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BroKen_H

BroKen_H

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Okay, quick listen for anyone that would. This one gave me fits, but I finally got the volume up to the rest of my songs. Wanted it to hit hard and then drop dramatically and found it was really hard to get the limiter to leave the quiet parts alone enough to do what I wanted. I tried to get a washy vocal that was still distinct. Let me know if the words are not understandable. Lots of tracks on this monster...tried my best to make everything have it's own space.

Sorry, Mastered only. Too much going on to make the mix master the way I wanted this to sound...



The original mix:


The partially mastered:
 
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It's quite loud...at least on my headphonesThe lead vocals are clear enough on the softer parts, but tend to become just "sound" in the louder parts - almost like a sax or something.
The rest sounds good to me - lots of variety in the arrangement which is cool :)
 
Mastered only? That's backwards. Get your mix solid first, Then and only then worry about mastering. "Mix-mastering" is inherently a bad idea. It makes it hard for you or the people commenting to distinguish problems in the mix from problems caused by the crap on the master bus, and leads to wasted time and frustration. Don't even worry about volume at this stage. Just get it sounding good first.

Sorry to have to be blunt: this isn't sounding good. There's so much going on that is harsh, muddy, boxy, and other adjectives besides. Your vocal is getting masked. I'm not hearing your lyrics clearly. Things that ought to be effects like that chirping and tweating take center stage. Drums are too low, rhythm guitar is way too loud, everything is straight up the middle, there's little if any width or depth in the mix. Some of that harshness and unpleasantness could be coming from your attempt to boost the volume on the master bus, or it could be in the mix, or both--as I said above, it's hard to diagnose. I would strip this right back to the raw tracks and start over.
 
Robus said:
Mastered only? That's backwards. Get your mix solid first, Then and only then worry about mastering. "Mix-mastering" is inherently a bad idea. It makes it hard for you or the people commenting to distinguish problems in the mix from problems caused by the crap on the master bus, and leads to wasted time and frustration. Don't even worry about volume at this stage. Just get it sounding good first.

Sorry to have to be blunt: this isn't sounding good. There's so much going on that is harsh, muddy, boxy, and other adjectives besides. Your vocal is getting masked. I'm not hearing your lyrics clearly. Things that ought to be effects like that chirping and tweating take center stage. Drums are too low, rhythm guitar is way too loud, everything is straight up the middle, there's little if any width or depth in the mix. Some of that harshness and unpleasantness could be coming from your attempt to boost the volume on the master bus, or it could be in the mix, or both--as I said above, it's hard to diagnose. I would strip this right back to the raw tracks and start over.
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I have to disagree with a lot of this.... I won't get into details but find the opposite in the case of many of your issues.
 
I probably should have said, the acoustic parts sound much closer than the heavier parts of the song.
 
I think the song has a very ambitious objective. I like the feel and where you are going with it. I really think you are letting your plug ins kill your mixes.

I suggest using just basics. Get your effects set, put a simple EQ and a limiter on your master track nothing more. No presets, nothing, everything from scratch. Keep EQ and limiter off until you get your mix. Then, once set, kick on your EQ and limiter and tweak it. If you find your EQ is being used too much, kill it and go find the problems. Go back, try it again, your EQ should just be making minor final mix adjustments.

I am not the mix master and I know there are far better ways, but for us who are just trying to get a "decent" mix, I think this would work well for you.

Stay away form the fancy plug ins for a bit. I am pretty sure you know enough to trust your knowledge a little bit.

I hope I wasn't being too much a jerk, but I really feel you know how to mix and get a decent master. But you are letting the plugins make you second guess yourself. IMO.
 
I felt like this was overcompressed and much of the power the track has is lost because of the limiter you added. I think you'd probably get the mix closer to what you want if you try to get the levels right using your faders and automation rather than using the limiter. It may just be my preference but the drums are buried while the acoustic guitars are a little too loud. I really enjoyed the song and structure but the overlimiting is not doing your mix favors.
 
BH, if my comments were too harsh, I apologize. I'll give another listen tomorrow and see if I'm hearing it differently.
 
Okay, I'll try to hit this from the top.

Ido: Thanks for the positives. You've hit the vocal on the head. That's what I'm trying for. I want the vocal to be a "pad" that you can understand the lyric from. If you can understand the words, I have what I'm after.

Robus: I have a mix that is in REALLY good shape. Had to be for this to work. Then when I mastered it, I had to hack it up. The softer parts had to be mastered differently from the hard parts and still gel as a whole, but it's over limited at this point because of the way it needs to fit back together...If I posted the mix, you'd be all over it because the acoustic parts are barely audible...doesn't work with the limiting any other way. I considered making this thing 4 pieces and running different limiting...hey, with automation, that could work. Run different limiting on the different parts so the loud is less limited (and therefore less stressed and flattened) and the acoustic parts can stay where they are (but come back up). I want loud and in your face followed by extreme serene. That's the goal!

