This is just audio guys, and you ain't going to set off a global nuclear alert by experimenting.... Really. Trust me, I have all those buttons right here!
I blow through so many disks when I am working on a project. I burn a CD of every mix to play in other systems. In fact, even on involved mixes (ones that are going to take 10 hours) I will burn a disk every 2 or 3 hours and go play it on other systems just to get a feel for what is going on. You would not beleive how revealing this is. It can stop you cold from continuing down sonic roads that will disappoint you the next day. You know the story....."It sounded great last night in the control room. Why is there so much bass in the mix today?".
Experiment! Run a lot of different versions of the mix. At least a version with the vocal up a couple db, and one with the vocal down a couple db. Maybe one with the bass and kick drum up a bit too. Maybe one with the solo turned up. You never know which of those mixes is going to be what excites you two weeks later at the mastering house. I have shared this story in one of my articles on the main page, but here it is again. On The Heavy Brothers CD I worked months and months on, when we got to mastering, we wanted to use one of the last mixes we did of a particular song. There were about 10 mixes of it, and this one just had the right stuff, except for one thing! The guitar solo was really mushy. The other producer wanted to make the guitar more wet with effects, and I disagreed all the way with doing this. He said "Burn it that way", so I did. So, the solo section sucked bad. The tone sucked bad, and he realized it a week later when we were reviewing the mixes before going to the mastering house.
We did find however that a mix that was a few mixes before it had exactly the guitar tone and effects we wanted, but the rest of the song was not mixed quite like what we wanted. No problem! At mastering ,we flew in both mixes and splice in the guitar solo part from one mix into the other mix. The changes in and out of the guitar solo were so big that you could not hear the edit at all, and the different mix on the rest of the instruments during the solo made a nice change overall in the song. All of us, including the mastering engineer, who never stated his opinions no matter how many times I would ask him to, thought it was killer!
So, burn a lot of different versions of the mix! If you are going to master yourself, you can play around with spicing together a combination of mixes if you are not happy with one in particular. This is what Editors are for!!!
But experimenting is what audio is all about guys. It is not about Roger Nichols says do this, or sonusman says to do that, it is about taking all that with a grain of salt, or as things to try if the situation is right, but continuing on to find WHAT WORKS FOR THAT MIX THAT DAY! You will never know if a drastic eq change on something will work unless you try it.
Great work is not done overnight or in a hurry. The big boys spend usually far more time then many around here on production, and they have the best equipment and loads of experience too. You will easily spend a couple of days mixing a song if you have an ear towards getting the mix to sound right. You are cheating your song with any less time investment.
Experiment! Use up some disks! CDR are down to about $.30 each if you buy 50 at a time. Blow through those so you can hear your progress. You will learns a lot from it.
Few of the professional engineers on BBS's think like a newbie to recording. Few of them really had to learn it on their own too.
Many newbies to recording are far from knowing enough about audio production to understand that I didn't share even one "secret" earlier in this thread. But to the inexperienced engineer, they sure seem like secrets revealed when they try them eh?
This is not a slam on either professionals of newbies. This is just the way I am seeing in on the boards. I titled this thread the way I did to generate interest, not because I feel any of the info I shared was "secret". So, you pro's out their, cut me a little slack! I managed to get some good info in about 4000 words, in a manner and style that newbies could understand, out to several hundred people or more. While that makes me feel good, it certainly doesn't make me feel like I know more then other professionals, or am sharing "trade secrets". Just that I could articulate it well enough for a newbie to understand it.
I invited Tom Cram, via email, to share some links to BBS's and titles of books that cover this stuff. I thank you Tom for taking the time to do so. THAT is the type of information people need if they are looking for more advanced stuff.
But, like I explained to Tom in another email, you have to consider the audience. Once again, this is not a slam on the many fine people who post on this site, but many just don't understand even the basic of sound propagation, or signal path. Many of those books Tom listed I have read, and few of them explained things in a way a newbie could understand. Many of those websites would chase off the people posting on this site with the most basic questions they ask here. That is why I seldom link to sites like that, or recommend books like those. I would say that most audio related books ARE NOT geared towards unassisted learning. They would make excellent study books for people going to school for audio, but most on these boards are not too interested in spending that kind of money to learn how to record their bands demo's. Thus, site's like this exist, and hopefully, all these sites have solid professional engineers who have an eye towards being helpful to newbies, and can articulate complex audio concepts in a way that newbies can understand. I believe this website does that FAR better then any other BBS I have seen on the net.
