Newb General Mix Questions

T

thewanderer24

New member
I'm an experienced musician, but I am new to recording and getting ready to work on my first mix in the next few days. I've been thinking in circles a lot about how to approach it, and what to do with effects, eq, etc.. If it matters, I am working in Sonar 5.0 studio edition.

These are 2 relatively simple songs. Basically each has an acoustic guitar filling most of the space (it was mic'ed in stereo, one mic close to and pointing at the bridge and another close to and pointing towards the 12th fret). There's an electric bass recorded through a highend preamp, into my firepod line in, and a main vocal track with a female singer. Each song will have another track added (probably flute) for a solo spot (and maybe some other fills through the song), and may (or may not) have some backup vocals added. They also might have a little percussion added (shaker, etc.).

I dumped down a simple mix -- turn all levels so everything can be heard fairly evenly, and print to mp3, with just the guitar (one track pushed fully left, the other fully right) bass and vocals. There are little bits of stuff I heard, that need to be cleaned up, but it already sounds very good to me. I was kinda suprised, actually. I listened to it several places away from my monitors, and it still sounds really nice.

I guess my questions are, after reading endless stuff here and elsewhere about EQ'ing, compression, reverb, etc., do I really need to mess with that stuff on the guitar and bass tracks if they sound good together (and with the vocal) already?? The dynamics on the guitar and bass seem good to me as they are (they're fairly dynamic songs). So does it make sense for me to manually get rid of a couple stray peaks in the waveforms, and then compress the whole song together as a whole in the end, instead of processing individual tracks? In your experience, do you ever do it this way?

I definitely needed to put some compression on the vocal to tame some pretty heavy dynamics. But, I recorded in (IMO) a nice sounding room. I played around with many reverb ideas, but still love the sound of the vocals dry. I found myself tweaking reverb settings to get them to a point that I could just barely notice the reverb was there. I'm not sure one way or the other if the reverb on the vocal even is good or bad as an addition at this point. Do you guys ever run the main vocal with no reverb or eq?

Anyway, I know my explanation may be vague right now, but I am really trying to see if I am thinking in the right directions here. I am afraid of unnecessarily overprocessing some of the tracks that sound good to me, but don't want to let that fear give me a substandard end product.

Obviously, as the last tracks get added to these songs some of this stuff might answer itself, but I guess I am asking more philosophical questions about your approach to mixing.

Appreciate any comments from you more experienced folks.
 
My suggestion would be to listen in your monitoring environment to some commercial CDs with a similar type of music and arrangement that you have going. See if you can pick up on some of the things they are doing. Be careful not to be fooled by volume. A commercial CD is going to have a lot more volume than yours, so try to compare at equal volumes, i.e, turn down your monitors when listening to a commerical CD, turn up your monitors when listening to your mix.

If it sounds good to you, there is no need to over process anything. Reverb adds a little shimmer, and tastefully using the compression and EQ, can help even things out. But even though you have a million plug ins and processors you can use, you don't HAVE to use them. Especially if you are happy.

Eventually you will learn how to incorporate more processing to help enhance your sound. But I highly recommend developing your ear for some commerical music in your style.
 
Excellent answer from Sushi-Mon. In addition to listening to some reference CDs of similar music, maybe try doing some different mixes of your song, both with a minimalistic approach to the mix, and a more produced approach, and then listen to them the next day. Decide what you like and don't like about each (take notes), then go back and apply what you learned.
 
thewanderer24 said:
I guess my questions are, after reading endless stuff here and elsewhere about EQ'ing, compression, reverb, etc., do I really need to mess with that stuff on the guitar and bass tracks if they sound good together (and with the vocal) already??
Click to expand...

No! Straight answer to part of your question. If it sounds good.. don't mess with it. I actually do a lot of ah.. er.. nothing to a lot of tracks. Good mic, good preamp, put 'em in front of a good guitar.. not much needs any improvement.

Sounds like you have many of the mixing techniques under control. panning, relative levels.. . at least you seem to have a good sense for what those should sound like.

Fix ind. tracks, or whole mix? I tend to fix peaks in individual tracks, so I put a compressor on them. I mix instruments together and apply FX to that mixed track. I usually apply slightly different FX to main vocal than to background vocal. Then mix vocals together. Then mix instruments and vocals together. That's just my personal preference.
 
Thanks for the quick and reasonable answers guys. Good advice here, that I will use.

I don't know why, but I guess I really just needed someone with more experience to tell me to trust my ears.

More specific question...
If there is a track that is dynamically pretty good, but has a handful of peaks that are too big (meaning 6 db out of the rest of the track), does it make sense to go after those peaks manually, one by one, or would you always just use a compressor, limiter, etc?
 
thewanderer said:
More specific question...
If there is a track that is dynamically pretty good, but has a handful of peaks that are too big (meaning 6 db out of the rest of the track), does it make sense to go after those peaks manually, one by one, or would you always just use a compressor, limiter, etc?
Click to expand...
For me that's a situational call, depending on the quantity and size of the peaks.

If there's say, a dozen or so peaks (two dozen if you count +/- peak pairs) that just go off the scale relative to the average peaks, I'll knock those down manually; it's fast, accurate and transparent.

If after attacking those there's another level of excessive peaks that may number in the scores, and that are ruining the RMS without adding anything useful to the dynamics, those will probably get compressed or limited. The type of compression depends on the style and sound of the track.

G.
 
SouthSIDE Glen said:
For me that's a situational call, depending on the quantity and size of the peaks.

If there's say, a dozen or so peaks (two dozen if you count +/- peak pairs) that just go off the scale relative to the average peaks, I'll knock those down manually; it's fast, accurate and transparent.

If after attacking those there's another level of excessive peaks that may number in the scores, and that are ruining the RMS without adding anything useful to the dynamics, those will probably get compressed or limited. The type of compression depends on the style and sound of the track.

G.
Click to expand...


Thanks. Great answer. This is exactly what I was asking.
 
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