Mix It Yourself - Up All Night Blues

  • Thread starter Thread starter XLR
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There's a thing I wanted to ask about my mix: Do you, especially if listening on headphones, perceive anything "special" about the panning on the guitars and vocals? It's not moving around or anything, but I used not only differences in volume (like normal panpots do), but a combination of level and runtime differences, like a near-coincident (like ORTF or NOS) micing technique would have provided to achieve the panorama positions.

Edit:
I thought maybe I should illustrate this. So I bounced the first 12 bars of the rhythm and the lead guitars panned left and right using three different settings. In this file, you can first hear the method I used in my mix. Both guitars are attenuated by 6.125dB and delayed by 0.522 milliseconds on one side each. In the second 12 bars, the guitars are panned to each side using the normal panpot such that the volume differences are roughly the same as in the first 12 bars and the stereo meter shows them in the same place as in the first example. The panpots (which go to 64 on both sides) read 18 in this case. In the third run through, I tried to match the stereo positions from example one only using the panpots. Here, they read 50. After that, I pasted example one again for comparison.

In all three settings, I didn't alter the reverb the guitars ran through, the seeming differences in reverb level and EQ are just the different panning methods working.

For best effect, listen on headphones.

What do you think?
 
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Listening on speakers now for the first time. Man, things sound different, especially aspects of stereo width.

nessbass - I think the double-a-mono-track-and-delay-one-side effect is a good one. It does give a similar feel to time-arrival stereo mike configurations. And I did notice the width that gave in your original mix, especially on headphones.

new mixes:
Kainz - the second mix has a nice saturated smoothness to it and the vocal sounds stellar.

rayc - Vocal's kind of quiet in the second mix but man, I love that bass line.
 
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Eddie – Right off I like the balance in the rhythm section. The rhythm gtr can get repetitive sounding but doesn’t here with it's level and tone. Another one where the bass gtr is deep but very distinct. Nice effect on Anfontan’s elec. I love the tone of Dogman’s part and the fearless polytonal line. Despite all our rock'n roll no-rules attitudes around here, we're all way too bound by harmonic tradition so it's good to have some more adventurous use of tonality I think. Nice arrangement. This would fit right in at the Boeuf sur le Toit nightclub in 1920s Paris with Darius Milhaud and company.

rayc – I like the way it starts with the staggered entries, like the band’s just walking on stage and picking up their instrumenst. Good balance w/the vocal.
 
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Timothy Lawler said:
I love the tone of Dogman’s part and the fearless polytonal line.
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Fearless polytonal line? I thought I had a good handle on "tactfulness" but I see I can learn something from you here as well. :D

Maybe with some better editing I could pull it off more convincingly, but the idea was during the Dogman solo the horrified rhythm section players drop out one at a time until he's done, then finish the last verse without him.
 
EddieRay said:
...the idea was during the Dogman solo the... rhythm section players drop out one at a time until he's done...
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A very interesting issue to me, since I like polytonal and atonal music. I can see the scenario described happening in reality, given many musicans' orientation towards traditional harmony.

Go Dogman. There are no rules. :cool:
 
Kainz said:
Hey again :)

I decided to give this one another shot with my "real" mixing stuff (as opposed to Reaper + freebies). So this time it is Cubase SX 3 and some commercial plugs (mainly some URS stuff and some Voxengo).

I was kinda surprised from the spaceness, clearness and dynamic difference it made. My mixing approach was the same - trying to keep the tracks quite raw and give them some dirt and character (some blues yeah! :p).

The "proper" version

Check out the space and dynamics in this one - it just keeps sounding better and better if you crank it up, no smashed dynamics here :). And again no mastering.
Click to expand...

That does sound good! But it's only about 36 seconds long. :confused:

I just listened to 'em all. This was way cool. :cool: :cool: :cool:
 
EddieRay said:
That does sound good! But it's only about 36 seconds long. :confused:

I just listened to 'em all. This was way cool. :cool: :cool: :cool:
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Nice to hear you liked it. I have no idea why it drops off after 36 secs for you, works perfectly for me. Try downloading it again? Also sometimes emptying the temporary internet files folder and downing it again seems to help with these kind of problems.

To Timothy:

I used mostly freebie plugins for the saturation effects. Antress vintage compressor series, namely LA2A and 1176 clones - wich tbh suck and don't have anything common with the hardware units (except the GUI). Also they pretty much suck in dynamic control too but they saturate nicely :p. So I use them as a "dirt machines", works nicely :).
 
EddieRay said:
http://www.nowhereradio.com/artists/album.php?aid=3924&alid=-1

Revised mix uploaded...
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Nice. A bit more subtle arrangement. I like the bass balance, miss the vocal delay. Don't know which of your versions I like better.


Kainz -
Antress vintage compressor series, namely LA2A and 1176 clones - wich tbh suck and don't have anything common with the hardware units (except the GUI). Also they pretty much suck in dynamic control too but they saturate nicely
Click to expand...
I really like the tone you got in your mix. The Antares site seems to be down at the moment, but do you mean that the plugs mentioned are freebies from them?

rayc - Holy crap, I love the mix. Yes, seriously. I do really think we're all way too conservative most of the time. Ah, yeah, that's good.
 
Timothy Lawler said:
Kainz - I really like the tone you got in your mix. The Antares site seems to be down at the moment, but do you mean that the plugs mentioned are freebies from them?
Click to expand...

Not Antares but Antress, just google it up. And yes the plugins I meant are free (amongst with plenty of other ones at Antress site).

I played around with the tracks some more and did one mix from another point of view - not that raw sounding anymore and more in balance. Check it out. I think I may infact like the raw one bit more than this new more polished one.
 
I just did a version...really simple. I wanted it to sound more like a bar band. Slightly raw.

Blues
 
Dogman - a very full sounding, well balanced mix and arrangement.

Kainz - "Antress", ah well, so I can't read or spell. :eek: Really, thanks, I checked out the site and got the plugs. The new mix is huge sounding. The bass gtr is a mile wide. Much respect for your mixing ability.

EVERY mix in the thread has some great ideas. Listening to all the versions the main thing I'm taking away from it is that I'm way too conservative with my mixing approach. Thanks everyone for the lesson.
 
I downloaded some of the Antress plugs last week. Mainly the "vintage" stuff. haven't played with any bar the vintager & I was none to subtle with that so I didn't use it for these mixes - they seem pretty flash though.
 
here's my mix, done in Reaper with free plugins :o

All Night Jam Session

i worked on it for a long time last night, made some final adjustments to it today, hopefully it's decent. i messed around with using compression as an effect on certain tracks, to give each track it's own sorta space. i used a few different comps and really cranked em out to give a different sound to each guitar part. this was a good song for me to experiment with getting different sounds to sit together, as well as getting similar sounds to not step on each other. let me know what you guys think :o
 
I got home from work at 6 am, saw this thread, and decided to join in on the fun. I did a decent amount of "producing" on this song. It's different...


Here's my version
 
zed32 - Yeah, I like the low end of the second mix. The gtrs sound big. Reaper has some good compressors - some 1176 and LA2A-ish stuff.

This is Poison - Lots of creative arrangement ideas in it. During the fist vocal verse I like the rhythmic offset of the pitch shifted gtr line and the bit of editing of it taking out that awkward low note. The sudden vocal effect sounds good. Also the bass gtr editing during the 2nd vocal verse.
 
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