Hey, it's a valid approach- your take on it did not sound anything like bad. I'm only saying that at least for me and Lee, what we got seemed like 'the worse' already, and screamed 'change me radically'. I didn't percieve that as mix decisions, it sounded to me like a relatively normal mix that had been dubbed onto cassettes 1000 times with the azimuth off. I understand that this changed it a lot, and if it was meant to sound like that, woopsy
I'm all the more interested to see what Bill does, now. Does he go minimalist and treat the presentation as a set of mix choices, or does he do what me and Lee did, decide that it's a drum machine, bass, DX7 or something and voice- that he knows what those sound like- and break out the chainsaws and oxyacetylene torches to render the thing in a wildly different way?
That's certainly what I was doing when I chose to EQ that radically (had to be 20 db of notch in a narrow spot in the midbass) and apply the expansion stuff. I was like 'this is a drum box, and a keyboard, and I know what this stuff sounds like' and I tried to dig that out from the mud of the source.
Makes me wonder what would happen if we got some other posters to try their hands on this. Would they try to smooth the grunge out of the existing presentation, or re-imagine it into something more characteristic of them? In particular I'm curious how it strikes Brad, because the way the mud is shoveled onto this, it's like the Anti-Brad, it really is. Not only is it massive mud and no definition, it's phasey as hell and just about the opposite of his sound in every way. What would he do? I could see his take being closer to Lee's than mine or yours (Lee got some good clarity there), but without anything comby about it- but some of that is in the recording itself and has to be removed. Hmmmm...
Bill? Same goes for you- are you preserving the presentation of this track like it was intentional, or are you treating it like it's covered with a ton of mud and making it strikingly different?