thewanderer24
New member
I'm an experienced musician, but I am new to recording and getting ready to work on my first mix in the next few days. I've been thinking in circles a lot about how to approach it, and what to do with effects, eq, etc.. If it matters, I am working in Sonar 5.0 studio edition.
These are 2 relatively simple songs. Basically each has an acoustic guitar filling most of the space (it was mic'ed in stereo, one mic close to and pointing at the bridge and another close to and pointing towards the 12th fret). There's an electric bass recorded through a highend preamp, into my firepod line in, and a main vocal track with a female singer. Each song will have another track added (probably flute) for a solo spot (and maybe some other fills through the song), and may (or may not) have some backup vocals added. They also might have a little percussion added (shaker, etc.).
I dumped down a simple mix -- turn all levels so everything can be heard fairly evenly, and print to mp3, with just the guitar (one track pushed fully left, the other fully right) bass and vocals. There are little bits of stuff I heard, that need to be cleaned up, but it already sounds very good to me. I was kinda suprised, actually. I listened to it several places away from my monitors, and it still sounds really nice.
I guess my questions are, after reading endless stuff here and elsewhere about EQ'ing, compression, reverb, etc., do I really need to mess with that stuff on the guitar and bass tracks if they sound good together (and with the vocal) already?? The dynamics on the guitar and bass seem good to me as they are (they're fairly dynamic songs). So does it make sense for me to manually get rid of a couple stray peaks in the waveforms, and then compress the whole song together as a whole in the end, instead of processing individual tracks? In your experience, do you ever do it this way?
I definitely needed to put some compression on the vocal to tame some pretty heavy dynamics. But, I recorded in (IMO) a nice sounding room. I played around with many reverb ideas, but still love the sound of the vocals dry. I found myself tweaking reverb settings to get them to a point that I could just barely notice the reverb was there. I'm not sure one way or the other if the reverb on the vocal even is good or bad as an addition at this point. Do you guys ever run the main vocal with no reverb or eq?
Anyway, I know my explanation may be vague right now, but I am really trying to see if I am thinking in the right directions here. I am afraid of unnecessarily overprocessing some of the tracks that sound good to me, but don't want to let that fear give me a substandard end product.
Obviously, as the last tracks get added to these songs some of this stuff might answer itself, but I guess I am asking more philosophical questions about your approach to mixing.
Appreciate any comments from you more experienced folks.
These are 2 relatively simple songs. Basically each has an acoustic guitar filling most of the space (it was mic'ed in stereo, one mic close to and pointing at the bridge and another close to and pointing towards the 12th fret). There's an electric bass recorded through a highend preamp, into my firepod line in, and a main vocal track with a female singer. Each song will have another track added (probably flute) for a solo spot (and maybe some other fills through the song), and may (or may not) have some backup vocals added. They also might have a little percussion added (shaker, etc.).
I dumped down a simple mix -- turn all levels so everything can be heard fairly evenly, and print to mp3, with just the guitar (one track pushed fully left, the other fully right) bass and vocals. There are little bits of stuff I heard, that need to be cleaned up, but it already sounds very good to me. I was kinda suprised, actually. I listened to it several places away from my monitors, and it still sounds really nice.
I guess my questions are, after reading endless stuff here and elsewhere about EQ'ing, compression, reverb, etc., do I really need to mess with that stuff on the guitar and bass tracks if they sound good together (and with the vocal) already?? The dynamics on the guitar and bass seem good to me as they are (they're fairly dynamic songs). So does it make sense for me to manually get rid of a couple stray peaks in the waveforms, and then compress the whole song together as a whole in the end, instead of processing individual tracks? In your experience, do you ever do it this way?
I definitely needed to put some compression on the vocal to tame some pretty heavy dynamics. But, I recorded in (IMO) a nice sounding room. I played around with many reverb ideas, but still love the sound of the vocals dry. I found myself tweaking reverb settings to get them to a point that I could just barely notice the reverb was there. I'm not sure one way or the other if the reverb on the vocal even is good or bad as an addition at this point. Do you guys ever run the main vocal with no reverb or eq?
Anyway, I know my explanation may be vague right now, but I am really trying to see if I am thinking in the right directions here. I am afraid of unnecessarily overprocessing some of the tracks that sound good to me, but don't want to let that fear give me a substandard end product.
Obviously, as the last tracks get added to these songs some of this stuff might answer itself, but I guess I am asking more philosophical questions about your approach to mixing.
Appreciate any comments from you more experienced folks.