After receiving back the first mastered version of "Aloud" from John at Spleenless Mastering, I have made the somewhat unexpected decision to go back a step and revisit the mix. Somewhere during the transition from the final mix that Nadim and I settled on in our last mixing session to the version Nadim produced without buss compression for John, the balance of the song got totally thrown off. I think compensatory adjustments were made when the compression was removed and some of them ended up actually weakening the song. The primary difference was an increase in overall level for the guitars. This had the unfortunate effect of burying the vocals (especially during the chorus, where they were already on the low side) and swallowing a lot of the sustain on the drums, making them sound flimsy. Going back to the original final mix, I was surprised at how much more propulsive it felt, but after conducting comparisons with some of other driving rock music I own it's become clear that prominent drums and bass and fairly understated guitars are commonplace for that style of music. You really need that strong rhythmic underpinning to be prominent for the song to hit hard. The plus side of all this is that I will get to revisit the mix and implement a few needed changes, like an increase in volume for a couple guitar riffs and perhaps some changes to the processing of the vocals.
All in all I feel like I'm still on the right track here, it's just going to take some extra time to get things right. This is very much a learning experience and one that will immediately inform the other upcoming recordings. For one thing, I'm going to give myself a buffer of a week or two from the time the next song is "finished" before I send it out for mastering, in case I have second thoughts about a particular decision.
This stuff is hard!
-T
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