Why does everything HAVE to be so damn loud!?!?!?!?!?!?
I have pre-mastered mixes that are fully 3dB RMS LOUDER than most anything I have ever heard out of the 70's and through the mid 80's! More recent stuff by selected artists still have very low average volume and just sound killer! I have a friend in Atlanta who is doing beautiful sounding work and this stuff NEVER hits 0dB on a digital Peak meter. NEVER.
Ask yourself if you are sacrificing a great sound to gain a couple of dB in the mix. Did all of a sudder, because your recording isn't as loud as Everclear, you start to lose a rich tone? Did all of a sudden the "space" around instruments disappear? Did certain things start to take on an edge that sort of hurts when you hear it?
Loud is not always good! With some of the recordings I hear, professional and otherwise, I can't even listen to the whole CD without fatique. I CANNOT imagine having to actually spend a month in the studio working like that!
I recently did some work with a band, re-mixing a few songs, and recording a cover for them that was LOUD!!! I finally had to force the issue. We re-mixed a song that was going on a compilation of Portland bands that an ex Capitol A&R guy is putting together, and I just didn't give the band a copy of the pre-mastered mix, nor the post "mastered" mix that the guitar player wanted to squash the shit out of and add MORE high end! I made them wait 2 weeks, even though they reminded me every other day that I need to get them a master to send to this guy. I finally gave it to them, both the pre-mastered and post mastered mixes. They thought the post-mastered that they were in on sucked bad, but they didn't know which was which. I just made them pick the one they thought sounded best. They picked a no EQ, but slightly volume increased mix, which I still didn't think was all that great sounding in comparison to the original mix. This thing is a "bit" loud, but still quieter than a lot of stuff being put out on the market. The one that had eq and was really squashed sounded about as loud as other stuff, but they agreed the song just didn't sound that good that loud. I think they might have learned a lesson. I HOPE they learned a lesson. Loud is not always so good.
Can you imagine what some of this stuff you hear on the radio sounded like before the evil labels told the mastering engineers to make as loud as the other crap out there? I can. I have heard some. I indeed heard some of the better qualities the mastering engineer added, but also heard the uniqueness of the bands recording get killed in the pursuit of LOUD. It was a shame. It was also hard to listen to the post mastered product.
I am not saying that mastering a bit louder is necessarily bad. I am not saying that changing a bit of eq is bad. I am just suggesting that most music does not suffer so badly in the mixing that it only needs to have 3dB of dynamics!!! Things don't HAVE to be "everything, all the time"! It is okay to have seperation and dynamics! Really, it is okay.
Maybe some of this stems from the amount of live sound work I have done lately. I have mixed the good, the bad, and the ugly. What continues to impress me though is that live, you are at the mercy of the performance and little else. Try to squash the mix of a loud band in a 36X52' room when the guitars on stage are blasting at 95dB on there own. It just isn't going to work.... But where this becomes relevent in what I am talking about is that when the band finally decides to tone down a bit for a certain part or whatever, the dynamics are simply amazing. Very REAL. Of course, what can you expect from a live performance eh?
I don't mind mind having to turn up the volume of a playback device if the mix is a bit more quiet than the last bands thing. I REALLY like how different bands sound very different on tape. I don't see the need to make everything all one volume, or with similar EQ characteristics. I have found that older recordings had many more differences in the overall sound than newer ones do. This is the folly of a lot of questions that people are asking these days about mixing and mastering. They all want "someones" sound, rather than dealing with "there" sound. This is further amazing because seldomly do these people sound like who they want to sound like!
I posted in another thread once that "this is MUSIC, it is supposed to have dynamics". All of these "everything, all the time" recordings are a total bore to listen to because they lack meaningful dynamics. They lack meaningful space between all the intrumentation. They lack meaningful color to each sound. It is as though the sounds were picked because they didn't make the meters jump up when that instrument came in.
