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River Deep Mountain High
Date: February 2022
Band: Recover (Originally performed byTina Turner)
Songwriters: Phil Spector, Jeff Barry, and Ellie Greenwich
Style: Pop
Tempo: 170
This mix was an obligatory assignment from Sound Education Nederland.
Lyrics
See [here]
Recording
This song was recorded at Trypoul Recording Studios (Neerkant, the Netherlands’; www.trypoul.nl) by Hendrikus Nijhof, Jeroen Wolff, Antoine van Kampen, and Dirk Joosten (studio ownder). See also [here].
Mixing and Mastering
Mixing and pre-mastering (loudness normalization and meta-data) was done in Cubase Pro 11 and WaveLab Pro 11 by Antoine van Kampen using plugins from mainly Waves, SoundToys, and Fabfilter. For mastering, for the initial mix, I used the Weiss DS1-MK3 compressor (Softube), the Weiss MM-1 Maximizer (Softube), Fabfilter Q-3, and Waves L1 for dithering. For the alternative mix I used the bx_digital V3 M/S EQ (Brainworkx), Unisum compressor (Tone Projects), TDR Limiter 6 GE (Tokyo Dawn Records), and Lin Dither (Steinberg).
Special thanks to Jeffrey Jansen and Karel Bravenboer for providing feedback on the initial mix. Below an impression of the project in Cubase.
Mixing challenges and evaluation
A selection of mixing challenges
Vocals
- Apart from the ‘usual’ processing (i.e., compression, eq, tuning) it turned out that the choice for reverb was critical. I tried many different reverbs and delays during the mixing process before finally settling for the one you now hear in the mix.
- I still find the vocals little bit harsh now and then. I think this is due to the microphone choice used for recording, and I found it difficult to improve during the mixing. In addition, there is a small part in the final mix in which the vocals sound hollow. Not sure what is causing this.
Drums
- I used parallel compression on the complete drum kit
- Again, I found it difficult to balance the overheads, but in the end it worked out well. However, I left out the room microphones since I could not find a proper use for them without breaking the mix.
- The kick posed the largest challenge. We used three microphones during recording (in, out, and sub) but I couldn’t manage to get a descent sound out of it. Therefore, I eventually replaced the kick with a sample from Groove Agent (Steinberg). Still added some additional high, for the click, in the kick.
- The mic’ing of the drumkit was not optimal resulting in a fair amount of crosstalk in the hihat and snare microphone. I could account for this in part by some high-pass filtering on the hi-hat. For the snare I never succeeded to get it in a way I wanted but in the mix it sounds ok. In principle, I could also have replaced the snare with a sample, but this would have required a lot of work due to the crosstalk.
Bass
- I used both the DI and Amped signal but didn’t do much processing on the bass. Mainly, I used the Waves bass rider and a compressor to level out the bass.
Guitar
- The guitar was recorded using the DI, close mic’ing, and a microphone at some distance from the amplifier. I directly abandoned this last mic since it sounded too roomy. The final guitar sound is a combination of the close mic recording and the DI on which I used Amplitube 5.
- The guitar is mainly panned to the left but I used as a delay with a delay time of 22 ms (Haas effect) on the right channel to make it wider.
Piano
- Not much processing needed. However, I edited the recording to get rid of a few glitches.
Horn section
-
- It was difficult to get them good sounding in the mix. Might be in part due to the recording (and the long notes played that lack sufficient high and power). However, might also be my lack of skills. I tried many different things to process the recordings. I also tried to replace the horns with samples (Horn section from Native Instruments) but none of this was really a success. In the end I settled for the raw recordings with very little processing.
- After note: after producing the final mix and master, I tried some parallel distortion. This improved the sound.
In addition to this there were many many details to be taken care of. One of them being several attempts to make the bridge sufficiently interesting.
Personally, I would have reduced the level of the lead vocal with a few dB to have the vocal in the mix instead of on top of the mix. In addition, I would have made the guitar far less crunchy. The current choices also sound good and were the final decisions made by Recover.
Alternative mix
For the fun of it, I made an alternative mix with additional backing vocals, guitar, and Hammond. Bas played the first few guitar riffs, while Bart did the remaining part. Ana provided some interesting background vocals to add further power to the existing bvoc’s. Thanks to you all! Still open for improvement but I was kind of done with this song. Perhaps I will return to it in some weeks. Nevertheless, you find the result below.
Guitar riffs: Bas van Kampen, Bart Dietvorst (session guitarist; youtube; spotify; the Netherlands),
Backing vocals: Ana Pshokina (session vocalist; instagram; youtube; Ukraine)
Hammond: Antoine van Kampen.
Final mix and master
The raw recording:
The final mix:
The final master:
The final master of the alternative mix:
Master by Laurens van Oers (Obsidian Mastering)
Feedback
From Sound Education Nederland:
Audio tracks
The raw recordings, the mix, and the WaveLab montage, and the master can be downloaded from dropbox.
License
The copyright of this song is owned by Philles (US 1966) London (Europe) A&M (US 1969). See also [here].
Software
Last updated on May 17th, 2022 at 03:34 pm
