Dose of Noob Reality

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jeliot86

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I had quite an epiphany today. One of those turning points you have that just makes you go WOW....now I'm getting it! Just Thought I would share with the other noobs out there.

I have been crawling on these forums a little over a year learning the ins/out of recording, mixing, plugins, eq.........the whole enchillada. And thanks to the great people that scour these forums looking to help out the less fortunate.....................I have made real progress in the mixes I have been working on and have learned so much my heads about to explode. Taking bit's here.... pieces there..... and building my mixes. To what I felt where huge leaps

Anyways

Tonight I took a mix that I had been mixing for over a year while learning and decided I wanted to tear it down, even out of the levels bypass all the plugins and start fresh. I set the gains by pure eye, turned up the MASTER and HOLY $#%$........My mix sounded GREAT...............

Demoralized as am right now I have made a huge turning point. The Moral of the story being "LESS IS MORE"............Learn all you can my friends but use SPARINGLY!!!!
 
So true so true.
Many of the landmark albums of our times are of the same philosophy.
 
jeliot86 said:
Demoralized as am right now I have made a huge turning point. The Moral of the story being "LESS IS MORE"............Learn all you can my friends but use SPARINGLY!!!!
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Welcome. We've been waiting for you.
 
Kind of had that same thought when i took an acoustic song i had, and just listened to the dry guitar in the mix - it ended up sounding better than the version i had with a crap load of random effects and plugins on it that i thought, at the time, would make it better! it was an old track, but now that i think about it and ACTUALLY listen to it, that (3000 dollar, but rented) guitar probably didn't need anything on it.
 
Yeah im working on a cd right now for someone. The vocals were done on a tlm103 through an avalon. Someone mixed a few of the songs already and put a ton of eq on the vocals, like 8 dbs of 12k. That was totally unnecessary I bypassed the eq it sounded more natural. Were talking bout female vox here who needs 8 db of 12k on females?!?
 
There is a reason why most of the effects in Audacity are lacking........

Because you don't need them.
 
Congrats on the Satori! We may sound like an old broken record, but it's the way it is. How do I make my recordings sound better? By getting a good performance of a good song on a good instrument in a good room with the right mic in the right place. If you can't do that, all the triggers, samples, plugins, EQ, FX, gates, noise reduction and compression in the world won't help. It is the greatest error of most noobs that they worry about where the sound is going instead of where it's coming from. Think about the signal chain from the front to the back, not the other way around. Then you push the red button.-Richie
 
Richard Monroe said:
Think about the signal chain from the front to the back, not the other way around.
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Absolutely. Or, as I like to mantra it:

It's the performer's job to make the tracking engineer's job easy.
It's the tracking engineer's job to make the mixing engineer's job easy.
It's the mixing engineer's job to make the mastering engineer's job easy.
It's the mastering engineer's job to make the listener's job easy.

G.
 
Indeed....

I've found this forum to be really helpful in just the same manner....I've eased off of a lot of the effects and stopped looking for that "magic bullet!" Of course, I'm also mindful of tose who remind me that the rules are made to be broken ;-)
 
Noobz! You don't know what you're talking about! You need to put at least 3 compressors on a vocal track. For better results, put a reverb between the 2nd and 3rd compressor. Then limit.
:mad:
 
mikemorgan said:
Hi, my name is Mike and I'm addicted to Autotune.........
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Hi Mike,

Autotune is soooo 90s. You need to get yourself off of it, and move into spectral editing. That way you can retune each harmonic in your voice perfectly.
 
I look back at some of my 'mixes' from when I first started out...the crap I had all over each track is crazy....plugins of all kinds...crazy plugin choices...outrageous settings....
 
Monkey Allen said:
I look back at some of my 'mixes' from when I first started out...the crap I had all over each track is crazy....plugins of all kinds...crazy plugin choices...outrageous settings....
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Yeah, me too. I used to think "If it's there, it should be used". Not only effects, but I thought that doubling guitars and vocals (by copying them to another track) made things sound "big", etc....

I can't even listen to anything I did a month ago, but listening to the really old mixes is extremely painful.:eek:
 
File under 'forgetable'

RAMI said:
Yeah, me too. I used to think "If it's there, it should be used". Not only effects, but I thought that doubling guitars and vocals (by copying them to another track) made things sound "big", etc....

but listening to the really old mixes is extremely painful.:eek:
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I think that's natural, we hear of this that and the other and how the great pioneers and grand masters used them on this classic and that classic......as I've been picking up on all kinds of ideas and advice in the mixing realm, I realize I've really been overdoing it big time and my earliest efforts, for the most part really do qualify as "unlistenable !". Less really can be where it's at. I've got the map to 'Unadorned' !!
 
RAMI said:
Yeah, me too. I used to think "If it's there, it should be used".
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I've been at it for eight years now and I still haven't got over this one, and chances are I never will, I think it's part of my character. I've never recorded a song where I haven't used every channel on the mixer and every effect that I have. I don't even stop arranging until I've run out of synths. I will say though that I've learned to live with it and use it to my advantage - I don't remember ever being accused of overproducing, using too many effects or whatever.
 
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At some point you do have to chalk certain things up to taste....I tend to clutter up my instrumental with a lot of synth lines. Sometimes they sound cluttered, other times they sound fuller for my efforts. I have a friend or two that hate my sound simply because they're used to sparser, more simplistic arrangements....but then again, I guess we started off talking about processing, not composing.
 
How about Saturation plugs?????? Valve, Tape ect.......ect........... I used to think every one I tried was next greatest thing on earth. Then I learned to equal the gain going in AND OUT, then flip the bypass on and off.........ooops where did all my MOJO GO? Ohhhhhh that was just VOLUME........:(
 
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