Saad album finished + glowing Amnplify review
I recently finished mixing a contemporary Pop project for Sydney singer-songwriter, SaaD, aka Dylan Regtop.
The influences and brief for the overall album sound contained references such as Bon Iver, S.Carey and the like.
Challenges with the record included the artist’s desire to have drums and bass that could hardly be heard, yet still desiring a balanced mix, ie not too top heavy. As a result, I used a lot of very processed lo fi drums, and bass content, often stemming out to a cassette player and back into the DAW to achieve murkier sounds that whilst having more harmonics, had less attack and audibility within the mix.
The album was a pleasure to work on, and the brief precise. However, the vocals were by no means an easy mix. The takes were great, but the vocalist is quite sibilant, which when combined with the harsh top end of their mic, Rhodes NT2A, was hard to control in the mix. Sibilance had to therefore be dealt with in multiple stages, those including tape to mellow the high frequencies, standard de-essers, Pro Q3 dynamic EQ and F6’s dynamic EQ.
Another production journey that further related to the vocal, was the presence of mouth clicks, through out each track. The Rhodes’ brittle top end once again had any mouth noise unpleasantly emphasised, but through treatment by Izotope’s RX, we were able to de-click the vocals with a great outcome. Note a forth coming YouTube tutorial will be coming on RX and de-click vocals.
Finally, post the production journey, some positive reviews are starting to come in.
Amnplify comment;
“musically, the album is a pastiche of atmospheric genre pieces given depth by Regtop’s extraordinary ability to create sparse, but haunting soundscapes.”
Further, it seems we achieved the production brief, Amnplify comment,
“it’s tempting to draw comparisons to something like Bon Iver or Sigur Ros, though even those records are more akin to conventional structure than the individual pieces on SaaD. Sonically there are similarities to some sod ven stuff, perhaps even Beta Radio, but even then the sparsity of this album is probably beyond the reach of both of those acts.”