DM60: The only thing on my master bus extra above your recommendation is a glue compressor running 1.1:1 and barely moving the needle. The acoustic parts are sounding pretty much like I want them (I'd honestly like them quieter and more dynamic), but I'm having a hard time getting the electric parts to gel RIGHT when I push them. The song is really 4 songs patched together into this one, so the mix is really odd. I've got a lot of bass and drums (during the acoustic parts) that are -16 - -20 dB lower than the electric parts. So making the two levels gel with a limiter engaged required some "out of the box" thinking, which is why there's no mix without mastering.
The bass is what it's been through the entire project. Same set up all the way through. Some songs add a piano mirror, and some (like this one) have a sub running underneath to give it more bottom. Voice is straight up with my one plug on it plus compressor. Most of those tracks don't have anything more than high pass. Not even EQ. I'm doing a bit of EQ at the bus level to mask the limiter's push...apparently not enough.

musicgeekandlvr: You are absolutely correct. I had to push the limiter to 10.6dB (whereas most of my tracks run between 3dB and 5dB to get the same loudness my other tracks have. It is WAY overlimited...and therein lies the rub. I'm literally trying to use the same limiter across three completely different tasks in the same song. This IS what sounded best...

Robus and Dave: I'm pretty thick skinned. I come here to get help, not to get hurt. My feelings come second to my music... :)

Okay, I'm going to try to automate the limiter...drop it back a lot to begin with and try dropping it out altogether during the acoustic parts so they are much more dynamic. We'll see how that comes out.
 
It seems like "don't use compression and limiting" has become the new "use real valve amps turned up loud otherwise you suck".

Fuck it - one fascist overlord goes away, other ones try to take his place. :D :D
 
Bubba, that's very funny to me, because this song uses a real valve amp (4 times) turned up as loud as it can go...I've just gone a bit overboard on the limiting because I was trying to get to the same levels as other songs, and I need more less of it...:)
 
Okay, before we go too far on the comments, let me get the new versions uploaded and ready. Went back to the good mix and tried my idea of automating the limiter (but backed off from +9.6dB to +5.2dB. Let's see how those changes affect the effects...
 
Okay, here we go. The unmastered:



And the mastered (partially). Automated the limiter so it bypasses during the acoustic parts and dropped it back a bunch during the electric parts, and a little more even, at the end.



I'm not getting the droning vocal with this, but at least it has some dynamics left...:)
 
Bubba po said:
It seems like "don't use compression and limiting" has become the new "use real valve amps turned up loud otherwise you suck".

Fuck it - one fascist overlord goes away, other ones try to take his place. :D :D
Click to expand...

I misunderstood what BH said he was doing, so there is that. The argument I would make is that mixing comes first, followed by mastering. It's too easy to slap some mastering plugin on the mix bus during the mix process to make it louder. Fine. If it sounds good nobody will say a word. But if it doesn't sound good, the problem is that much harder to diagnose and fix. That harshness on that I think I hear on the vocal, is it a mix issue or a mastering one?

BTW BH, is that your AC15? Are you liking it? It sounds nothing like those early clips you posted in May.

Ps. I see you just posted the unmastered mix. I'm really curious to the listen.
 
The Vox is still giving good tones, but I'm still playing with miking positions. What you're listening to is from 1" into the speaker at 12 o'clock with the master cranked and 4 different settings on the top boost--two with the new LP and two with my Mockingbird. I think I need more meat (closer to the cap). They sound okay, but not what I'm looking for, and certainly not what you hear in the room. It is giving me quite a lot of practice time with the guitars...lol
 
If by mean you mean you want a fatter tone, try moving it farther away from the cap. I liked the tone of that amp but the tube rattle was a deal breaker. Glad yours is working out for you.

The mix sounds pretty good. I think the harshness is down to the mastering.
 
Okay, I'll lift it up. There's only about the width of the 57 until I'm miking the wood of the cab... My problems with the amp have always been with "too bright". Can't seem to get my 57 to pick up the "balls" of the thing. Also considering buying some kind of diode overdrive, like a TS, and see if I can get it to break up a bit more...

Maybe, since most of my experience is with sims, I could get the Amplitube Vox bit and play with dynamic mike placement until I figure out what works (while it plays a loop), and then emulate that in meat world. I know that sounds backwards, but playing parts in a room, at volume, over and over, you lose your ear before you get where you're going. I don't have the most sophisticated studio in the world, but I know it's fairly tonal neutral and very dead. I should be able to get this to sound better. Would moving the mike away from the speaker make more or less bright? I'm just pretty novice at miking up a real amp.

Anyway, this is the first song where I haven't got ANY sims running, so it's a step forward. I got some pretty decent tones, and when layered they ended up sounding pretty good. :)
 
So I jumped right to the unmastered version ("mixing" clinic after all, right? :D)

The big things that stuck out to me is that the drums were really quiet (the song is really energetic and intense except for the subdued drums), and the vocal is kind of mid-rangey. I don't know how much of the latter is just your voice and the way it interacts with itself when multi-tracked or if you need to boost the highs a little.
 
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