Punk mix needs YOU!

GoetzManor

GoetzManor

New member
Hey everybody,

First time poster, long time board watcher. I have recently started taking music production seriously and I was hoping maybe you guys could give me some tips and advice on how to improve the mix of this track. Any help at all would be appreciated and I thank you for your time.


Jamie

soundcloud.com/goetz-manor-recording/drugs-final-mix

EDIT: It wouldn't let me post the link. Guess I'd better get posting!

Thanks again.
 
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Hi Jamie, I think to be honest this mix needs a lot of work in every part man. The drums are buried with the most prominent part of them being a clicky sound from the kick I think, the only frequencies from the bass coming through are boomy ones, the guitars are quite fizzy but could probably work if the rest of the mix issues were addressed and vocals are quite uneven. Overall it's very muddy and sounds like standing outside a club with a band playing inside.

In terms of suggestions for improving your mix, how are you recording the different parts and then how are you mixing them? I hope this doesn't sound too harsh, I'm sure you can only get better with practice/experience - but let us know about your processes and hopefully people can chime in with suggestions.
 
In terms of suggestions for improving your mix, how are you recording the different parts and then how are you mixing them?
Click to expand...
The guitar was recorded on a 15 watt Crate practice amp using an Audix i-5 pointed at the speaker.
The bass was DI-ed and then afterwards duplicated and a distortion plugin placed on one track to give it some grit.
I record each drum individually because I lack the mixer inputs and microphones to record the whole kit at once.
The vocals were recorded on several takes using both an i-5 and an MXL 990 because the singer was all over the place vocally.

I use a pair of Rokit 5 monitors for mixing (as it's all I can afford right now) in a non treated room (I just sit as close to the monitors as I can). I'm not at my DAW right now so I'm going to try to remember the best I can. First, I put a high pass filter on everything. For the DI bass, I cut some of the lows and boosted some highs and did the opposite for the distortion bass track.

I've always heard "never let the drummer in the control room" and because I'm a drummer I guess I'm overcompensating for the other instruments by turning down the drums to avoid that cliche. I tend to make the kick click-y because its the only time I can hear it otherwise it just gets buried. The "click" comes from a duplicated track that has been heavily compressed and eq'ed with almost all the low end being taken out.

The guitar was recorded twice and panned. If I remember, I scooped out some mids.

The vocals have been compressed and heavily automated.

That's all I can think of right now. I'll post more if I remember. Any extra help is greatly appreciated.
 
As far as lo-fi punk goes, I've heard far worse, but this thing could definitely use some work.

The guitar solo is really buried.
The snare sounds really loose and not punch.
The kick is all click.

The bass is at a pretty good level; it does a good job of holding things together melodically, actually.
The pan on the call and response vocals is cool.

It sounds like you're going for high energy, but you're at an unfortunate in-between ground of not being tight and coherent enough for a studio song and not having the crowd feedback and enthusiasm of a live bootleg.

Good start. I look forward to seeing where you take this.

Edit: Is it a bad thing that I am at this moment posting about a punk song to the HR bbs instead of going to a Casualties show? Probably.
 
I just listened to the mix again, through headphones this time, and this time it sounds much better. It sounds very underground and actually pretty good. You might want to lower the vocals. I guess I wasn't quite in that 'underground mood' that day. So did you mix this through headphones?
 
GoetzManor said:
I've always heard "never let the drummer in the control room" and because I'm a drummer I guess I'm overcompensating for the other instruments by turning down the drums to avoid that cliche. I tend to make the kick click-y because its the only time I can hear it otherwise it just gets buried. The "click" comes from a duplicated track that has been heavily compressed and eq'ed with almost all the low end being taken out.
Click to expand...

I can't see what you're getting out of that method GM, other than burying everything except the click of the kick. I'd get rid of the duplicated track and bring up the volume of the drums overall. You should be able to keep the kick audible by putting a high pass filter on the guitars and making sure that the kick and the bass guitar aren't cancelling each other out. You shouldn't have anything much else in yer kick frequency range except for the bass.

GoetzManor said:
The bass was DI-ed and then afterwards duplicated and a distortion plugin placed on one track to give it some grit...For the DI bass, I cut some of the lows and boosted some highs and did the opposite for the distortion bass track.
Click to expand...

Again, I'd just concentrate on getting one good track with the bass rather than two identical ones treated differently. Find the boomy frequency and do a very narrow eq cut when you do to remove it and work on the relationship between bass and drums. I wonder whether boosting the lows on your distortion track is part of the boomy problem? If you have two identical bass tracks and you've boosted the lows/cut the highs on one and cut the lows/boosted the highs on the other, the net effect is that you have one bass track where you have boosted everything. EQ tends to sound far better when you're mainly getting rid of frequencies you don't want rather than adding to frequencies.

Get your bass and drums sorted and bring up the guitar solo a fair bit and I reckon you'll be in much better shape with this mix. I'd recommend having a listen to Greg L and Arcadeko's stuff on here too, they both do punk type stuff and do it well.
 
Kick drum has no low end. I understand you prefer a clicky kick sound. Try not to cut the low end too aggressively. Overall drums need to come forward by a good amount.
Mix sounds somewhat boomy. And agree with everything on the post above mine =)
 
If you have two identical bass tracks and you've boosted the lows/cut the highs on one and cut the lows/boosted the highs on the other, the net effect is that you have one bass track where you have boosted everything.
Click to expand...

I realize after I posted it that it sounded ridiculous. So I went back and cut the distortion bass track and started working on the original. I think its starting to sound better; also the kick now has a lot more "oomph" to it which entailed soloing the bass and kick together and playing around. So thanks for that!

Did the drums have to come up a lot because when I'm sitting in between my monitors they sound like they're at a good level, so then when I raise the drum buss level it sounds way too loud. Am I on the right track?

And what would you recommend doing to get the vocals to be more even? And furthermore, were they loud enough in the mix, because it seems like when I lowered them they were unintelligible and when I brought them up they overpowered the mix. There was no happy medium. I can't re-record the vocals because the singer is heading out of the country.

Once again, thank you all so much for the input, it's embarrassing being a noob but I have to start somewhere I suppose.
 
So..

Not a lot of time on my hands right now but.. I would reccomend turning up the ratio on the vocal compressor. That should help level out some of the spikes in volume.
 
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