Good Place for vocals w Spoken word poetry and background jazz groove???

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mshea

mshea

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I HAVE NO IDEA where to PUT a THING! Pan? What? Where? HELP!!! I wish I could get this right but I don't have a place to start.

6 Tracks.

Drum Beat
Organ Jam/Groove
Acoustic Bass
Acoustic Piano
Wierd synth thing
One Female Voice speaking rhythmic poetry.

I have NO IDEA where to PUT any of them. Currently i've got everything glommed together...but need some separation and clarity...If vocals aren't WWWAAYYY UP! They glom into music....but don't want to lose the background groove either. HEEELLLPPP!!!
 
Ok, I would do roughly this:

The bass dead in the middle (Always I think)
The keyboard I would expand far out to both sides. And keep at low volume.
Is the drums on one track? If so they should go in the middle, at least if they use kick and snare. Otherwise I like to pan hi hats and suchlike slightly off.
Experiment with the organ, mayby pan it so it sits right in one speaker (7-10% panned) this may sound unbalanced though if you dont have anything else to weigh up on the other side. As I said, try.
As for the vocal. EQ. Leave room for the vocal by cutting frequencies in the opposing instruments where the vocal can stits so it can stand out more. You can make the vocal clearer by EQ:ing too. This is a whole science as you probably know. Search the web for info on witch frequencies do what where. (I dont have any links in front of me as im at work, sorry)

Good luck!
 
Oh of course! I forgot the piano. Pan the piano and organ against each other. Should work.
 
Hmmm?

OK... I will give this a try... :) THANK YOU! I'll let you know how it turns out.
 
i would pan the bass to one side a bit (9 o clock) and pan the drums opposite (3 o clock)...

pan the piano and organ opposite of each other a little further out....

then do the synth in stereo hard left and hard right....

spoken word dead center.......

kinda odd? maybe.....
 
Pan Bass to 9 o´clock?

Thats a bold move.
They didnt even dothat in the sixties...
 
Being a jazz nut myself, I would have the bass slapped up right in the middle using the Charles Mingus technique of mic'ing the acoustic by pointing a condenser or pzm DIRECTLY at the cleft-hole of the bass. I would mic the drums using 3 mics;1 for snare (with a slight percussive 'verb and have the tail end of verb panned left and the snare hit panned right<Jazz drummer Art Blakey described this technique in a DownBeat mag a few eons ago>) 1 mic for the kick and 1 for the overheads. Piano s/b panned lightly right(10:00 pos),dry using the pedals for any verb or sustain and the organ panned left,not hard (3:00 pos). Vocs dead center,using a de-esser for siblance destruction and add a slight voc 'verb for taste!
 
I gathered good results with doing the rough eq-ing mono until all the instruments sound fairly ok (best done with only one speaker ;) ).
I do all the paning afterwards...
 
yep, alot of us are dealing with music where the kick,snare,and bass are the foundation of the mix and not putting them center is a no-no.....alot of times in jazz those 3 components dont play the same role as they do in pop, rock, funk, etc....so it really depends on what role each instrument is contributing to the mix......

Im not big on jazz like MrQ so id take advice from him before myself.......
 
Set the drum level first then bring in the bass and vocals. Get those mixed right and just bring in the rest slowly until it feels right.

Just make sure you balance your stereo image. If piano is on the left then put organ more to the right, etc.
 
There is a cool recording by Material on an album called Hallucination Engine. It is funk/jazz with William Burroughs talking over the top.

You might want to give it a listen for some ideas.
 
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