No feedback required - just sharing w/ friends - Who We Are - "Brown Haired Girl"
Brown Haired Girl by Who We Are | Free Listening on SoundCloud
This was a fun one.
Last Monday morning, about 6 am, long story short, I had a dream ... and some guy was singing this song in a church hall. You know it was a dream because I've not been in a church for years.
Anyways ... I realized I liked the song -- about the same time I realized I was dreaming and needed to remember it for later -- so I woke up, got out of bed, and (dragged a comb across my head) recorded a sketch pad version of what I could remember.
Band came over on Tuesday (next day), and we had a "creative session" scheduled. I introduced this to them, and then we spent the whole time piecing a song structure together from the bits and parts that I'd jotted down. This was the last take of the evening, and I decided to record it.
I thought it came out pretty well. If folks aren't bored already, I'll share a common mixing mistake that I made when I started the mix.
Sometimes, when something is really new ... and we're excited about it, we will inadvertently make it too LOUD -- and in early versions of the mix, that's exactly what I did. I compressed the shit out of the drums because ... well ... I wanted to hear every ghost tone on the snare.
Wrong. When you make this mistake, you suck up all the oxygen in the room -- and the rest of the instruments need to compete too hard for space and attention in the frequency mush. The result is a 2D sonic collage -- all the sounds pressed hard against the glass ceiling.
I was later reminded of how wrong I was as I watched some Waves videos. I would encourage some of the folks here to visit Waves.com, and watch some of those "Building a mix" videos. They are excellent. Some folks might not get the nuances of the presentation until they learn more about the craft, but they really are a good source of information. Yes, they are selling plugins at the same time, but regardless, they're quite good.
Anyways ... the presenter goes through drums and bass -- building the mix foundation -- which is exactly how I do it also -- and, as a veteran, he has a certain regimen to his mixing routine. This is where I was reminded of how foolish I'd been. He gets all his drum tracks in the "same range" -- which I do too. This is not the same as "normalization" -- which maximizes gain on a track -- for in most cases, I've got the kick and snare peaking at between -12 to -6 db -- nowhere NEAR max on the channels -- plenty of headroom on each individual track.
But I was running the track output levels really hot; and he reminded me to strip the tracks of all compression so when fed to the drum-sub, the sum on the sub-bus should not be clipping as ALL the tracks are fed to it. In my case, this meant going from the -3db area to the -16db area on the individual faders (I use 8 channels for drums: Kick/Snare/HH/RTL/RTR/FT/OHL/OHR). Once I wasn't clipping the sub-bus, I then folded in the compression.
Wow. What a difference. The drums opened up. NOW you can make alteration in tone, and have space around the kit. So much more natural. Snare and toms were parallel compressed for tone and punch. Snare has a plate on it, and the (on the drum sub-mix) has a room reverb on it.
The bass came down. The guitar and keys came down -- the air in the mix opened.
The drums can take all the air out of the room if you let them. Remember that protocol, and you'll have much less of an issue with it.
Stay safe all you folks up in the northeast and mid atlantic this weekend! The storm looks like a winter mess!!
Brown Haired Girl by Who We Are | Free Listening on SoundCloud
This was a fun one.
Last Monday morning, about 6 am, long story short, I had a dream ... and some guy was singing this song in a church hall. You know it was a dream because I've not been in a church for years.
Anyways ... I realized I liked the song -- about the same time I realized I was dreaming and needed to remember it for later -- so I woke up, got out of bed, and (dragged a comb across my head) recorded a sketch pad version of what I could remember.
Band came over on Tuesday (next day), and we had a "creative session" scheduled. I introduced this to them, and then we spent the whole time piecing a song structure together from the bits and parts that I'd jotted down. This was the last take of the evening, and I decided to record it.
I thought it came out pretty well. If folks aren't bored already, I'll share a common mixing mistake that I made when I started the mix.
Sometimes, when something is really new ... and we're excited about it, we will inadvertently make it too LOUD -- and in early versions of the mix, that's exactly what I did. I compressed the shit out of the drums because ... well ... I wanted to hear every ghost tone on the snare.
Wrong. When you make this mistake, you suck up all the oxygen in the room -- and the rest of the instruments need to compete too hard for space and attention in the frequency mush. The result is a 2D sonic collage -- all the sounds pressed hard against the glass ceiling.
I was later reminded of how wrong I was as I watched some Waves videos. I would encourage some of the folks here to visit Waves.com, and watch some of those "Building a mix" videos. They are excellent. Some folks might not get the nuances of the presentation until they learn more about the craft, but they really are a good source of information. Yes, they are selling plugins at the same time, but regardless, they're quite good.
Anyways ... the presenter goes through drums and bass -- building the mix foundation -- which is exactly how I do it also -- and, as a veteran, he has a certain regimen to his mixing routine. This is where I was reminded of how foolish I'd been. He gets all his drum tracks in the "same range" -- which I do too. This is not the same as "normalization" -- which maximizes gain on a track -- for in most cases, I've got the kick and snare peaking at between -12 to -6 db -- nowhere NEAR max on the channels -- plenty of headroom on each individual track.
But I was running the track output levels really hot; and he reminded me to strip the tracks of all compression so when fed to the drum-sub, the sum on the sub-bus should not be clipping as ALL the tracks are fed to it. In my case, this meant going from the -3db area to the -16db area on the individual faders (I use 8 channels for drums: Kick/Snare/HH/RTL/RTR/FT/OHL/OHR). Once I wasn't clipping the sub-bus, I then folded in the compression.
Wow. What a difference. The drums opened up. NOW you can make alteration in tone, and have space around the kit. So much more natural. Snare and toms were parallel compressed for tone and punch. Snare has a plate on it, and the (on the drum sub-mix) has a room reverb on it.
The bass came down. The guitar and keys came down -- the air in the mix opened.
The drums can take all the air out of the room if you let them. Remember that protocol, and you'll have much less of an issue with it.
Stay safe all you folks up in the northeast and mid atlantic this weekend! The storm looks like a winter mess!!