Last spring I recorded a dad and daughter acoustic/folk thing, with guitar and bass and vocals, plus me and a buddy added banjo and mandolin at the dad's request. We recorded at my home studio, using a KSM 32 for most everything into a Presonus hybrid mixer/interface. Anyway, this guy happens to be a close friend, and may have not been communicating everything to me like he could have. But my mixes weren't suiting him, and I seriously thought it was because of his own performance he was unhappy - because he mentioned that several times. But later I figured out he didn't like the sonic quality - my mixes sucked, and I would have liked to have known.
There's a million approaches to mixing, with different reverbs and spacial properties along with the different ways to EQ everything. Nothing I tried fit him, and we finally gave up. I've been working on my mixing since, reading up on it, listening, changing up the mixer plugins, mics and preamps and everything. I now have something that I think he'd like, but he told me it's buried. The songs sound 100% better, but it's too late.
So communication is so very important. I needed to let him know he's free to tell me exactly what he thinks about the mix. If it sucks, I want to know - and why. I'm pretty much a newbie, and he knew that coming into the project, and he told me he wasn't mad afterwards, he just knew he learned how not to do it next time. So my first really serious recording flopped. I learned some important communication skills, some major mixing tricks and changes, and I need to bury the project and go on.
There's a million approaches to mixing, with different reverbs and spacial properties along with the different ways to EQ everything. Nothing I tried fit him, and we finally gave up. I've been working on my mixing since, reading up on it, listening, changing up the mixer plugins, mics and preamps and everything. I now have something that I think he'd like, but he told me it's buried. The songs sound 100% better, but it's too late.
So communication is so very important. I needed to let him know he's free to tell me exactly what he thinks about the mix. If it sucks, I want to know - and why. I'm pretty much a newbie, and he knew that coming into the project, and he told me he wasn't mad afterwards, he just knew he learned how not to do it next time. So my first really serious recording flopped. I learned some important communication skills, some major mixing tricks and changes, and I need to bury the project and go on.
