having some troubles mixing...

  • Thread starter Thread starter Nick The Man
  • Start date Start date
I don't use any reverb... sometimes i apply it to vocals..

tangerine said:
Strip it down and start with the bass drum. Have a play with the eq (try not to use the same eq settings for the guitar as the vocals as these can swamp one another) and have a mess around with position of the instruments in the stereo field don't have eveything in the middle try and create space in your mix and good luck :) .
Click to expand...

ahh yeah this is the name of the game it seems .. thanks
 
Can you get us some screen shots of your mix window and some sound samples? You really aren't giving us much information to work with, hell I'm not even sure what genre of music you're trying to mix, it makes a difference. I used to lose my kicks all the time until I realized that maybe I should do more of my mixing around it(especially for the heavier rock/metal songs). Of course you want some really good attack to help cut thru the mix but you also need the lowend to give it some punch and balls. Also you need to beef up the snare if it's barely there. I used to cut the hell outta the low end on the snare in an attempt to keep it out of the way of everything and would just end up with a whimpy "tick, tick" snare sound. Now I add just the slightest bit of the right lowend so you can feel it when listening to the mix. As far as guitars, and vox goes, I just get that right at the source, neither really ever needs eq'ing. I use the mic to get the right sounds from the speaker and use the amp to eq the way I like it. As far as the singer, I actually spend time now finding the right mic for the voice and then usually just add a small splash of delay(I'm anti-reverb right now). Now what I'm about to say may seem like blasphemy in the studio world but, I'm almost 100% compression free now. Volume adjustments act as my "leveler". This is just how I do stuff and may not relate to you at all, but hopefully there's at least a little something in here that can help you.
 
I just hear a LOT of inappropriate production approaches for this kind of song.

The drum tracking is pretty bad. You just aren't capturing the instrument in a way where it sounds good. Possibly, the drummer has a horribly tuned kit, but SOME of the problem is how it is being captured too.
 
is there anyways i can upload the tracks on here and then let someone else mix it ... im curious as to how it would sound if someone else mixed this song
 
You could zip all the properly labled files and then find somewhere to host said zip file, and we could mix it.

I rarely use traditional compression, but I hardlimit. I do what I can to track with good dynamics (ie: if I'm singing I'll back up if I get louder), but if I want to bring the whole track up, I limit at -3dB and bring up the track a comfrotably amount, sometimes as much as 6dB or sometimes as little as .5dB.

As far as mixing goes, I almost always start with the drums, get a mix and send them to a sub (in my DAW), I then mix around the drum tracks, and bring individual mics as needed. After listening to a song a few times and adding envelopes as needed, I'm pretty much on the home stretch. When EQing, it's best to have an idea of what sound you want, and know if it's realistic to achieve it with EQ or by changing the source (ie: use a different snare drum). Also, a basic EQ technique is to boost and sweep. If you're using a paragraphic EQ in your DAW it's easy, boost a frequency about 10dB, maybe more if needed (be careful not to blow speakers when sweeping the low frequencies), then sweep the frequencies until you find a frequency that you like or don't like, then boost or cut as needed.
 
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The guitar and bass sounds good to me, the vocals seems out of place.
Its a good idea to upload the tracks and let us try to mix it : )
The drums is fine to me, only the kick drums should be a little louder.

Great tune! I'm addicted to it.
 
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