A question of degree.
I read that post on the sticky that talks about working on being able to hear problems and so forth. My questions is, if you are all alone in the world, how do you learn that? The only thing I have is my own little home studio. Are there source files out there that demonstrate this? For example, "here is a bad recording of a track, now here is a good example that you can compare?"
I don't really know what I am listening for. I do understand that a lot of mixing and stuff is subjective,
What I mean is real audio issues that nearly everyone who knows what they are doing would agree are problems that need fixed. How do you learn that stuff from home without taking some $3000 online audio course?
Long question short...how do I learn how and what to listen for from all alone in my room?
This is the dilema that faces all home recorders really. If you compare it to the pro world, home recorders by the very nature of what they are attempting to do will be better at this than most recording artists because
most artists, session musicians and band members
don't do the recording and mixing. That's why there are engineers.......it's also partly why so many artists down the years have actually been dissatisfied with the results. I'm not saying the majority have, but if it's a minority, it's a huge minority.
I think if you have an instinct for what sounds good (do you tweak your hifi/guitar amp eq etc?) then you'll know what you're trying to achieve and it'll fall into place over time.
My 'instinct' has altered as time has gone by. I used to distort my recordings and it never sounded bad to me. Now, I cannot stand mix distortion, bathed in effects. Recording and mixing for me is a combination of having an idea of certain sounds I want to hear but being open to change and surprize. If one person can like it, 10 can. And 100 etc.
For me, instinct is the key word. Others may disagree but I don't believe in any set of rules that can replace knowing what you want to hear.
And this
is key. Because it's true. Rules set by someone else can't tell you what you like or want to hear. Alot of people however, think they can.
I also think that your tastes and opinions of what is 'good' changes with time and due to differing circumstances. When I first started downloading music, I didn't care if things came in at 96kbps or 128. As my ears have gotten a little more discerning, I can just about tolerate 128 but I always look for 192+ and a 96 will net you a swinging right hook to the rock'n'rolls. Metaphorically, of course.
One can get nervous about posting stuff or letting more experienced people hear your music because it seems like they must have the handle on what constitutes 'good'. But there really aren't universally accepted standards. What you think sounds good today might still be so in 20 years. Or it may not. The music won't have changed. Your opinion of what is good has.
Try to achieve it through physical techniques like mic choice, instrument choice, placement within an environment etc rather than through mixing.
I can be a paradoxical chappie at the best and worst of times and I'm going to be so in regard to this statement. For me the hub and the nub of all things recorded turns on the fusion of these two points. On the one hand, the
sound you achieve will be entirely dependent on how you capture those sounds and this is going to be ifluenced by a number of things as Steen says, like the mics you use, in which combinations and where you put them. The instruments and combinations of those instruments also make a difference.
But the mixing together of those instruments and/or voices is, in my opinion, crucial because I'm of the view that part of mixing is sonic shaping and creation of an artificial soundscape and you can pretty much do what you like. You can subvert the purity of what you've recorded into
something else altogether and it could be valid and sound great. I often hear "never fix it in the mix". I disagree. I say learn
how to fix in the mix. You may never have cause to use what you've learned but you'll at least know how to, should you ever need/want to.
The use of the physical techniques
and mixing combined is how recording has reached where it currently has. Sometimes leaning heavier on one side than the other {depending on the song}, but always in tandem.
I found that getting better at mixing really was about practice and repetition.
I'm not a good mixer at all. But I'm a heck of alot better than I was last year and five years before that and twelve years before that.....Practicing and repeating are, in my opinion, non~negotiable.
I certainly got plenty of snippets of info from asking questions and reading various articles
In the pre~internet days, articles, biographies and interviews were pretty much the only way one found out about recording, unless you knew someone who knew
the dark arts. You'd have to catch the odd statement here and there and somehow try to apply these nebulous terms to the concrete practice and there was definitely an element of pissing in the wind. I suppose one benefit was that you developed your own idea of what 'good' was.
Funnilly enough, there is an overdose of recording information available. You could, theoretically spend your teens and 20s amassing recording information from a humongous library of sources and know all there is to know without ever recording a thing. But the thing that hasn't and can't ever change is
putting the time in is the big thing.
Yeah man, it just takes time through experience.
At the start, few people want to hear this because in our instant coffee world, we have a tendency to want things "that take time to come by"
yesterday ! But it's a statement that, like good music, bears repeated listening and drinking in.
Yeah man, it just takes time through experience.
My primary concern was that since I am an amateur, how can I trust that I know what sounds good? We all know "good" is subjective, but just because I think it sounds good doesn't mean I wouldn't like something else better if I knew it existed.
Somehow, everyone gets eventually exposed to stuff they think is better than what they knew when they first started.
Besides that, making something better doesn't necessarily make it good.
Well, I suppose that's true. A song could be really bad but made better so it's only 'lame'.
I constantly reference my mixes to commercial tracks and save parts of songs that have isolated instruments so that I can try to match some of the qualities that I like.
A weird thing has happened to me. Rather than do this, I think in terms of what I call "approximations". Those approximations are simply start points, a kind of loose idea in my head. Because I don't really want my stuff to sound like anything I listen to. I listen to a very wide variety of genres across the eras and one thing I've picked up without really focusing on it initially is that there is a huge variety in terms of quality of recording, playing, mixing etc. There are great engineers and average ones and lame ones and some who have been all of those at various junctures of their careers. And such a sonically large palette from which to choose.
play commercial music on the monitors.
Say for some reason his monitors/room hype the bass, he'll learn that through referencing commercial tracks on them.
It can also be of use, when you've done a mix, to play it on different mediums to see if it sounds as you want it in different rooms/vehicles and different machines.
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