I should mention no effects were added before recording started. I just have raw, unaltered recordings. 2 songs were her singing over an mp3. 1 song was her singing over acoustic guitar I recorded. 1 song was her singing over guitar, bass (both through guitar rig) and a drum track (made in battery) that I made.
Teach me anything. Thanks.
Firstly, did you record her voice on separate tracks or is it all combined now? (Separate is better).
I'm pretty new to this too, but I've been getting some lessons at a friend's studio and here's how it seems to me so far:
Basically, there seem to be a big range of technical possibilities but they mostly lead towards the general goal of improving and highlighting the parts you want to emphasize and reducing or removing all the unnecessary bits. That might mean removing stray noises, cutting out spikes that go too high or low, improving the ‘punch’ of something, or just making it sound better. It can also mean ruthlessly cutting some instruments out of the mix until it’s their turn to contribute. You want to get a balance that is both musically artistic and technically good.
But apart from doing some polishing on the actual noises (and the possibilities of that alone seem huge...), it’s also good to try and create some kind of “sound stage”. This also seems to involve a more or less endless array of possibilities, but using panning is an important part of producing an appealing stereo image, rather just a mono effect with everything piled up in the middle. Panning can involve incredibly subtle ways of ‘virtually’ moving the sounds around, and I admit to not really knowing how to do it yet. But it’s worth investigating in as much detail as you can manage.
This article might give you a sniff at some of the issues, but I'm sure there's plenty more detailed stuff around once you know what to Google for.
The Art of Mixing
You can start, as you suggest, by simply adjusting volumes. Try things like pulling the backing right down while the vocals are going, but pull them immediately back again when the word stops (assuming you have individual tracks of course). If it’s done well the casual listener will imagine that the band is going louder all the way through than is actually the case, but they can still hear the words. Listen carefully to a variety of songs and see if you can pick some of the strategies they're using to make sure that the right sound is centre stage when it needs to be, and what happens to the others in the meantime.
When I started listening purely to hear what the mix was doing, I was quite surprised by the amount of silence that was involved. Sometimes it’s literally a fraction of a second of complete silence, but more often it’s long periods where one instrument or another didn’t feature at all. It’s a bit like watching an amateur band - if everybody plays full bore all the way through the result is a mess of sound that doesn’t always blend properly and lacks definition, balance, and variation.
Good luck with it all. It doesn't matter how rough the early results are, it's all good learning and all fun.
Cheers,
Chris
