IMP 14- Crit Or Die!
First, some ones I'll skip 'cos of not following the rules exactly- save me the trouble of actually doing a crit.
IMP14_audio_geek: wrong bit rate, you gotta use what J says, so we all suffer alike
IMP14-singsing: ditto, not the right bit rate. These were part of the rules and changing that will make the entry sound different from everyone else's.
IMP_14-JUST GO (blloyd): spaces in the filename! Seems to have downloaded OK, but it does say no spaces. I presume there can be file handling problems in some cases with spaces. This is waaaaay more of a technicality, but I'm so slammed for time I'm going to weasel out of critting the entry on that basis
Now on to the crits themselves...
IMP_14_Jason_Thompson: Snarly guitars. I like how they're voiced, and the track swings. Drums have a neat thump and pop. All in all this is very likeable
IMP-14_Ryst: I'm totally thinking hair metal here. Lots of hairspray on the guitars, lots of fog machines and red spotlights.
IMP14_-_iCombsMix: it's big but sort of dissipated? Nothing is remotely upfront. I can't get into this song much when it sits back. Actually no matter what the music, I want SOMETHING to be upfront and commanding attention. I'm really missing somebody jumping forward and being the star. On the bright side a neat guitar sweep jumped out a bit
IMP14_briefcasemanx: OK, here's the opposite. Everything's a bit too much upfront, I want more space for the music to move, it's like it's crammed into a phonebooth. I do like how the vocals are squeezing to the front.
IMP14_ChrisJ: next time we take your EQs away! Fuck you all, I still like the obnoxious lead guitar
It's amazing how much it can hurt some people without being that much more loud than everything else- it does sound like it's in a tin can tho. Oops
so I concede, it was just wrong.
imp14_darkhorseporter: Wow, this is pretty brite. DAMN is it brite. My speakers don't tend to emphasis the bright much at the moment, so the fact that this is overwhelmingly bright is ominous. Lead guitar sounds kind of like mine
nice use of verbs tho
IMP14_DevinK_03: Wildly out of step with modern mix sounds
now, that understood, this sounds kinda cool. It's hard to get used to, and I'm a big classic vinyl record fan so I should be all over this stuff. The guitars sit way back like it was Journey. Glossy cymbals. I just dunno. It's bringing out the things about the track I'm not so into.
imp14_HLabb: Ok, now THAT is the way to do the lead guitar. I stand corrected. Nothing else is really jumping out at me as something that must be listened to, though- it's like a lot of good sounds that don't add up into a killer song perhaps because it's not that much of a killer song
I think this one needs more than good sounds, perhaps why I threw in some AWFUL sounds in an attempt to fake excitement
imp14_macbraddy: Hey, really good balance! hey, really good impact! This is the metalhead mix, no? It's a little brite but I'm still liking it, it's actually making me want to hear where the song goes. I wonder how much is about how bombastic this is, because this is really over the top. The only thing really tiring me is that half-open hihat. Also the voices are a bit too much like they're singing through cardboard boxes until the end chorus, but the thing is, it was working to make me want to hear more, for some Godforsaken reason. Probably the same stuff with me and the ugly guitar- searing midrange sounds making it sound like it's projecting more. All in all, I think this one's a winner. WELL DONE.
IMP14_mcsnare: Immediately more professional-sounding than most. It's not lighting me up like macbraddy's amazing entry, though, I think because it's more faithful to the sort of laid back energy coming off the track. It's authoritative but boring. All the sounds are apparently exactly as God intended them, but there's not enough wrong to make it compelling. It makes me like the mixer but NOT the band. That's a pretty serious fault from such an otherwise stellar entry. Ask yourself, how could this be more compelling through some element being really obnoxious? What would make the band/song sound less predictable and on rails? I'm convinced that's part of what macbraddy did- he had everything more angular and edgy, and all the voices sounded like they were screaming, at the high cost of making them sound really weird.
IMP14_Soul_Fire_Mix: Raucous! This time it's the guitars which are obnoxious. I think there are a lot of elements here which don't sound that professional, but it hints at being interesting. I guess the guitars are distracting, so crunchy and loud. Vocals feel pretty strong, bright spotlight on those guys while every guitar has THREE bright spotlights on it...
IMP14-ATOR: Big and wide- so much so that somehow I'm still waiting for the main part of the song to kick in. I'm looking for something- probably just my mid-happiness- the body of the song feels empty except for the vocals. I feel like the guitars aren't strong enough to carry this one. The drums are just killing them, it's like they're a guitar pad.
