Need help with mix

C

chuckduffy

Well-known member
Just kidding - nothing I can do with this one. Telegram Sam got me in a nostalgic mood, and I'm going to reveal all my heavy hitter mix secrets on this one. Recorded in 1987 on a Peavey AMR 4 track, no noise reduction, standard speed. Korg DD-5 drum machine with the snare turned off and me playing on my flea market snare miced with an sm58. I played bass along with the drums and bounced this to another stereo deck. Popped this stereo tape in the amr and did the main vocals and guitar to track 3 and the background vocals on track 4. Mixed the whole thing down to a stereo vhs deck. Fast forward 25 years transferred the track to my daw and for ultimate unlimited superlative fidelity rendered to 128kbps. YIKES! The f'd up thing is I remember it like it was yesterday.

i know u
 
"I'm going to reveal all my heavy hitter mix secrets on this one. Recorded in 1987 on a Peavey AMR 4 track, no noise reduction, standard speed." THAT is how you got that vintage sound! :-) It does have a vintage sound? Considering everything above, I'd have to give a hat tip. Mammaries, stories,,, Ah yes, I remember those.
 
That sounds great for a 25 year old recording. I just stopped using a cassette 4 track recorder a few years ago and I could never get anything I did to sound that good
 
Jim D said:
That sounds great for a 25 year old recording. I just stopped using a cassette 4 track recorder a few years ago and I could never get anything I did to sound that good
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Thanks Jim. I always found it easy to record and mix on a 4 track as, well there isn't much to mix. The AMR was a great machine, not the typical 4track and I've never met anyone else who owned one. It was capable of much, much better quality than this, depending who was at the controls :-)

cakewalkKaKed said:
Kewl !!! it sounds almost as though you made it yesterday with a saturation plug :D
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I didn't know what a compressor was then, didn't use noise reduction and hit the tape all hard all the time. The level of distortion on the individual tracks was amazing when I queued up some of the tapes a while back. Half the time I didn't even use distortion or overdrive on the guitar - it was half overdriving the board and half distorting on tape :-)

RockinRobby said:
"I'm going to reveal all my heavy hitter mix secrets on this one. Recorded in 1987 on a Peavey AMR 4 track, no noise reduction, standard speed." THAT is how you got that vintage sound! :-) It does have a vintage sound? Considering everything above, I'd have to give a hat tip. Mammaries, stories,,, Ah yes, I remember those.
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Yes - I am now vintage. I find vintage me cringeworthy, but it's still fun to listen to when I get nostalgic. Several of my friends would say the words "Mammaries, stories" along with the song back in the day, so that brought back memories :-)
 
That sounded a lot better than I expected! In 1987 I was still doing "home recording" with a boom box. By the time I got a 4-track, I wasn't able to do stuff like this at all.

You could've been in a U2 cover band with that voice!
 
heatmiser said:
That sounded a lot better than I expected! In 1987 I was still doing "home recording" with a boom box. By the time I got a 4-track, I wasn't able to do stuff like this at all.

You could've been in a U2 cover band with that voice!
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Yeah - on some songs I had a bad case of the bonos :-) I went from the boombox in the bathroom to the 4 track, a keyboard, a drum machine and microphones in one shot (spent up my next semesters tuition money). I don't think have any boombox tapes left though, I found one last year but it was all shed and something bad had spilled on it. I *still* have all my original 4 track tapes though, except for my very first batch that my brother tossed out one day.
 
I really enjoyed this one. The whole mix has a very nice warmth and completeness to it, and the song itself is good too. It made me think of Guided by Voices with that analogue sound. Thanks for sharing Chuck
 
robgreen said:
I really enjoyed this one. The whole mix has a very nice warmth and completeness to it, and the song itself is good too. It made me think of Guided by Voices with that analogue sound. Thanks for sharing Chuck
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Thanks Rob. It was a very prolific, fun, churn it out and get it done period - the 4-track suited that perfectly. There was only so much you could put into a song, and when the tracks were full there was no editing or anything, so the songs were 'done' in a few hours. When I did get this stuff to digital I thought it was funny that 128kbps mp3 actually sounded better for this stuff than the higher bitrate. Go figure.

I like Guided by Voices quite a bit, but I came pretty late to the game for them. I saw them perform last year here in DC, and the show bothered me a little as they have this GOD OF RAWK thing they do on stage and transform small, subtle songs into screaming walls of rock n roll distortion, but still it was a good time.

