First Mix I've done

[rahoo]

I recorded my friend's Ska/Punk band and I am on a budget (used mostly my Zoom h4n that I bought for school, along with some crappy "dynamic" karaoke mics) I did this all on Cubase 4LE and used mostly Waves VSTs.

Disclaimer: the drums might sound flat, because I only had about 4 mics, 2 in front (stereo), one on snare and another at the low tom/ride side. also, I'm hoping to get some decent shure mics soon for hopefully re-doing this.

Any tips/critique/etc will be helpful. Thanks!

here's the link:

http://www.soundclick.com/player/single_player.cfm?songid=9956479&q=hi

 

[PDP]

Needs alot of work. The bass is non existant. The drums are buried, the vox and horns stand way out from the mix.

What is your monitoring speakers and amp?

 

[rahoo]

well i dont really use monitors ://....i use studio ref. headphones bc i'm in an apartment right now

 

[.Tyson Studios.]

Like PDP said, needs lots of work. Horns quality were good. The vox sounds terrible on standard computer speakers. It's basically a scratching sound. Bass guitar is alright. Bass drum isn't even existent. That makes the whole drum intro pretty bad. It would sound alot better if you used the 2 overhead, 1 snare, and 1 bass mic method. Keep working on it. Monitors would help alot.

 

[PDP]

well i dont really use monitors ://....i use studio ref. headphones bc i'm in an apartment right now

OK, that says alot, your going to have to play the mix on any other system you can, car stereo, whatever, because its impossible to get good levels on headphones alone. You can get M-audio av20s off Ebay cheap (little tiny monitors), even using them low, you'll still get much better results.

 

[killthepixelnow]

I recorded my friend's Ska/Punk band and I am on a budget (used mostly my Zoom h4n that I bought for school, along with some crappy "dynamic" karaoke mics) I did this all on Cubase 4LE and used mostly Waves VSTs.

You can get a decent recording with cheap stuff if you know how to use it.

Disclaimer: the drums might sound flat, because I only had about 4 mics, 2 in front (stereo), one on snare and another at the low tom/ride side. also, I'm hoping to get some decent shure mics soon for hopefully re-doing this.

Led Zeppelin recorded with just three mics. You can even record with just one mic! Placement is the clue. With four mics you can have two overheads to capture the cymbals, snare and toms. The other mic can go in front of the kicks and the last to the snare, with some hi-hat bleed.


Now, I've listened with headphones and it's all balanced to the left... it seems that you're having some panning issues (the placement of the instruments along the sound spectrum). A good pair of monitors will be very useful if you're planning to do serious mixing.

One little thing more, if you don't have a decent amp at home, run the signal thru a Direct Injection (DI) box to capture the clean signal so you can re-amp later.