Go for vibe
I just finished mastering a really excellent record for an artist friend from Los Angeles. He and his wife made this retro-futuristic album of 50s-60s soul covers; I’ll post about it when it’s out, it’s wonderful.
There was one song that he asked to redo the mix for after having heard the master, and part of the redo was that they swapped back in a previous vocal take, which they’d preferred but which they’d set aside for fear it might have a little distortion on it.
My personal thought on this is that you’ve mostly always gotta go for the vibe, even if there’s distortion. Distortion is after all the sound of things stretching a little bit past their safe zone … which is not not always a terrible place to be with a vocal performance!
I had the most freeing experience a couple of records ago. I mixed this (fantastic, heavy, angry, propulsive, mesmerizing) record for this postpunk band out of Boise. They did the recording themselves, and then the drummer did some preliminary mixing — kind of basically getting it to the best place he could, as a talented amateur — and then I walked them through exporting all the individual tracks out of Logic with the plugins baked in. So that I had no choice in mixing but to start from whatever choices they’d made, you know? I like to start with what the artist was finding inspiring.
And: they had chosen SO MUCH DISTORTION on the vocals 😂 So I just had to work with it! And it was really good for me. It reminded me that I have the option to feel much less precious about distortion on the vocals. There are ways to shape it until it works, you know?
Distortion is instant vibe — jamie
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