Help please!

[Change of POETS]

Have you tried turning up your monitors? Seriously, put in some earplugs and show them what loud is. It sounds like you have your monitors turned down and the track turned up.

My monitors are at 85dbSPL at a -14dbRMS signal in the DAW.

The problem is, the client is 3500 miles away in Austria, and I have no idea what their monitoring environment is like.

 

[RedStone]

Why not turn everything else down 1dB and the vocals down like a half a dB - that will give an apparent 1 to 2dB gain in the drums - then raise the volume on the master bus when you play it back for your client to compensate

 

[Change of POETS]

Hey Poets,

I apologize, as it seems I misunderstood the intent of your question, originally.

Call me Change, it's my stage name and I used to be in a group called P.O.E.T.S. when I signed up here a few years back. I requested a name change via an Admin, but they never even bothered with a response.

Anyway, it's not your fault you misunderstood. I suck at communicating (or so my wife says) so it's likely my fault.

I was actually kind of confused at first, because the quality of your mix didn't seem like it would have came from someone who didn't know some of this rudimentary stuff. You do good work, obviously.

Thanks. I'm still learning quite a bit, and that's why I'm looking for some new technique here to achieve what they want. My knowledge is tapped.

Having been in similar situations that you're currently in ... first off, I would say the most important thing to do is to keep your composure. From the tone of your post, it seems like there's a degree of urgency to this, and you really want to be able to give them what they want and still have a good mix. And that's good.

But keep in mind that most musicians are basically turds. Or at least the ones that work with me. I'm a musician, and I'll freely admit I was once a turd. Now that we have that out of the way, remember that you were hired to mix, I'm assuming, and not master. So what would be so wrong with explaining to them that you may have reached the limits of your capabilities? That you consider yourself a very competent mixer ... but merely an adequate mastering engineer at best. And their music is SSOOOO GOOOD, that you just don't feel that you can do justice to the greatness that is their music in that regard.

That way, you can just pass the baton to someone else and say : "Here, you deal with it."

I've been mastering for about 4 years. I'm not as good at that as I am mixing. But I'm a pretty decent ME. However, I suck at Limiting. I've tried every trick I've read up on... Somehow, I can't squeeze the life out of a mix like some ME's can, and still retain the low end power. I always get distortion when I try to push passed the -10dbRMS mark. However, I prefer to save dynamics so that's incredibly loud to me.

Now if this wasn't an option for me, the next thing I personally would do would be to pull out the multiband compressor. If the beat is distorting, it isn't very likely that it's distorting accross the frequency spectrum. More than likely, it's a particular frequency band that is the culprit, and I would further guess it is the very low / sub frequencies just to make a wild guess.

If you can work a little magic with the multiband, in theory you would be able to bring up the overall volume on the whole beat while still keeping the offending frequency range in check so it doesn't distort. This is probably what a good ME would do anyway.

Honestly, I'm a MB hater. I've always been under the perception that if I need to use the MB in mastering, the mix isn't right. However, the mix isn't perfect in this case because of the producer's laziness, and the clients desire for low end.

Lastly, when someone tells me they want something louder in the mix, and it's already unbelievably loud, the first thing I'll generally do is EQ it differently; specifically, I'll zero in on some midrange frequencies that the human ear is very sensitive to. This will raise the "perceived loudness," sometimes by a drastic amount, without actually having to raise the actual loudness at all. This is good, economical use of headroom. Making something sound louder without chewing up any additional headroom is money, in the mixing world. Any time you can do that, you're going to make it that much easier for the Mastering guy to get a louder mix.

Any time you've got any element of a mix that is very loud, but sounds like it could still come up ... it means that you're wasting valuable headroom on something that's not making the mix sound louder. It's just eating up headroom.
.

This is good info, and I'll try to utilize it on this track. Should I use a 30hz rolloff on it to kill the subharmonics? I tried that and it seemed to kill a lot of the lowend, and that's what they don't want... Maybe some gain in the midrange with a subtraction in the 30hz are will work? Save me some headroom from the lowend, and be perceived as louder...

Thanks, Chess.

 

[SonicAlbert]

I should have listened to the mix before saying anything at all.

The vocals sound great, nice job. They do seem a bit too hot in relation to everything else. Like maybe not just 1/2 or 1 dB too hot either. Each part of the mix sounds okay to me, except that their relationship to each other has not quite come together.

The deep kick and the hand clap/snare are certainly a problem. They are too loud and the rest of the drums are certainly too soft. My meters here are showing red when I play the track, they can't mean volume alone when they are talking about having it be louder.

I think what they are talking about is that the drums are very simple and not filled in much. Very much ballad type drums. so there's an emptiness about the drum track and the whole mix because there isn't a lot of rhythmic fill.

