Sept 27th 2018
A disclaimer
There are many great videos dropping about referencing and side chaining vocal effects. Search YouTube and watch the ones that have most views first. That's what I do. Glean the stuff you need. Apply it. Rinse and repeat.
Sick:
I have been whacked by a virus or something cold-like for about a week. This has brought about overdoses of tea and tons of bed rest. As the fever began to let go, I started mixing again - the never ending guinea pig song, The Vine.
Referencing
Because I sit and eventually get deaf to my own mixing weaknesses while in my studio cave, I need to constantly compare my tracks with the hits w/i my genre to see if I am going in the right direction. The Vine has, over time, morphed into a whole new time of song (bigger arrangement) and I needed to find a more fitting reference song in order to check if I'm doing this right. There really are a lot of subjective ideas in the referencing process. Just the choice of reference song says something about what I want my song to sound like. I could have had just me and a guitar and been done with this album a year ago. Great things take time. Looking back, I think this is the only way to go. The lyrics are worth the arrangement.
I am not a piano player, didn't have money to hire one and was forced to create the piano all by myself which made getting every chord and note right. Referencing helped me see where I could simply and have greater effect.
I bought the song "I Won't Let You Go " by Switchfoot on iTunes, and uploaded it into my MagicA/B plugin at the end of my mixing chain.
Wow!
I reopened some guidelines and tips I've downloaded from various mixing gurus such as David Glenn and studied them. I added each step as things to do on my The Vine Mix List in my Wunderlist app so I wouldn't forget to compare them. Aside from frequency spectrum and sonic consistency, things such as internal contrast, wideness and emotion ate good things to check. See the links, David Glenn etc. below.
In the above video he explains how to go from fry vocal to amazing vocal and using side chain compression to brake the echoes so that they are only heard in the silent areas between words. This is important to master if you are going to avoid muddiness and overlapping in a mix.
References
David Glenn
Links:
The video at the top: https://youtu.be/GIcuVlOQ3SQ