Opinions on vocal house remix

[smyrf]

Hi everyone,

As my first post on this fine forum, I thought I'd post up a remix I recently did of a tune I recorded a while back on a very limited setup:

smyrf's sounds on SoundCloud - Create, record and share your sounds for free

Any feedback / tips on mixing/arrangement/artistic aspects more than welcome!

Thanks in advance... been following the site for a short while now and impressed at the wealth (and quality) of information to be found here!

[Atlantis_AR]

I'm unsure whether to give feedback on this as it's not really my area of expertise. You've done a decent amount of work getting it this far, but the overall sound is still very cheap. The kick isn't the best-sounding (I notice the main kick is different from the intro kick though, but the same still applies) and the hat sounds dry and with too much bass. Same with the clap. The bassline sounds thin but does work. The rhythm guitar is where things finally start to spice up, though it does tend to get a bit repetative. The vocal has too much bass in it - high-pass it off. The synth at 1:50 is again a welcome addition because it doesn't sound so dry. You should be able to sweeten the highs a bit too by boosting here and there and making things sparkle more, and try adding some more reverb too.

Lastly, there's no need for mastering just yet so reduce the master volume a bit and keep the dynamics open.

[smyrf]

Thanks for your comments. I should probably point out that I'm an amateur in this game and this represents my first attempt at something of this level, so any such feedback is appreciated and helpful.

I did actually have a high-pass on the vocals but probably not to a high-enough frequency - I tried increasing it now and agree it not only clears up the mix but makes the vocals themselves less harsh. Funnily enough the hats did actually have an hpf at somewhere around 200hz... though the idea with the drums was to have a slight acoustic feel, hence the combined acoustic+electronic kick (I used the acoustic bd only for the first few bars in the intro). Clap was also a combination of 3 samples for that "meaty" sound which I used for effect; I generally try to avoid stock drum patches! But my sample library is also admittedly old and bad quality (many 8-bit samples in there from my old "tracking" days!)

Also the reason for dynamics and eq on the master channel - I don't see this tune going the pro ME route any time soon so just wanted to get a decently-sounding tune out there.

Advice taken onboard regardless