monitors vs laptop speakers - take a listen

  • Thread starter Thread starter mustardeer
  • Start date Start date
Your problem is that the guitar is really muddy. It's volume is in the low end and laptop speakers don't have any low end. Try adding some 3k to the guitar and brighen it up a bit.

The vocals are kind of fuzzy and distorted sounding (like an old-time record player)
 
Jay that makes a lot of sense actually. The laptop speakers have no low end.
But the best advice I've gotten on this board so far was to turn the monitors down while mixing. Everything sounds good when loud.

Ok, i'm ready to upload just trying to find the right website..
 
mustardeer said:
But the best advice I've gotten on this board so far was to turn the monitors down while mixing. Everything sounds good when loud.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm guessing since your ears weren't very fresh, they were starting to just ignore or 'compress' what was loud and focus on what was really quiet, so you were 'hearing' everything like you wanted... but to fresh ears it would've been a WHOLE different world..

It's very important to take breaks periodically, though I know I don't do it enough.. or even at all most of the time. If I do it's because I need sleep or because my headphones are starting to cause pain to my ears.. (the design of the ear cushions, not the sound in my ears..) :eek:
 
Sorry amigo, the links work now.
The fresh ear advice makes a lot of sense.
Typing from my phone now..
 
so i take it nobody could do better than my mix?
hmm, what happened to all the "pros" :)
 
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=4GK9TNXL
I was jibbed by your jibe so spent 15 mins on this. 5 downloading & converting the rest importing, treating, mixing, running off the mix, converting to MP3 & an extra 5 min uploading.
All I did was deal with the mud in the guitar & increase the freqs that sounded nicest.
I threw the blockfish close vocal on to the vox & a little reverb, cleared the mud from the drum & added some more reverb over the stereo out bus.
I also removed a lot of the background noise.
It doesn't have the smokey room vibe you were after but it certainly is less closet like. As you can hear - it's your recording space or rather your recording process within that space. You need to compensate for the room in your mic placement as well as mixing if you're not going to treat the room.
 
I just had a fiddle with it. I don't know what went wrong with your monitors, I have a hard time believing you could hear those 'drums' on there. Which, I think, need re-recording. I didn't bother taking care of the noise. I could've quantized them, but that shouldn't be necessary. Anyway, here you go.
 
i had a quick go on the laptop the other day..

ok,,,,so, then i forgot about it but! from what i saw i can give you a tip.

were the kick and snare miced with one mic?

if so.
either mic kick and snare separately.

OR run a few test recordings to ensure that the one mic is picking up a good balance of both drums.


i did all sorts of faffing about to try to separate them, like,,,i tried duplicating the drum track and gating the snare out. then putting it out of phase with the original to result in snare only...but it didn't really work so well.
 
sorry Steenamaroo, i forgot to mention i didn't include the "kick".
I listened to the kick track again and i thought it sounded like shit i didn't want to embarrass myself. I did record it onto a separate track though.

Ok, very exciting I'm gonna download everyone's work right now, can't wait.
 
nice, all 3 mixes are pretty nice.
Ok, singlespeak, mind sharing what you did there?
The drums are a bit loud but overall pretty impressive. Sounds like one song and not 3 separate tracks. Did you make space for each track with eq or something? what's on the vocals? do tell :)

and whoever named their work piano bar.mp3, i should have sent you tracks with a pop, the drums are way out of sync.
 
I did piano bar mp3 - the drums were , in fact everything was, dropped in exactly as you sent them. I didn't do any lining up at all.
My sole task was to demo how much clearer things could be.
 
With respect, I don't understand why this post even started :):)

Did you mix it for my little sister's single speaker tranny? My Dad's $3 PC headphones? The dude walking outside my house listening to music through the speaker on his crappy mobile?

Surely you make make a mix on the gear you saved for and carefully chose to be the closest to reference that you could afford, and if it's played back on a laptop where music reproduction is about as accurate as deaf lapsteel player, then that's what it sounds like.

If you play it on a different laptop, it'll sound way different again.

.. Just calling it how I see it...

Cheers,
FM
 
I actually like the topic. A little acoustic tune like this shouldn't present any shocking differences when played back on small speakers. It's a totally valid issue.
 
I try out my recordings on just about every system I have access to. I'll try it in my wife's stereo and computer, the kids' computer, a my cheap earbuds, my small cheap portable speakers, and of course the automobile. The only problem with the latter these days, is that I now drive an vehicle with an older CD player, and it doesn't seem to accept CD-RW discs (In fact, it greatly prefers Verbatim Lightscribe CD-Rs. Store-bought albums on CD are of course no problem). I really don't want to waste a permanent copy if it's a bad mix. I could try it in my wife's 2007 Ford Focus instead, but I really like the 5-band analog EQ in my '93 Grand Caravan.
 
+1 on checking it on multiple systems.

mustardeer: A typical consumer stereo system with an "audio in" jack can be your friend here. Your main problem was that the tracks just had too much low end in them. Commercial mixes are smaller than you might realize.
 
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