Making Doo

[Alanfc]

with limited resources at home

Whilst referencing Pro CD's, I have found the freq's in my mixes that are harsh and amateur. I got on the parametric and started pulling & sweeping around and made the discoveries. To test my results, I increased the gnarly freq's on the pro CD, and it sounded like my mixes ! I'm pretty happy.

However, I don't have the software power to have enough EQ's to solve everything. Main offenders are voice and electric guitar. The performances and arrangements are keepers. Let's assume for this discussion I will not be able to re-track anything.

My idea:
make a single stereo track of an electric guitar group, and another of a vocal group. This way I can use 1 EQ for each as my cure. Then possibly blend in a bit of individual tracks here & there if necessary.
This would be instead of EQ'ing down the harshness on the whole single stereo track mix. This is for our band's homemade CD with my amateur homebrew "mastering".

Are there any sonic problems with this? The stereo tracks would represent all the panning of the guitars and voices (right?). To then bounce these stereo groups to the whole final stereo file, is there a problem with this that my untrained ear will miss?

thanks

 

[JKestle]

I've asked myself this question,

I don't know the answer, but....

One thing I can think of is, when mixing down a group to a stereo track, your software may change the bit depth and add dither or truncate to 16bit.

Make sure your software settings are set to maintain your bit depth (24bit mixdown to 24bit....no dither).

Please correct me if I'm wrong.....................no really...............do it........

 

[Alanfc]

Thanks J

yeah I've made that mistake, forgetting to uncheck the dither when I do that first bounce to stereo. Then when I export to final Wave then I check the dither

Thanks for the note

 

[Fire Dome]

I have a similar problem where there are about 7 different vocal parts and about 10 guitar parts all needing the same eq compression etc.
what program are you using? See if there is a feature to create a group bus and send/bus out the offending tracks to that and then insert an eq to the group channel. This should save some processing power.

hope I understood your problem

Dave

 

[Alanfc]

thanks Dave
Yes this would address my situation too. I'll be trying that. I have Cakewalk Homestudio and can do the whole aux bus thing (although have little experience with it)

Thanks

 

[crosstudio]

if your PC isn't fast enough, then you should put the processing into the tracks. make a copy of your tune so you can go back to the original... or copy each track that you are going to EQ and then archive the original.

do as many tracks as you can (non-destructive) and then apply the EQ to the copied tracks when your PC gets to the point where it can't handle the processing. Of course, you run the risk of not liking something once all the tracks are done, but you can always re-copy the original and re-apply the EQ to your liking.

 

[Massive Master]

If you have a number of tracks that all need the same treatment, something was wrong on the way in. Start at the source, and get it right from that point.

 

[Alanfc]

thank you

guess what I ended up doing- redoing all main guitars with fewer parts and smarter amp settings !

Thanks for all the help everyone anyways, I'm sure I'll use the info again