is this true?

D

djclueveli

New member
is it true that the less instruments you have in a mix the bigger each instrument has to be? and what exactly does this mean and how is it done?
 
djclueveli said:
is it true that the less instruments you have in a mix the bigger each instrument has to be? and what exactly does this mean and how is it done?
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Yes, no, it's kinda true.

You have an audio spectrum available that goes from low to high. With a dense mix (many instruments and tracks), you hafta carve out audio notches for each instrument.

With less instruments, you can let each instrument use more of its full bandwidth, so, in effect, each instrument appears "bigger" in the final mix.
 
Yeah if you have fewer instruments, everything has more room to breath, and you don't need to mess with things as much. Desner mixes need more work.

Sometimes it's good to sit back and take stock of it all, and think "do I really need this in here". Some times simplicity is the best way to go. Othertimes it isn't.
 
You shouldn't have to "carve" very much, unless something was recorded improperly, the tone is way off, etc. I now officially hate the very concept of "carving," unless it's a thanksgiving turkey.

Sometimes less is more. And if you've got a really slammin' drum track, a thick guitar, and the bass is thumpin' away right in the pocket ... sometimes adding more layers just for the sake of adding more layers winds up achieving the opposite effect. And suddenly that thick guitar has to compete with something else, or the midrange of the bass guitar is suddenly covered up by another busy rhythm track or whatever ... and you wind up with a thinner, more crowded / congested mix as opposed to bigger, more open one.

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I'd rephrase it to each instrument is *allowed to be* "bigger" in the mix. Not "needs" to be.

An acoustic guitar in a metal power-ballad can be rather "thin" sounding, but still be fairly gigantic in the mix. Throw the rest of the distorted guitars in after the hook near the end, and the "gigantic" sounding acoustic just got smashed - sonically speaking.
 
chessrock said:
You shouldn't have to "carve" very much, unless something was recorded improperly, the tone is way off, etc. I now officially hate the very concept of "carving," unless it's a thanksgiving turkey.
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"Carving" can also be achieved by the proper selection of mics and mic placement. Maybe "assigning frequency ranges" would have been a better phrase.
 
That's a good way to put it.

So much more of it still depends on the instruments and the technique. It's kind of tough to "assign" a frequency range ... :D I mean it is what it is, and it's at where it's at for the most part.

Certainly, various elements can be emphasized, de-emphasized, or rolled off by mic selection / technique, which can certainly help shape things, but using terms like "carving" or "assigning" I believe tends to imply far too much power / influence on the engineering side of things. Something people really need to learn to break themselves of if they ever want truly progress, in my opinion.

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Harvey Gerst said:
"Carving" can also be achieved by the proper selection of mics and mic placement. Maybe "assigning frequency ranges" would have been a better phrase.
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chessrock said:
That's a good way to put it.

So much more of it still depends on the instruments and the technique. It's kind of tough to "assign" a frequency range ... I mean it is what it is, and it's at where it's at for the most part.
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As we're carving out a definition of "carving out" or "assigning", I'd like to take it even a step further and say that it goes as far back - or at least it should - as the arrangement of the song itself.

If one wants to create a dense mega-track mix where everything fits and it all works, they really need to design it in the arrangement first, with an eye towards (among many other things) just which part(s) of the spectrum each part is meant to dominate, and at which point(s) in the song.
legionserial said:
Yeah if you have fewer instruments, everything has more room to breath, and you don't need to mess with things as much. Denser mixes need more work.
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I'd say yes and no to that. The less busy a mix, the more important it becomes to get the sound of each instrument sounding good.

Add a piano accompaniment to a mix of drums, bass, two guitars, an organ, two vocals and a horn section, and your probably not so worried about whether it emphasizes the fine nuanced sound of a quality grand concert piano, even if that's what you're using. OTOH, on a sparse mix of, say, vocals and piano, the details of the piano sound can become much more important and require more attention to tracking and mixing detail (depending on what sound you're looking for.)

G.
 
SouthSIDE Glen said:
I'd say yes and no to that. The less busy a mix, the more important it becomes to get the sound of each instrument sounding good.
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Very true, but another way to put it would be that you get to spend more time concentrating on getting each instrument to sound good, rather than spending so much time messing around trying to get things to fit. I much prefer working with sparse mixes for that reason. There may be certain naunces to an instrument that you get the freedom to highlight in the mix moreso than if you have a whole bunch of stuff going on. Sometimes I feel that sacrifices have to be made while mixing something with a lot going on. But then that's probably because I'm far from an accomplished mixer.

I say this because I spend a most of my time working on metal, and when I work on something that isn't quite so balls to the wall and full of sound, that freedom can be quite a joy.
 
legionserial said:
Very true, but another way to put it would be that you get to spend more time concentrating on getting each instrument to sound good, rather than spending so much time messing around trying to get things to fit. I much prefer working with sparse mixes for that reason. There may be certain naunces to an instrument that you get the freedom to highlight in the mix moreso than if you have a whole bunch of stuff going on. Sometimes I feel that sacrifices have to be made while mixing something with a lot going on. But then that's probably because I'm far from an accomplished mixer.

I say this because I spend a most of my time working on metal, and when I work on something that isn't quite so balls to the wall and full of sound, that freedom can be quite a joy.
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Simpler mixes usually sound better by their very nature, IMHO. Less is often more. I find them more fun to work with also, but usually because they just plain sound better.

I REALLY enjoy working on complicated mixes with a ton of tracks designed and arranged really well (think Poi Dog Pondering or Alan Parsons), but on this level those projects are few and far between. Most 30-track projects that I see I wind up virtually discarding 22 of those 30 tracks.

YMMV, of course.

G.
 
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