Mixing is HARD!

Mixerman said:
They were a bidding war band from the early 00s that I wrote about in The Daily Adventures of Mixerman.
Click to expand...

I thought "Bitch Slap" and the entire Mixerman Diary was a made up story of non-existent characters...?

At least I seem to recall reading where you said that somewhere on the Internet, when you decided to come clean about it all after many years of speculation by followers of the diary.
 
Right...I think that's the web page I recall reading awhile back.

The Daily Adventures of Mixerman is a satire, and everyone in the story is merely a non-existent character, including Mixerman himself.
Click to expand...

Though I guess "Mixerman", the non-existant character...still exists and posts on the forums. :)
 
A problem I use to have is I kept changing channel gain knobs throughout the mix. So If one channel was coming too loud in a part of the song I would turn it down, then later I felt like it was too low so I would turn it up. Basically, learning AUTOMATION was great. So instead I would automate the volume throughout the song on each channel.
 
Greg_L said:
Mixing is pretty much the last stage. If everything is done well up to that point - tuning, tones, performance, miking, tracking - then mixing is easy.
Click to expand...

I found this to be very true when I downloaded a few of the tracks from the Telefunken site and I was amazed. It sounded great with the faders up and no effects. I guess I was used to mixing my poorly recorded attempts at making music.
 
BLP said:
A problem I use to have is I kept changing channel gain knobs throughout the mix. So If one channel was coming too loud in a part of the song I would turn it down, then later I felt like it was too low so I would turn it up. Basically, learning AUTOMATION was great. So instead I would automate the volume throughout the song on each channel.
Click to expand...

Not that it's really relevant, but automation is my least favorite thing about mixing.
 
dastrick said:
Not that it's really relevant, but automation is my least favorite thing about mixing.
Click to expand...
Wow. To me, automation *IS* mixing.

If one doesn't jockey the faders, there's no mixing being done. It's just laying the tracks on top of each other like a pile of sheet rock.

To each their own, I guess.

G.
 
I was thinking about this, and then I read Mixerman response and that pretty much nails it. I can find myself getting lost in every step of the process, but at some point, I need to do some kind of a reset and think realistically about what difference this detail, whatever detail I'm getting lost in, will really make to the final outcome. And there's a lot of them along the way.

One thing to do is definitely stop on your project and listen to the radio for random songs and hear mixes, I do this and I say, "Weird, I would never mix that song like that." And yet it is one of the most famous, classic, popular, songs of all time. One crazy mix that comes right to mind is Motown classics with that tambourine that is louder than anything else. I would never consider doing something that odd, I don't even like it, but it is unique and a stamp, and a style, and is anyone going to fix that? Hell no.

Then I go back to mixes from my old Foxtex x-15 that are muddy as hell, but there's still something there I really love. Hey, how about those old classic songs where the mic pre is obviously over driven on the highs, but no one would dare disturb those amazingly perfect performances. But also, we're talking about 3 minutes out of someone's day who isn't a trained detailed listener, do something cool, move on to the next thing. Keep moving forward, finish a project. Now if I could only take my own darn advice....
 
SouthSIDE Glen said:
Wow. To me, automation *IS* mixing.

If one doesn't jockey the faders, there's no mixing being done. It's just laying the tracks on top of each other like a pile of sheet rock.

To each their own, I guess.

G.
Click to expand...

I agree (mostly). Automation with a mouse is a pain. Which is the way I do it. I absolutely love having my fingers on the faders.

And although automation is a big part of mixing, it's not all of mixing. There's still a lot of other stuff involved, as I know that you know. But I understand what you were saying.
 
Oh yeah, I didn't meant to imply that automation is all of mixing, only that it's not fully mixing without it. I also prefer physical faders, but have gotten used to manually working the rubber bands.

Lately I've been practicing with Nuendo's hybrid option of writing the automation curve in real time by dragging the virtual fader up and down, but getting "the touch" with that via the mouse is kinda funky. If I had a control surface slider, that feature would be great, but if I'm forced to mouse it, I'll stick to manually dragging the rubber band handles myself.

G.
 
Not that it's really relevant, but automation is my least favorite thing about mixing.
Click to expand...
I agree... but not for volume automation... I like that...
Its all the OTHER automation that I despise... especially the automation that cubase puts in WHEN I DONT WANT IT TO! Oh I hate that, depends on the VSTs but I have some that write automation automatically even when the track is not playing! There is nothing more despicable to me then having to tell the DAW to delete all the automation (other than volume) for a track, especially if its happens more than once.

Okay, so maybe I am a noob and nobody else has these problems, its always possible ;)

Sam.
 