Love the sig line. I bought Queen is Dead on vinyl the week it came out and wore out my first copy within the year.
 
Yeah, I love that album - Strangeways Here We Come is rarely out of the cd player in my missus car, so I tend to associate long journeys with the pair of us growling along to 'A Rush & A Push...'

I know what you mean about GBV. I saw them probably about 10 years ago now and my main beef was with their obsession to play as many songs as they could fit into the allotted time as if it was some kind of challenge, as opposed to making the set as good as they could.

Hope you've got more work to post up here anyway chuck, I look forward to hearing it.
 
robgreen said:
Yeah, I love that album - Strangeways Here We Come is rarely out of the cd player in my missus car, so I tend to associate long journeys with the pair of us growling along to 'A Rush & A Push...'

I know what you mean about GBV. I saw them probably about 10 years ago now and my main beef was with their obsession to play as many songs as they could fit into the allotted time as if it was some kind of challenge, as opposed to making the set as good as they could.

Hope you've got more work to post up here anyway chuck, I look forward to hearing it.
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That's awesome about the strangeways and the missus car, sounds like found mrs. right too :-) GBV - when I saw them last year it was about chugging jack, chain smoking and marshalls on 11. There's nothing wrong with that, but it just seemed a little tappish if you know what I mean.

As far as more stuff - if we are talking quantity - the forum would run out of patience well before i would run out of songs :-)
 
Really good song & well put together - sounds more Jim Kerr than Bonobo - but pre stadium Kerr at that.. I still have my Yamaha 4 track & all my tapes.
4 tracks had a certain quality to them. Lot's of thinking things through.
Running hot all the time was THE thing to do & set me up poorly for digital - I actually recorded to tape & then uploaded to comp for a while until I a) learnt how to record properly in digital & b) found that adding 1000 instruments filled out the sound in almost the same way as tape noise did.
Nice to hear the track.
As for low MP3 rate - yeah, I guess the squishing & the hard cut of freqs above & below can be advantageous - certainly was for your track. No artifacts crept in which is good.
As to the Smiths - WOW, I even bought their compliations I loved them so much. Draise Train & Oscillating Wildly being good reasons to buy anything really. Oh & RANK was just a revelation - tough as well as all the other adjectives.
 
rayc said:
Really good song & well put together - sounds more Jim Kerr than Bonobo - but pre stadium Kerr at that.. I still have my Yamaha 4 track & all my tapes.
4 tracks had a certain quality to them. Lot's of thinking things through.
Running hot all the time was THE thing to do & set me up poorly for digital - I actually recorded to tape & then uploaded to comp for a while until I a) learnt how to record properly in digital & b) found that adding 1000 instruments filled out the sound in almost the same way as tape noise did.
Nice to hear the track.
As for low MP3 rate - yeah, I guess the squishing & the hard cut of freqs above & below can be advantageous - certainly was for your track. No artifacts crept in which is good.
As to the Smiths - WOW, I even bought their compliations I loved them so much. Draise Train & Oscillating Wildly being good reasons to buy anything really. Oh & RANK was just a revelation - tough as well as all the other adjectives.
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Thanks Ray! I'm on a real nostalgia kick lately as I turned 45 on the 5th. Of course 4tracks, junky musical instruments, and songs written and recorded 25 years ago are all inextricably tied up in that nostalgia :-) I've heard the Jim Kerr comparison a couple times, Bono more a few. Ian MuCulloch more than a few times on some material, though that was probably more to do with me doing a pretty good version of Killing Moon at live shows. Of course the Smiths are all a part of the wave of nostalgia - as I was pretty much first in line for any new release back in college. My voice has changed considerably over the years, on a posting of a more recent song someone noted that the chorus vocal sounded like JERRY GARCIA! That I had *never* heard in my life, but when I thought about it for a moment I got what he was saying.

I hear you about the transition to digital. It took me a bit to get used to it, but I never really had a problem with the sound. I had a signing bonus for a programming job in 93 or 94 and I picked up the first rev of the Digidesign Session 8 track daw for a measly $3500 and teamed it up with a MIDIVERB 3, a 3630 compressor and a tascam DA30 :-) Worst converters ever, worst pres ever, 16 bit max, 4 total instances of EQ, worst compressor ever, worst reverb ever and to tell you the truth, outside of the STUPID HORRIBLE drum sequences I was using during that period (KORG M1 with onboard sequencer), I have absolutely no problem with the sound I got, nor did I ever think twice about it while I was using it :-)
 
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