Separation and Depth superior in Analog?

Side note here...both the Waves J37 and Kramer tape sims are going for $29 today. I’m going to pick up the J37, use some of the bare bones digital recording and production techniques miroslav suggests, and see if that helps with my mixes as it relates to my original dilemma. For $29 this will be a good experiment.

Thanks all!
Buckeyeslide
 
More plugins is not the answer. They just add an overlay of digital crud to whatever you had before. If you want separation and depth, your key tools are the faders and pan controls.
 
Buckeyeslide said:
Side note here...both the Waves J37 and Kramer tape sims are going for $29 today. I’m going to pick up the J37, use some of the bare bones digital recording and production techniques miroslav suggests, and see if that helps with my mixes as it relates to my original dilemma. For $29 this will be a good experiment.

Thanks all!
Buckeyeslide
Click to expand...

If you buy through Audio Deluxe...they are running a special...buy one Waves plug for $29...get the second one for $1.

AudioDeluxe
 
With me, I started with analog and moved into digital. With tape, I only had a 4 track, so when I moved into digital, I had all of these virtual tracks in the DAW and I also have 10 actual hard wired tracks to record to. I was in track heaven. And that was my problem. I thought to myself, "wow, no tape his, no generation degradation, and I simply wanted it all. I finally felt like I had a pro studio.

Of course that was all just my own ego talking, as it was far from pro...even semi pro. But, sometimes you have to go to the extreme before you can overdose and then recover. I had tracks all over the damn place, with drums, guitars, strings and vocals, and while they all sounded nice and clean, they also seemed pretty damn flat and stark. I wanted to turn the strings up, but to do that, I stepped on some of the drums. I wanted to hear the background vocals, and then the cymbals and hi hat suffered.

I finally figured out what my problem was. I had overdosed on tracks. I had told myself that because it was all digital, it was all good. But, what I failed to understand was there is still a threshold to the final result. You always have that zero dB to deal with and while you can stuff all kinds of tracks in there, the result is often just a flat mass of sound that has no depth and distinction.

Even panning to stereo, to give me more width didn't really help. Oh, it helped some, but I was so far into the multi-track world that I just added more tracks. I tried plugins that were designed to give you more headroom and I read essays about how to use the VU meter to your advantage, yadda, yadda, yadda. I learned a lot, but I was going at it all wrong.

What I finally figured out was, along with mic placement and using the room as part of your natural ambience, less is more. It just boiled down to me trying to stuff too much into my mixes. I have all of these digital VSTs and man, I can sound like a full orchestra, now. So, on top of the drums that each have their own track, and the guitars that were done in the second wave, I was stuffing brass and woodwinds and strings in like I was the new Phil Spector, minus the weird wigs and sunglasses.

Less is really a lot more, when you think about it. You have more depth in your tracks, because everything that is there can kind of spread out. You can hear everything and everything kind of has it's own place. I still use my stereo to place things on right and left, but I've really started limiting all of my strings and other orchestral tracks to being more tastefully placed, here and there.

And when you listen to bands like the Beatles, for instance...they were limited to a 4 track machine and they bounced things around quite a bit. But, in their songs, you hear strings here and there, and then maybe trumpet or two over there while the vocal is on top, with maybe an acoustic guitar or piano. And when a full string section would take over, nothing else was there. All guitars were gone, and only the vocal and drums. There wasn't enough band width for it all. The songs were never over mixed. They subscribed to the notion that "less is more".

"Less is more" has a deeper meaning, too. You can have a lot of vocals, three and four part harmony and that wall of sound that Spector was so famous for, but if you really want to catch someone's ear, don't put all of that stuff in every song. Leave some of the harmony out, so the listener can maybe sing along. Or maybe just to keep the band width open for what's there, for the purpose of depth and presence in the mix.

There's another saying that works here, too. KISS, which means "keep it simple, stupid". Don't try to be the master of tracking, just because you have all of those options in front of you. Sure, in a live gig, they say leave it on the stage. But that's talking about the performance. They also tell you to leave them wanting more. If you give them everything you've got all at once, what else are they going to want from you? And what else do you have?

"Less is more" and "Keep it simple, stupid". These are things I learned, when I moved from analog to digital. Maybe this is something the OP has been experiencing, too?
 