Mix to sound good! Bottom line is that who cares how loud it is. It does not take too long to start realizing when you are starting to push a mix to that point where extra volume means giving up tone. If the damn mix sounds better a bit quieter, who is to argue with that? Who cares if it is not as loud as the next guys stuff, does it sound good?
That is the ultimate question you should always ask yourself when making decisions about the mixes Peak volume. Sure, it is okay for the song to eventually achieve 0 or -1dB on the meters at it's loudest point, but you don't HAVE to have the mix hovering around -4dB for 75% of the time.
Break from the norm boys! Don't fall for the game of being louder than the next guy. Mix and master to SOUND GOOD and forget the rest.
The one CD I have mixed that I feel very good about is also one that I mastered. It was my first mastering job where I was actually paid.... I can play it over and over again and not get fatigued from listening. What is funny is that it is really not too much quieter than many modern recordings are, yet, it has a LOT of dynamics. This CD earned me another shot, this time in the tracking stage too on the bands next CD. Everybody likes it. Of course the songs are good, but the production is very natural, and like I said, far more attention was placed on making it sound good rather than making it sound like something else (which would have been unachievable really. This band sounds like they do, and that is that.....) This band get old people at their shows and these old farts like the more "retro"? sound of the CD. The young people just say it sounds really good and unique. Not ONE person has ever complained that it wasn't loud enough, or that the eq was very different from other stuff in their collection. Most just think it sounds good.
I learned a lesson from this that I hope to carry into every production I ever work on again where the artist will step back and listen to the recording from the stand point of sounding good for WHAT it is, rather than what they think it should sound like.
I hope some you will follow your own sound too and forget trying to compete with the Jone's next door.
How daring and imaginative you are VOXVENDER for following the norm!
Think through the whole thing. A Led Zeppelin recording does not sound any "quieter" on the radio than most anything new coming out does. But it sure sounds a LOT closer to the CD than newer stuff does, and it outright sounds better when comparing the CD's!
Think it through guys. Maybe one out of 10,000 of you even need to worry about your product being compared on a radio station! I can assure you that if it was, and your post mastered mix was 3 or 4 dB quieter than other stuff out their, nobody would even notice on the radio.
Please make a point next time that actually makes sense. This "louder to keep up" nonsense is hysteria realized!
Not sure what more I CAN add here. My past posts have covered a bit of ground, and without actually getting into specific stuff that is usually only pertinent to the mix one would be currently working on, anything else is just "you could do this, you could do that", and I could never cover ALL the things one "could" do in a mix.
Maybe I can talk about "crowding the mix" a bit here. This has been foremost on my mind lately because of some stuff I have worked on in the last 6 months, where the client wanted the "wall of sound". They felt that having 6 guitar tracks, snare durm samples layered 4 deep, and vocals doubled and sometimes tripled would make the sound bigger, deeper, and more intense.
I have found just the OPPOSIT! It is usually the "minimalist" approach that seems to bring forth the biggest, loudest, deepest mixes I have done. 16 tracks or less usually!
For the "less is more" trick to work, I feel it is important that you start out with tracks that stand on their own very well. Many people it would seem start double tracking because they don't get the kind of power and depth out of 1 track of something, so they feel that doing 2 or 3 of the same thing will increase the "presence" and "power" of the sound. I have seen many cases where layering has actually made the sound more distant and less powerful! There are many reasons why. One can be that a poorly "doubled" track, meaning one that is slightly out of tune and not dead on in timing can cause a comb filtering effect which will rob the track of it's power. Two, that the actual tone might be really messed up, and occupying a very big sonic space in the overall sound, thus, at mix, you are cutting a lot of "meat" out of the sound to make it fit in a dense mix.
When tracking, it is a good idea to have a VERY CLEAR idea of your production. Meaning, you should know what kind of sound you are after, and how many tracks you are going to dedicate to getting that sound. If you anticipate a very dense mix, you are going to want the sound while tracking to be very specific in it's range. You will need to concentrate on making that track sound in a very specific way. If you plan a more "sparse" mix, you can then track the instruments to occupy a much bigger sonic range. You will NEED for the instruments to occupy a broader sonic range in this case, otherwise you will be digging into using a lot of "tricks" with reverb and delay to make the sounds sort of bigger.
