11 track rock song - Know it all

Also what room are you mixing in? Has it been acoustically treated? If not I wouldn't bother trying to get good bass/kick mixes. It's so hard to mix in a bad room and have it translate well.
 
Ok going to listen to all your latest mixes. Can't wait.

As for the recording side it's not our mics that are a problem as only thing recorded with mic was the vocals.

I'll go through our whole setup to explain a bit about the recording:

Firstly the DAW we use is ableton live 8. What I have found since recording is that if you put monitor on a track whilst recording there's a tiny amount of latency. Major bummer. Rerecorded bass track without monitoring and it seems tighter. Didn't want to rerecord other people's bits for them (though I am mainly a guitarist so could do some cheeky overdubs I guess :P).

- The guitars and bass are DIed in through the USB port using ASIO driver. I'm using guitar rig 3 for amp simulation though what I put in those wavs is the direct input from them.

- Drums are programmed by our drummer using Battery and the piano roll in Ableton. If you think they sound crap then it's probably more to do with the choice of certain drum samples as they're professionally recorded ones that come with the battery package. You mention the overhead mics, there is one drum sample (crash ride I think) that's annoying at the end. I will upload drums with that replaced if you would be so kind as to sub the Hats track.
Also your comment about doing each drum separately, well we can do that! Each drum sample is separately recorded. I just didn't want to output 20 odd drum tracks in wav format for ease of download for people mostly :)

Vocals were double tracked but it sounded like 2 people singing so only kept one of the tracks. I used double tracking effect on vocals in my mix along with a secondary track with a lots of reverb lower in the mix. I put all vocals through considerable amounts of compression and a tiny amount of EQ (de-Essing etc).

As for the mixing. I have been mixing in my kitchen or in the living room using headphones if the missus is working or on some fairly crap speakers otherwise. I know both are big no-nos but I'm not pro and have kids so can't crank it up any I'm afraid on decent speakers :)
I also high pass all instruments and vocals except bass at min 60hz though I high passed alot higher on some instruments. I did try and scoop out notchs in bass drum and bass to interact well. Not sure I did it quite right.

Going to try and do a rough recreation of your mix and see if I can copy it. If I can then I can add my own flavour to it. When I have done another mix I'll put it up here and hopefully you can say if it's ok :)

I can record a second rythm track with my guitar, will have a bit of a different sound. Do you think that would add to it? I'm not sure exactly what the lead was playing though some lead bits need tightening up anyway.
 
What interface are you using? You should be monitoring straight from your interface for no latency.

It seems kinda pointless to mix a lot more since most of these tracks have clicks all throughout.

Always post everything you have recorded and let the engineer decide what he wants but yes doubled guitars panned hard left and right sound huge!

Also if you program anything please include midi track as mixing a prerecord we drum sample is pointless if you can very easily replace it with a decent sounding one.

So what I thought were overheads were the remaining drum tracks mixed together?
 
Pahtcub said:
What interface are you using? You should be monitoring straight from your interface for no latency.

It seems kinda pointless to mix a lot more since most of these tracks have clicks all throughout.

Always post everything you have recorded and let the engineer decide what he wants but yes doubled guitars panned hard left and right sound huge!

Also if you program anything please include midi track as mixing a prerecord we drum sample is pointless if you can very easily replace it with a decent sounding one.

So what I thought were overheads were the remaining drum tracks mixed together?
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There's a monitoring button in each track in ableton. Apparently it's a 'feature' of ableton that it records what you hear. You can get round it by duplicating the track and recording on one monitored and one not and keeping the one that's not monitored. Didn't know any of this when we recorded though :(

Info on that: https://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=185047

You're right about the clicks. I hadn't noticed them on any track but vocals as we'd gone straight in with guitar rig so they weren't detectable. That also meant I didn't notice about recording in mono as guitar rig puts the tracks in stereo. I will make sure I record in mono in future.

Think the clicks are some IO issue. Was a complete pain in the bum for recording the vocals as we kept having to hit record in between the clicks. It seemed to be on a cycle which made me think it was some buffering issue. The laptop is probably not ideal to do decent recording on though it's the best I have at the moment. Will look up about what I can do to help it. Maybe an external hard disk or something so it's not using same hard disk for playback and recording. It's got decent processor power and 4 gb of ram so I think it's mainly the disks which are bottlenecking it.

I think we're going to have to re-record all our tracks and make sure they're cleaner.

As for the 'other drums' track, there's another zip linked a few posts down that splits that into hats and toms.

I'm going to carry on mixing it anyway as I can certainly learn some skills doing it even if we have to rerecord a lot of it. I feel that once I get a grip on mixing this one then our other tracks should go a lot smoother. I did the changes you suggested but my drums aren't coming out as powerful.

Questions: for the drums are you compressing snare and kick separately or do you group the drums (or have then sent to a return) and put the compressor on that? The most powerful sounding drums I came up with had the compressor over all drum tracks.


Ableton doesn't have a native envelope shaper. Does that make a huge difference? You said you put it on the snare for more attack.

Also do you put another compressor on the master track at the end?

Oooh and one more thing, are you using reverb on any of the tracks? The mix sounds like it has some reverb on something but can't work out on what.

Many thanks Pahtcub
 
Don't monitor through your daw program. You should have a way to monitor straight from your interface or software for your interface. Then you can just record to daw prog and turn buffer size up to avoid clicks no need for new computer.

There is compression on each drum and compression on group track although slight. I like transient shapers for drums personally.

There is a la 2a on the master buss

There is slight convolution reverb throughout in different places as well as slight spring rev on certain guitar sections.

There is no real need to mess with the drums that much if you have the programmed midi as you can simply find a better sample rather than trying to fix a bad sound.
 
I've done a new mix. Few little bits to tweak but I'm done for tonight so thought I'd stick it up here.

I recorded a second rhythm track and panned one hard left and one hard right. Also changed some of the lead that was messy. Having said that I actually think it may have been better before...

Mucked around for ages with different compression possibilities. I'm fairly happy with this mix.

Learned alot anyway :)

https://soundcloud.com/voodoowedo/know-it-all5-more-comp

P.s. Followed your EQ for the drums.
 
Holy vocal reverb batman, and you said my delay was too much?! I try not to use reverb on vocals as it makes it more muddy, you can usually spot a rookie by how much they over use reverb on vocals. Also when you use reverb on vocals you need to filter the output of the reverb as you don't want reverb coming through on the high end.

There's also an annoying ring around 80-90 hz in the bass line(I'm talking a big boost), EQ it down then turn the bass track up. That's also another beginner mistake is mixing your own instrument louder than the rest of the band, pay very careful attention to that in the future.

Also check your mix in mono, you have some slight stereo phase issues.

Why is there a click at the end?



You're getting there though, good job, just a few common mistakes to fix.
 
Wish I coulda done this one. I can never seem to make sims sound good and I'm at college so I can't re-amp.
 
I tell you what though mate. I'm going to upload a new track to mix this evening hopefully and mix it alongside you guys. It's got bit of a different feel to this one.
 
Pahtcub said:
you can usually spot a rookie by how much they over use reverb on vocals. Also when you use reverb on vocals you need to filter the output of the reverb as you don't want reverb coming through on the high end.
Click to expand...

i chuckled. but probably for different reasons you'd imagine
 
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