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FingerzAndKeyz said:
I finally figured out what my problem was. I had overdosed on tracks. I had told myself that because it was all digital, it was all good. But, what I failed to understand was there is still a threshold to the final result. You always have that zero dB to deal with and while you can stuff all kinds of tracks in there, the result is often just a flat mass of sound that has no depth and distinction.
Click to expand...

Yes, guilty as charged. Usually my sin is generating midi tracks in BIAB and then dumping in strings, horns, piano, whatever...i mean, so easy with the synths. Not only does it overload, it makes things too mechanical and robs the creative element of the song, which is ironic. Oh, and stacking on all those plugings on top of that mess.

Yep, i’m retrenching and going back to basics.

Great insightful post, thanks very much!

Buckeyeslide
 
Are you recording acoustic instruments, or are most of your productions midi? That will make a big difference in depth.

With midi tracks, you need to pick your sounds carefully. If you can find sounds that already have some depth to them it helps.

Also, don't use stereo sounds and just put them in the middle, you just end up with 'big mono'. Place them around the stereo field and use EQ to make the ones that you want further back sound a little dull compared to the instruments up front.

There is a big difference between using 8 tracks of a violin patch and using 1 violin section patch. I had a guy build an entire midi orchestra, one instrument at a time. It took me forever to make it sound like an orchestra instead of 80 isolated instruments. For example, a violin patch is a close miked violin. A violin section would be miked from a distance and, therefore have more depth.

That might be part of your troubles.
 
On separation and depth - my $.02:

I personally believe tape has the perception of making mixing easier or better sounding because of how it compresses similar to the fletcher-munson curve. The tonal balance printed on tape changes with the dynamics of the music, somewhat similar to the way our ears hear it in real life.

Getting digital to do that is challenging, unless you use a lot of multi-band compression etc which comes with a host of issues.

Even so, I hardly use tape anymore.
 
Farview said:
Are you recording acoustic instruments, or are most of your productions midi? That will make a big difference in depth.

With midi tracks, you need to pick your sounds carefully. If you can find sounds that already have some depth to them it helps.

Also, don't use stereo sounds and just put them in the middle, you just end up with 'big mono'. Place them around the stereo field and use EQ to make the ones that you want further back sound a little dull compared to the instruments up front.

There is a big difference between using 8 tracks of a violin patch and using 1 violin section patch. I had a guy build an entire midi orchestra, one instrument at a time. It took me forever to make it sound like an orchestra instead of 80 isolated instruments. For example, a violin patch is a close miked violin. A violin section would be miked from a distance and, therefore have more depth.

That might be part of your troubles.
Click to expand...
All of this is true. It's also something people new to midi and unfamiliar with how an orchestra really sounds will do, by mistake. I had to laugh, because an orchestra has its own specific ambiance and each individual instrument shares part of that ambiance. It might be from distance away from a mic, the surrounding space, such as large open stage, or the tonal aspects of the instrument itself. All of these help create the sound of that particular instrument.

I once had a friend who suggested we create an audience clapping after a song. I told him there needed to be a space where you could place that audience in the mix. He thought just recording someone clapping over and over again would be sufficient. Because I couldn't correctly relate to him what would be needed for the audience clapping to be "real" within the mix, I decided to just record about 10 different tracks of several of us clapping.

Each track did have its own individual aspects, because there were about 4 of us doing the clapping. But, you need to think about ambiance, even with an audience. Space, distance from the microphone, the degree or magnitude of the claps, if you want to add anybody whistling...it's all in this mish-mash of the room space you decide on. Like the multiple violins...it can become quite labor intensive to make something sound like something it isn't.

What we ended up with was what really sounded like somebody dropping a bunch of ping pong balls and they were all hitting at various times. None of the claps were unique enough to sound like a true miked audience, because we started off with only a few hands clapping in the same room, with the same ambiance.

I don't know if it would have been possible to make the necessary changes using volume, reverb and EQ to alter the individual tracks, but it was far from the time he thought it would take to make it sound real. Sometimes, it just takes that "picture" to help people understand how involved something would be to accomplish what they thought was quite simple.
 
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