You need to eq the clap/snare down and get the kick down as well. Then you need to bring the whole drum track up so that it fills the mix more. Same with some of the other instruments. like the piano should come up a touch. The vocals are just a bit overpowering and the backing tracks too far back. So as a result the song and arrangement feels empty and lifeless. I think this is what they are talking about when they say "louder, louder".

Sometimes you just have to translate what someone is telling into what they really mean.

Regarding wide, you might want to hit the drums with a short delay or two and pan that hard left and right. A spacializer/widener type thing could work as well, but you have to careful with those.

The mix sounds pretty good, but the various elements of the arrangement are just not quite working with themselves yet. Hope this commentary helps a little.

 

[SonicAlbert]

Also, don't roll of the low end, that's part of the sound they are going for. I *guarantee* they'll be unhappy if that sub-bass goes away!

 

[tarnationsauce2]

I'd like to add a couple things.
When a client wants a change, sometimes they don't know to convey what they want. I 'll ask what exactly they want different and to cite an example if they know of one in a particular song. Have them show you the example if you don't have it in your personal music collection or can't find it online.

He obviously doesn't know how to say what he wants, because chorus on kick and snare would loose a lot of the definition and impact. But sure it'll be "wider".

To the problem at hand (kick / snare stems). I'd try to isolate them from eachother if possible.
If the audio came from a MIDI sequence, all the hits might be the same velocity. If the snare is even a hair quieter, you can put a gate with the threshold just above the snare's peak. That'ss give you a dedicated kick track.
Or you can go the loooong way and apply volume envelopes to 2 copies of the kick/snare tracks to make one kick, and one snare.

To make things wider, You could use comb filtering. But leave everything under 120hz or so alone (mono).

 

[kylen]

Nice song - not the genre I usually tweak. Here's a thought anyway. The bass is really very highly correlated in the stereo field, smack dab exactly right down the middle - although it opens up a later on.

Try to uncorrelate it a bit, the producer is even asking for this by mentioning a chorus on the bass. I ran a couple of experiments although my monitoring is the cans at this hour of the evening (I'm in an apartment) so this is just a guess.

I ran an aux to a LP filter (about 120Hz) followed by various things like a chorus and impulse reverb. I didn't really like the chorus because the resulting combs killed the mix too much. A couple of different impulses in SIR stirred things up in the bass a bit and let it move around a touch in the stereo field. In fact since SIR has a EQ in series with the wet signal I just moved SIR to an insert and low-passed the wet signal within SIR and blended dry/wet. The impulse is from noisevault.com and is PCM91 room medium space. Probably any number of impulses would do. A simple delay, although it decorrelates the bass caused too much combing for my taste also.

I know usually a centered bass is what we strive for many times but the bass you have here might be too centered for the clients taste. Just a thought.

 

[chessrock]

I've been mastering for about 4 years. I'm not as good at that as I am mixing. But I'm a pretty decent ME. However, I suck at Limiting. I've tried every trick I've read up on... Somehow, I can't squeeze the life out of a mix like some ME's can, and still retain the low end power. I always get distortion when I try to push passed the -10dbRMS mark.

I agree that you're a good mixer. At least based on the sample you posted.

But I am noticing some conflicting sentiments, here. I really think this might be the source of your difficulties, here. It kinda' sounds like the mixer is being asked to take on more than what most mixers are asked or expected to do. The client is asking the mixer to do the mastering. And although you're the mixer ... you did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, so what the heck?

Anyway, situations like these are the reason that mixing and mastering tend to be viewed as two separate functions, and in a perfect world, a serious project will be put in to the hands of a dedicated tracking / mixing engineer, and later sent off to a dedicated mastering engineer; preferably a good one who is very comfortable with the limiting, multiband compression, and all the other goodies that sometimes us tracking/mixing guys might not be as proficient at.

Again, I would word it in a very complimentary tone to the client: "Your music is of a caliber that is just waiting to blow people's minds. The masses will be clamoring for it by the boatload, and if you really want to make your mark on this generation of listeners, you might consider sending it off to have it mastered by a specialist who only does mastering." Or some BS like that.
.

 

[flatfinger]

you did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, so what the heck?



"Your music is of a caliber that is just waiting to blow people's minds. The masses will be clamoring for it by the boatload, and if you really want to make your mark on this generation of listeners, you might consider sending it off to have it mastered by a specialist who only does mastering." Or some BS like that.
.

who did yer hair, it's FABULOUS !!!!
can I have my check now?

 

[chessrock]

Exactly.

Flatfinger is feelin' me.

 

[Robert D]

Oh no, not the schmooz knob.