IMP14-Baddo: Another one where something is a little empty. I think I get that feeling when everything's distant and laid back but there are loud cymbals and sibilance- also I'm beginning to get tired of attacky drums, I'm starting to hate that 'tok' feel of closemiked but unbutchered drums.
imp14-maxim: OK, time to study mcsnare... this has just got too much buried stuff. The primary problem is how the track fills up space- it mostly doesn't, stuff comes from really far back, including some pretty major dynamic hits. It sounds like an electronica mix or something ambient- it doesn't really work in the genre the music is in to have the biggest things being the piano and chorus vocals. Sorry, no worky, even if the piano part is cool- even if the straight rock approach isn't that hot either. It just really needs to be big in different places than it is.
IMP14-Osumosan: okay, how about it needs to be freaking smaller? This isn't making it, and the reason is: even though it's producing a big, exploding, brutal sound, it's the MIX which is doing the bigness and exploding. You gotta make it sound more like the musicians are doing the exploding. It's compression swings going boom, it's really distracting. I think when the 2-buss morphs and pumps THAT much it's hard to even hear the music happening. Mix is screaming 'my hed is pastede on yay'.
IMP14AdamMiller: Here we have boxy and solid, a sense of physicality. Actually it's kinda working for me... I'm not thrilled with the band but I do want to listen some more. It seems like part of that is the way the low end is kicking. Do we have an arrangement change to something that isn't as good as the original song was? It sort of went motoring on when I expected it to throw in a change. Hmmm. This song doesn't need help motoring on
boy, it does make me want to keep listening though. Maybe it's because of how well it's balanced in the lows and low mids? I don't even know what it is, but sump'm worked.
IMP14BOEDOCONSTRICTORMIX: Upfront and vivid as hell- loads of clarity on everything, but that isn't making me want to hear more. It makes you wonder. Maybe I'm just hating everything that has treble?
more like, this is a sound picture that's very arbitrary. Hats are super bright and in front of everything else, the kick drum swings a lot of bass but the guitars are a wash, the bass guitar seems to drone (probably because it is)... there's just not enough of a sense of reality here for me to latch onto it. Like, that kick drum can't exist in the same room as that snare because they just act too differently, same as the hats, the guitars aren't in the same world as the vox... I just think this is an awfully hard song to make compelling and this mix lost me through relying on raw sounds instead of the ensemble.
IMP14Fantomas: Wow, deep man
if you took away all the cymbals this mix would be about half a mile away. I think that's a thing that always loses me, hearing murk combined with the 'sss sss sss sss' of cymbals. No likey, sorry. What would you be forced to do if you didn't have the cymbals there to fill up high end? Wouldn't it start to seem a little deep and murky?
imp14JHall: At last we can work out on J
yeah, this ain't finished, and this is why: sounds are coherent and all there, but they're not gelling. Sometimes the snare feels very weak, sometimes the guitars feel stuck on- I like how central the vocals are, but there's an unconnected feeling to everything. Not all the time, sometimes it's very 'there' but what makes it feel like the faders up mix it is, is inconsistency, the way that sometimes stuff hits and sometimes it fluffs. The sound treatments are all good and solid but they don't always add up. I think sometimes we do that with overkill (macbraddy!) and sometimes we're not concerned with it at all, but here we get to hear J, who normally gets stuff to add up and gel, NOT doing it due to not being finished. That makes it an interesting study- thanks J for having the balls to put up a stage of your work we normally would never hear
IMP14southboundlocoprint1: hey, compelling vocals! The song itself just feels generically big, perhaps because of the distortions of image I talked about with Boedo's, but for some reason the vocals are really clicking on this one. I wonder how much of that has to do with the radical hard panning? For some reason when the guy's yelling out of the side speaker, he feels so very immediate. I'd be interested to know the signal chain on the verse vocals in this mix. Part of it is surely how hot the vox are, because they're REALLY REALLY hot. If everything was as hot, the mix would suck, but instead it's a loud mix in which the vocals just blow everything else away...
M_Carter-IMP14: Pretty soft, what's it doing with the additional dynamics it gets? One thing is, it's nailing a really hot backbeat, I'm liking the feel of this snare. It's bugging me how nothing else is keeping up with the snare. The guitars are like pads again, the vocals are not aggressive. Also it keeps feeling like there are arrangement changes although I can't place exactly what they are. Things like the verby chorus gang vocals being more present than the guitars tend to throw me.
So this was a bitchy crit, but I've been too stressed out, so take it all with a grain of salt and take what you need, ignore everything else. I'm sort of using what I hear to work out HOW I hear and WHY I do some of the things I try and fail to do
for that reason, some of my reactions will be 'this sucks' because it sucks for ME and how I hear. YMMV.