For this production analysis I chose a song that I discovered fairly recently called "Believe it or Not" by The Royston Club. They're an indie band out of the UK. The specific version of this song is taken from their debut album "Shaking Hips and Crashing Cars", note that the single version of the song is an earlier recording and thus has different mastering than the album version.
Just off of a quick listen I can tell that there is some interesting mixing going on here. The space between the instruments isn't exactly consistent. I mean that during the verses and the bridge the instruments sound closer together, but during the chorus they sound more like a real band layout would sound where you get the full stereo audio with one guitar in each ear (or maybe just one guitar with a chorus effect on it). I made a perceived space graph based off of the chorus mastering since I believe it is more accurate to how the song was actually recorded.
As you can see, the vocalist is in front, with the guitars panned to each side with the background vocals, bass guitar, and drums in the back. However, I do know that the vocalist for the Royston Club plays the lead guitar, and so I think that the panning is actually just the rhythm guitar mixed to stereo in both ears. This is because when you heard the lead guitar in the verses, its at about the same position that the vocals are. The BG Vocals and Bass Guitar are interchangeable since the Bassist is also the background vocalist, but the drums are slightly further out of the way as to not overpower the rest of the instruments. I was at a show last night and despite being behind the singer, the drums were still very overpowering because of how close he was to the front.
For the actual processing done to the instruments, I think that it is very minimal. It is of course noticeably different from the original single version, but that could be due to the slightly different arrangement and recording quality. There is definitely a hint of reverb added to both the Lead and Background vocals, which I think is pretty standard in most vocal music, I personally always add reverb to my vocals. There might be some slight EQ used, I think the Vocals, Guitar, and Bass all sound a bit crispier than they would if heard live, so they've probably added a small boost to the high end. The drums though I think have actually be run trough a bit of a lowpass filter, not a very strong one because you can still hear the high end but I can make out more of the lower sound than high sound in the drums. Finally, it is a bit difficult to tell if there was compression added intentionally or if it is just the standard YouTube compression present on any video, but it is there. Outside of the YouTube compression, if they did apply some, it would probably have been very slight to make the instruments kind of blend together better. I'm not sure how to explain the technical effects of compression, I'm only familiar with how it sounds when I use it so I'm just applying that to this song, but you can certainly hear some of it in larger sections of the song like the chorus.
Overall, I think the mixing is done really well, and I'm actually all for the more centered and compressed sound of indie rock. I'm a big fan of impactful drums that cut through the mix, and I think compression makes that specific sound clearer. I'm not sure how to describe it exactly, but other artists like The Rare Occasions or Jimmy Eat World have a similar mix, and I think its especially present in 90s and 00s indie and pop rock. All the sounds are clearly heard here, and I love the power of the guitar especially in the chorus. The panning just makes the sound feel are lot bigger, and I'm noticing now that a lot of other rock music I like uses the same kind of sound.
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