Not a fan of tinkering with live tracks. You either capture it perfectly at the show or spend endless hours trying to get it sounding decent.
That said, this is a good board capture. What are you looking for from the master? Power? Volume? Certain instruments to be more present?
Well what I did was certainly not my attempt at overdoing it.
When I have some spare time I'll give it some more attention.
Thanks on the compliments. I recorded this using presonus studio/live board + studio solo with an old studiomaster board 24 tracks wide plus monitor and foh mixes. It was a pain in the ass to null the monitors and mains out of the mix, plus control all that bass and guitar bleed in the drums. I have it out in distribution on an EP, but looking at a go around in re-mastering of this track on a two song single for the merch table. what I am looking for is an all around loudness increase. maybe something stronger mids and possibly something in the highs. I tried the guy at Mercury, but what he gave me was to ploppy in the kicks and a breathy master compressor. But it seemed he was more interested into mixing the song himself (for a fee, of course). I am willing to pay someone to master this without it sounding like someone is overdoing it.
I only listened to the original and Pinky's first attempt. Does anybody else feel like there's a wall right in the middle of the stage? I mean, hard panning is one thing, but those guitars on the far side sound like they are completely isolated from everything else in the mix, off on the sides all by themselves. It's the weirdest damn thing, and I suspected some sort of phase fuckery causing it. Collapsing to mono makes the whole mix sound nasty and trashy and the guitars drop out. It just feels really wrong for some reason. That's on speakers, I think headphones would be horrifying!
Frankly, all of the issues with this mix would better addressed in the mix. Maybe putting some of the spill and bleed back in would help, but it is kinda just turd polishing at this point.
Pinky's first attempt had something strange going on in the way low region, too. It felt like the lowest frequencies from the bass guitar was playing almost perfectly between the beats. Don't know what that is. Might just be me, but there is some disconnect between the sub region and the rest of the mix that freaked me out.
I only listened to the original and Pinky's first attempt. Does anybody else feel like there's a wall right in the middle of the stage? I mean, hard panning is one thing, but those guitars on the far side sound like they are completely isolated from everything else in the mix, off on the sides all by themselves. It's the weirdest damn thing, and I suspected some sort of phase fuckery causing it. Collapsing to mono makes the whole mix sound nasty and trashy and the guitars drop out. It just feels really wrong for some reason. That's on speakers, I think headphones would be horrifying!
Frankly, all of the issues with this mix would better addressed in the mix. Maybe putting some of the spill and bleed back in would help, but it is kinda just turd polishing at this point.
Pinky's first attempt had something strange going on in the way low region, too. It felt like the lowest frequencies from the bass guitar was playing almost perfectly between the beats. Don't know what that is. Might just be me, but there is some disconnect between the sub region and the rest of the mix that freaked me out.
thanks to everyone that participated. I'm going to review these masters.
I think I forgot to mention I used the old 70-80's way of mixing with eqing differentially. There was no sidechain processes like the current stuff is done.
I never use side chain techniques for standard multitrack mixes. But for live stuff where you only have the 2 channels, it may actually be of great benefit.
(assuming we're talking about the same thing here)
This video demonstrates how to cheat a mix, but really that shouldn't be necessary in most mixes and I can only see this as necessary in mastering where the mix isn't quite right (but you can't go back and remix it, like in your case). It's also useful if you like boiler plate hot mixes/masters.