one I had on the original and I just left it - but dialled it up a bit, or maybe I changed the impulse, I don't remember. More or less doing things at random and hoping they "work". Probably it's too big a room.

But yeah, you're right - no-one who actually is a listener will know. I might, on the next one, try something different re. the verb on the kit. Cheers

[Armistice]

The 1st chords seem quite loud - probably just the sudden, unannounced arrival.
Terrific song and capture.

Thanks ray - if you check the pic of the wav file you'll see it's not loud at all - perhaps just sudden...

[Armistice]

Ah, I didn't seen V4, so I did listen to the earlier one. Now I'm listening to V4, definitely sounds better.
While I didn't think the drums were bad on the earlier one they did sound far away compared to the rest of the band.
I recon you could add a touch more verb to the guitars to push them back a bit as they do sound very close - this might leave your vocal sounding really upfront though.

Or just leave this alone - there's nothing really wrong with it

Thanks - and I think I'm doing exactly that. Trust me, all our meagre fanbase loved the CD and no-one said "It's a bit middly ..." because they wouldn't know. I'm just doing this for the exercise and because I want to have better versions and to be able to give them to Richard as well.

Although perhaps we could reform for one new song, or a cover, and put the entire album out again as a special edition...

[TripleM]

Second mix is better. The drums are coming through now.

I would turn down the acoustic guitars just a bit. To me they're not quite far enough behind the vocal.

I'm listening on a different system this time. On this system the bass has some boomy low end. Nothing bad. But I think it could be tamed a bit.