Really, tracking sort of "sparse" and "thin sounding" works out well. If the tracks wind up not being "big enough" for you, you at least have a lot of control using "tricks" at mix to make them bigger. Once you learn some of these tricks, they will come easily to you and you won't waste a whole lot of time implementing them.
Tracking "big and lush" can be problematic. I prefer tracking this way though with stuff like vocal and
acoustic guitar stuff (folk music, and jazz/blues stuff). But again, you really got to get the sound RIGHT while tracking because ensuing EQ and "tricks" in the mix tend to not work out so well at mix time. "Big and lush" should probably be avoided unless you have a very good control room to monitor in. The reason why is that what you THINK is big and lush could be the result of phase cancellation and/or coupling in a poorly tuned control room. Your initial sounds were "colored" by the control room, and you find out later that the sound weren't as cool when you play your mix elsewhere. Sound confusing? It isn't really. Think about it for a bit.
Another thing to think about is WHAT will be big in the mix, and what should be small. You can't have everything "balls to the walls" in a mix and expect good results. If you want big guitars and vocals, that is usually at the expense of the drums. If you want big drums, that is usually at the expense of the other instruments, etc......Yes, you can have a few things "big" in the mix, you just can't have EVERYTHING big in the mix. Not possible! Listen to your favorite recordings with an ear towards what is big and small in the mix. It will become very evident in a hurry when you actually listen for it.
Trying to make everything big usually has the reverse effect. You just plainly have too much stuff fighting for attention! This causes your mix to sound quiet, small, and flat. Making everything sound great while "solo'ed" does NOT translate into everything blending together for a nice, big, lush mix! Not by a long shot. When determining what you want big and small in the mix, you must do this with EVERYTHING YOU WILL HAVE IN THE MIX turned up. The reason I recommend doing a mix with just "faders up" before you get into anything else is because you can then hear what instruments, and more specifically , what PART of an instruments sound is "masking" important elements in the mix. Once you have determined that, you can then worked toward removing unwanted frequencies from specific instruments so it doesn't mask other instruments. This I feel is the first "need to do" in mixing. Skip this vital step, find yourself eventually doing it at some point (if you wind up with a good mix that is... ).
What I can't help anybody with though is telling them what is important to a mix. I think truly, this is the "art" of mixing, KNOWING what instruments to make big and small in the mix to make that mix the best it can be! Sometimes you pick based upon performances. Sometimes you pick based upon what is really cool about the song. Mostly, it is a combination of both! The skill of doing this well is not easily learned, and only the person mixing can really learn it. I cannot teach people how to be intuitive.
Some people work well with certain styles of music better than others. For example, I don't consider myself to be all that hot with modern rock stuff. But, give me a funk tune and I will mix the crap out of it!!! But, I get many rock bands who want me to mix based on other stuff they have heard me mix in their genre that they liked. I am saying that I don't feel as comfortable with the rock stuff as I do with funk. So, I relax much faster, and can do much quicker work with funk than rock. I can mix rock well, but it takes me longer. Hell, I have seen engineers that can get the same good mix in rock as I can in half the time because they are more comfortable in it than I am. This is a consideration when I bid job for clients, how long it will take to get acceptable results. So, I guess what I am saying is that you may be trying to mix stuff that you are not good at mixing! Self honesty is important you know!
So, to wrap it all up, it is probably better to track thin if you are doing dense productions, or are in a badly tuned acoustic space. Track big if it is a sparse production, and/or you have a good acoustic space. But ALWAYS have a PRODUCTION GOAL. Without that, you are whistling in the dark!
When determining what you want big and small in the mix, you must do this with EVERYTHING YOU WILL HAVE IN THE MIX turned up. The reason I recommend doing a mix with just "faders up" before you get into anything else is because you can then hear what instruments, and more specifically , what PART of an instruments sound is "masking" important elements in the mix. Once you have determined that, you can then worked toward removing unwanted frequencies from specific instruments so it doesn't mask other instruments. This I feel is the first "need to do" in mixing.
Could you explain all of the above so I can understand it?
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Dethska
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Joined: 11 Nov 2003
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Posted: Fri Nov 19, 2004 4:45 pm Post subject:
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L J Max wrote:
Chris_Harris wrote:
I was going to save this for an article, but decided after some recent listening to various projects done by home recording engineers that I would "rant" this in this forum.