Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
|
Posted: Feb. 01 2014, 18:10 |
|
Quote (mindphaser @ Oct. 07 2013, 11:03) | I quite like those mixes but like in most of the other new mixes I get the impression again that Mr Oldfield seems to have lost his "good ear" for sound balance somehow. At least to my ears the main guitar solo in Moonlight Shadow is far too loud which, together with the abrupt ending, gives at least the last minute of the otherwise very nice and smooth mix quite an "amateurish" touch. |
It's of course hard to be sure about these things without actually sitting in Mike's chair, but there are things about the way his monitors are set up which really make me wonder how accurate a picture he's getting of what's going on in his mixes. In relation to Moonlight Shadow, I wonder if the fact he's got his centre speaker higher than the others has given him an inaccurate midrange response, leading to him thinking that guitar solo wasn't as far forward as it is. I think he's also possibly missed a trick there, in that keeping the vocals in the centre speaker then placing the guitar solo in the phantom centre between from L-R would have helped stop them conflicting when they're intertwining with each other towards the end. I think the centre speaker is a really tricky one in 5.1 music mixes anyway, people often have them optimised for film dialogue, so they're turned up louder than the others, and sometimes they're something which has been chosen because it fits under the TV rather than that its sound blends well with the others...so putting something like a loud guitar solo in there is taking a big risk, really!
I think it's a great shame there seems to be nobody there to say "That's a great first try, Mike, but can we just go back and have another look at a few things?", because I think it's something which everyone needs if they're going to produce high quality products. It's just too easy to get tired and overwhelmed without even fully realising it, and that's when things start getting missed, and questionable decisions start getting made.
Mike's music, with its many layers, is really well suited to being mixed in 5.1, but I think there's a danger of these mixes becoming less than the essential listening which I'd hope Mike wants them to be.
|