Several years ago I saw the Tedeschi Trucks Band for the first time and was impressed not so much by the technical chops of slide guitarist Derek Trucks but how the microtonal qualities of his incredible slide playing were not at all like your garden variety slide Blues, but some sort of otherworldly channeling of Blues, Country, Jazz and Eastern Indian music all at once. It seemed to me this wasn’t a person reeling through a list of hot licks in their head but a person that had music flowing through them completely out of their own head and present in the moment… I’m sure Mr. Trucks is like anyone and has good nights and bad nights but the night I saw them he was incandescent. Ever since that night I had a song title revolving in my head called “Speak Through Me” and I’d couch doodle with my acoustic guitar and some repeating ideas would keep bubbling up but not like the more linear song ideas that usually happen. My son was home for a few days so we went out to the Studio and jammed and showed him some of the disjointed ideas and he followed along on drums and then it sat on the hard drive for a couple of years until I recently revisited it and decided to finish it, it’s not really a song as much as an musical letter to the ideal of letting things flow and see if the music will play you. I’m not going say I fully achieved that or that it is on any level anything like what what Derek Trucks is capable of but for me the reaching alone was a worthwhile exercise.
Finished in Ardour 8.2.5, Connor on drums and me on everything else, guitars are a Baritone Telecaster and a custom Baritone acoustic both made by a luthier friend of mine. All electric guitars were tracked through a Strymon Iridium.
I think it’s a nice melody, but to my ears it’s so drowned under the bass that I almost don’t hear it anymore (aka “muddiness”).
Try to turn down the volume of the bass track, at least 6dB I’d say, maybe even more.
I’m assuming that it’s really the bass where the build-up around 150Hz comes from.
You might also want to check other instruments if there’s anything else “mudding” around there…
PS: feel free to send me the Ardour project of this track over to the shared folder link I sent you recently. I’d be happy to try a remix on it and share back my insights…
Yes, there are a few contributing factors to the bass, the song is in baritone tuning B-B so a lot of low notes below “E”, The song is almost all toms especially the floor Tom and it’s a big kit with an 18" floor Tom and I love big ringy toms. I also played the bass track with my fingers so with the B tuning it all piles up…
That said I did take some measures already, I highpassed the bass at 150Hz, I made a 4 dB cut at 200Hz with a pretty wide Q on the master bus and in the organic tom-heavy context of the song I’m OK with it being more bassy than some might be comfortable with… That said, this will be going on a future album project and this WIP post will likely see some further revisions, my guess is simply more attention to rolling off the floor tom would probably address a lot of it. To be honest I like the subsonic funk soup during the guitar solo, it’s a bit primordial…lol. If I get in over my head I may indeed take you up on your offer!
*EDIT I took your valid suggestions into consideration did put up a new mix with a tightened up floor tom and a deeper EQ cut, the EQ FFT display was showing some pretty strong frequencies at 180-230 Hz so I cut about 6db there… I think beyond that we’re getting into opinion territory, I like soul, funk, blues and roots records from the late 60’s and early 70’s. I’ve never really preferred production values from the 80’s onward (of course there are multiple exceptions like classical and jazz) fat saturated tape mixes are a happy place to my ears and I produce to please myself (it seems few others will listen anyway). Metal has angles, Roots music has curves…