I don't like mixing with one fader at a time with the mouse. So for now, I draw the automation by pulling and pushing the "rubber bands". :mad:

I tried the Korg NanoKontrol, but I didn't like it. It's cheap and just doesn't feel right. My next one will be a nice one with flying faders. :D
 
Whenever I need to adjust levels withing a DAW track...I prefer to slice up the track into smaller pieces, the size of which is usually governed by the track's content (like the individual words of a vocal track)...and then I just raise/lower the level of that sound wave piece....or Object as it's called in SAmplitude. That is done nondestructively, so I can do that all day without any permanent effect on the actual sound wave file.
I find that much easier and visually cleaner in the DAW...plus I often have to sliced up the tracks anyway, to make other adjsutments...so that's how I like doing it instead of the "rubber band" mode...which ends up cluttering the view with all the "handles" it creates.

By the time I'm done editing in the DAW...my mix levels have pretty much sorted themselves out...so there's no fader jockeying needed. I come out to my analog console, and just finer tune the overall track level per channel...but that's about it. Maybe on occasion I might have to ride a fader just here-n-there...but for the most part I can just sit back and listen to the mixdown as it takes place, since I've already set my levels at various sections of a track.

I guess it's still a form of DAW "automation"...it just doesn't feel/look like it during mixdown.
 
miroslav said:
Whenever I need to adjust levels withing a DAW track...I prefer to slice up the track into smaller pieces, the size of which is usually governed by the track's content (like the individual words of a vocal track)...and then I just raise/lower the level of that sound wave piece
Click to expand...
One of my associates works that exact same way, and has gotten good at it and fast at it. It's a valid style.

Just like DAW software selection itslef, it all depends on what one gets used to doing and using. I have no problems with other people doing things that way, but personally I prefer the rubber bands for a few reasons.

First, what you call "clutter", I call "informative". I like seeing the gain and pan automation curves as I can tell at a glance what's going on.

Second, gain automation is simply the digital version of the original riding the faders in analog, which is the way God originally intended it (;)). Chopping track up into segments and treating them as individual objects with individual volume settings just seems artificial and counter-intuitive to me.

Third, and probably the biggest, is when you want to do do more than just general quantum jumps in volume - i.e. ramp the volume over time, you're going to want to automate that anyway. As long as you're going to have an automation curve, you might as well use it as the common control instead of using one in this segment, not using one in that segment, but using one in that other segment, etc. and then having to track where you're using it and where you're not.

The exception to all this for me is VST automation. I have no use for that to begin with (who the hell really needs to automate a VST?), and when you throw too many rubber bands on the screen, then I agree it's just clutter. But for gain and pan, I'm making the Koolaid ;)

G.
 
I ended up working that way purely by chance.
In the beginning of my DAW usage.... when starting to edit a song, I was simply focused on editing, figuring the track volume stuff would come during mixdown. But then after working my way through track edits and having to slice up the tracks for various other reasons, the volume adjustment happened "by default"...and by the time I was done with other editing tasks, I found little need for an additional volume adjustment tool...like the "rubber bands".

I can see the volume changes because the sound wave is either increased or decreased, without the need for a "rubber band" line with lots of handles, which to me just clutters the track view.
Basically what I'm doing is fixing the individual sections of the sound wave so that their level ends up where it should have been in the first place, and the then the track sound wave looks also as it should...low spots are raised and high spots are lowered....and then I can take that one step further and do the same thing to entire sections of a track (made up of many small slices). It also lets me do "manual compression" to individual peaks within a slice of sound wave...so I just use the same approach for all my volume adjustments. I find it to be more precise than the "rubber band" approach and placing "handles" all along the track.
I also rarely need to really ramp anything up/down...but even that I can do easily using the same approach. and applying a fade-type move to the sliced piece.

As I said, in the end...it's still "automation", it just looks different and is done a little differently..but with both ways you have pretty much the same end result. I just got use to doing it my way and never bothered with the "rubber bands". I did try it out at one time and didn't care for it...it just seemed messier to my way of working.
 
Like I say, it comes down to what one is used to. It's two ways of skinning the same cat.

It was kind of absurd a bit once, though, when I was working as engineer with this one producer who was used to working with my friend who does it the way you do it. This procucer knows his music and has a decent ear and all that, and is a real producer and not a "produsah", but knows next to nothing abut the actual technical studio operations side of things (you would have had a hard time keeping from laughing at how many sessions it took him to understand that the Sen 421 was a front-address mike and that pointing it straight up in the air was not the way to mic either a git cab or a sax ;))

Anyway, I was filling in for the other engineer on this one session once, and it came time to tweak a beat or two of volume on something, so I start dragging the rubber band. He gets all flustered and starts questioning whether I actually knew what I was doing. The nerve of this guy. He literally has to ask what a +4/-10 switch was for and pointed his mics the wrong way and all sorts of audio 099 stuff like that all day, and he's asking me if *I* knew what I was doing? He said, "That's not the way the other guy does it."

I told him if he preferred that the other guy do it his way, he could wait for him to come in. That shut him up until a bit later when the other engineer did come in. The first thing this producer did was to try and call me on my technique to the other engineer, but the other guy immediately corrected him that there was nothing right or wrong about either of our techniques. If it weren't so absurd, it would have been irritating ;).

G.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top