mixing

  • Thread starter Thread starter EleosFever
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EleosFever

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Hello, for about 1 hour now I'm trying to mix a song.. I have tried many effect combinations but there are the same results.. The sounds at the final render is "thin" and no "full" as the professional mixes are.. What is the problem? The effects or must i master the song to get a nice result? If you can suggest me an good article that will help me.. Thanks..

I'm working on reaper..
 
I suggest posting it in the MP3 clinic and let others hear it. They will have a better idea of how to help if they can hear it.

Be sure to listen to others' mixes and leave comments for them... what goes around, comes around, etc. :)

peace.
 
The answer is so much bigger than the question...
 
I was walking around New York the other day, when a guy with a guitar came up and asked me "How do I get to Madison Square garden?".



I said: "Practice".
 
I'm about 3 hours in front of my pc trying to improve the mix but i can't achieve it..
 
You seem to have a monitoring problem. There is no low end in the mix, so you are either hearing low end that isn't there and cutting it out, or the sounds that you were using were thin and crappy in the first place.
 
RAMI said:
I was walking around New York the other day, when a guy with a guitar came up and asked me "How do I get to Madison Square garden?".



I said: "Practice".
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You've been waiting a long time to say that, haven't you? :D
 
Yeah EleosDude...it just takes time and practice.

Many of us have been at this for years and I, for one, still struggle with it at times.

I'm at work so can't listen but, like Farview said...monitoring could be the biggest culprit. And hand in hand with the monitoring is the room. If ya have cheap monitors like I used to have, you can't hear what's REALLY goin on in the mix.
Likewise with the room. If you have an untreated room, it makes it hard to get a good mix. Strong assed bass waves bouncing around etc...

What I did before treating my room was just burn off CD's, try them in various stereos, boomboxes (or whatever there called these days :D ) car stereos etc and take notes of how they translated. Go back to my mix, tweak it based on what I wrote and burn another CD.

Not the optimum way of doing it but you end up learning YOUR monitors in YOUR room.

So maybe fix what you can.....and "Practice."

Luck man....
Kel
 
You can spend years tweaking - But if a mix isn't 90% "there" in around three minutes, it's probably never going to get "there" no matter what.
 
Massive Master said:
You can spend years tweaking - But if a mix isn't 90% "there" in around three minutes, it's probably never going to get "there" no matter what.
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Maybe we need a new thread for this...but how do you guys determine "there"? I have some early recordings, that I keep wanting to revisit to get it "there"...."there" seems to change every few months for me.
 
BenignVanilla said:
Maybe we need a new thread for this...but how do you guys determine "there"? I have some early recordings, that I keep wanting to revisit to get it "there"...."there" seems to change every few months for me.
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You just have to decide and move on. Your old recordings are a chronicle of where you were at the time. Make something new and do something with that.
 
BenignVanilla said:
Maybe we need a new thread for this...but how do you guys determine "there"? I have some early recordings, that I keep wanting to revisit to get it "there"...."there" seems to change every few months for me.
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"There" is making the recording you intended to make.
 
HotRats said:
Maybe the minutes needed are not 3 but 30, but I do agree.
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I think that 3 is closer than 30.

As I track (either my own or other people's stuff), I'm mixing as I go. At any stage of recording, when I do a playback, I'm already working on how it is going to sound in the end. This is handy for two reasons . . . it can indicate whether what you've just tracked is slotting in ok (bearing in mind that other stuff may be added), and it takes less time to do the actual final mix.

This means that by the time the final bit has been tracked, the mix is virtually done, and all that remains is a credibility check.

But there is another way of looking at this . . . because tracking and mixing become pretty much the same process, you could argue that mixing is actually taking the length of time that it takes to track, i.e. many hours!
 
BenignVanilla said:
Maybe we need a new thread for this...but how do you guys determine "there"? I have some early recordings, that I keep wanting to revisit to get it "there"...."there" seems to change every few months for me.
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That's something I call "chasing a phantom mix", or trying to get a mix out of the tracks that just isn't there.

And I'll bet you that overall those subsequent mixes aren't really any better than the mixes you did a few months ago (unless a few months ago you just plain couldn't even mix a drink.) Like Farview said, just leave the old stuff alone and move on.

You mixes will never be perfect, especially after having spent so much intimate time with them. It's like when you spend time with a woman; you find out pretty quick that they all have freckles, and none of them looks like those fake airbrushed and Photoshopped magazine covers, and to expect otherwise is just setting yourself up for an unrealistic disappointment. Your mix is going to have freckles and wrinkles and stuff in it; recognize them for what they are and don't try to make your mix the perfect Photoshopped supermodel that doesn't exist in reality.

Trust your first instincts as far as a mix plan and run with it. When it's done, it's done. If you have to do a little tweaking after listening, fine. But once you find yourself chasing a sound like trying to scratch an unreachable itch, you've probably gone as far as you can go and should accept the results.

G.
 
gecko zzed said:
I think that 3 is closer than 30.

As I track (either my own or other people's stuff), I'm mixing as I go. At any stage of recording, when I do a playback, I'm already working on how it is going to sound in the end. This is handy for two reasons . . . it can indicate whether what you've just tracked is slotting in ok (bearing in mind that other stuff may be added), and it takes less time to do the actual final mix.

This means that by the time the final bit has been tracked, the mix is virtually done, and all that remains is a credibility check.

But there is another way of looking at this . . . because tracking and mixing become pretty much the same process, you could argue that mixing is actually taking the length of time that it takes to track, i.e. many hours!
Click to expand...

Everyone has his own way of working and there are a lot of variables involved in the process.

I mix during tracking only to give a good headphone mix to the musicians and usually when is mixing time I turnoff everything and begin almost from scratch.
The only exeption is when the client needs a final mix deliverd right at the end of the recording session. In that case I have to mix while tracking and, as you stated, you end up mixing for some hours. And most of the time we're talking about music with quite low track counts and not many instruments/musicians involved.

When I mix music I tracked by others, of course, I have to mix from scratch
and, I have to listen to the tune 1 time to understend what's going on and where, 1 time to make a starting point volume and pan balance. At this point eq, compression and fxs are involved and I guess 10 minutes are already gone.

So, I insist :D is more 30 than 3 min. :)
 
SouthSIDE Glen said:
That's something I call "chasing a phantom mix", or trying to get a mix out of the tracks that just isn't there.G.
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I've made this mistake a few times in my life. I came across some tapes from 1996, so I loaded them into Nuendo. I figured that since I have many more tools at my disposal now (as opposed to an analog mixer and limited outboard), I could really make this thing sound like I thought it should in the first place.

I was wrong. With all the drum replacement, UAD plugins, and 15 years more experience, it ended up sounding essentially the same.

That was the second time I made that mistake. The first was when I got the tapes to an old EP that I had done and decided to replay all the guitars. The guitar sound was a sore point from the get-go because the original studio was very small and didn't let the amps breath. (we ended up using combos instead of half stacks) So, the other guitar player and I retracked the guitars, then mixed it. To this day, I can't tell which version I'm listening to until it gets to a part of one of the songs that had an effect that we couldn't recreate on the remix.

Stuff tends to sound like what it wants to. The more you have to shoe-horn a mix together, the worse the results.

Old stuff is just old, move on.

IF it takes you 6 months to mix something, either it just isn't working or you are chasing your tail.
 
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