SouthSIDE Glen
independentrecording.net
After I voiced my great disdain for spring reverb in another forum, someone sent me a sample of something they did using spring verb. It was a kind of punk metal mix that was mixed fairly well. I'll admit that the use of spring reverb on it's metal-typical wide-pan doubled guitar worked well to add a fat and greasy crunch to the *heavily* distorted guitar. And because of the overall tone of the mix, the same spring verb on the spartan vocals sounded appropriate for the mix also.
It just goes to show that every sound has an application somewhere.
But I think more to the point is that it illustrates a problem with forums like this: everybody is coming from their own perspective. I am probably as guilty of this as anyone else.
The fact is that what is appropriate or not, what sounds good or not, etc. when was is referring to which boxes or plugs are "good", which mics and preamps are "good", what miking techniques work best, which sound design template is appropriate, etc. are all entirely dependant upon the style and arrangement of music we are working with.
That spring reverb worked well in that punk metal mix, but would sound absolutely awful in a dozen other genres. The same is true of the overall sound design on that song; a very stereotypical, almost cliche, soundstage layout for metal mixes that worked great for that cut, but would sound thin and amateurish if translated over to almost anything but metal.
I come from a diverse history of musical tastes. I even went through my metal period in my late teens like just about everybody else. But these days my particular orbit around the musical solar system doesn't take me anywhere near metal...except for this board and one jukebox at a biker bar that is a regular monthly stop for one of my live bands
. Most of the rock guitar I work with is not heavily distorted, is not hard panned, and is not all power chords. Somebody playing a jazz-infused blues solo on a Telecaster is entirely different than someone crunching out rhythm power chords on doubled Pauls.
And while in my musical orbit metal is seen as a single, relatively distant planet inhabited by a small subset of the musical population, there are many many folks on this board, however, who's perspective is just the opposite; they orbit almost exclusively in the hard rock-to-heavy metal realm, and much of what I do in terms of mixing technique is entirely foreign to them.
And of course the hip hoppers are a whole other world of music poduction altogether; to the point where they use entirely different definitions for common industry words (in the hip hop orbit, "producer" is what the rest of us call a particular flavor of "artist/composer" and "the beat" has little to do with time signatures.)
As we have seen lately, there are a lot of regular people on this board that inhabit just about every planet in the musical system from Stravinsky to movie scores to space rock to gospel and everything in between.
We all somehow need to do a better job - IMHumbleO - of IDing where we're coming from when we post. When someone comes on asking "how should I pan my guitars?" and does not ID the music style or describe the arrangement, there is no good way to answer the question. And when we all come back with our own assumptions that their style and arrangements are just like ours, this poor poster is going to get bombarded with a dozen different opinions, and often a thread hijack ensues with a couple of the responders start debating a finer point of disagreement amongst them. We see this happen all the time here
.
I'm not sure just how to fix it, and I can be just as broken as the next guy sometimes, but I think if we all got a bit more specific as to just what we're talking about, made a few less assumptions that everybody else was recording, mixing and playing the exact same band we were, and gave more varied answers that A will work for this stuff, but B will work for that, etc. that we'd have a big inprovement in the S/N ratio in these forums
G.
It just goes to show that every sound has an application somewhere.
But I think more to the point is that it illustrates a problem with forums like this: everybody is coming from their own perspective. I am probably as guilty of this as anyone else.
The fact is that what is appropriate or not, what sounds good or not, etc. when was is referring to which boxes or plugs are "good", which mics and preamps are "good", what miking techniques work best, which sound design template is appropriate, etc. are all entirely dependant upon the style and arrangement of music we are working with.
That spring reverb worked well in that punk metal mix, but would sound absolutely awful in a dozen other genres. The same is true of the overall sound design on that song; a very stereotypical, almost cliche, soundstage layout for metal mixes that worked great for that cut, but would sound thin and amateurish if translated over to almost anything but metal.
I come from a diverse history of musical tastes. I even went through my metal period in my late teens like just about everybody else. But these days my particular orbit around the musical solar system doesn't take me anywhere near metal...except for this board and one jukebox at a biker bar that is a regular monthly stop for one of my live bands
. Most of the rock guitar I work with is not heavily distorted, is not hard panned, and is not all power chords. Somebody playing a jazz-infused blues solo on a Telecaster is entirely different than someone crunching out rhythm power chords on doubled Pauls.And while in my musical orbit metal is seen as a single, relatively distant planet inhabited by a small subset of the musical population, there are many many folks on this board, however, who's perspective is just the opposite; they orbit almost exclusively in the hard rock-to-heavy metal realm, and much of what I do in terms of mixing technique is entirely foreign to them.
And of course the hip hoppers are a whole other world of music poduction altogether; to the point where they use entirely different definitions for common industry words (in the hip hop orbit, "producer" is what the rest of us call a particular flavor of "artist/composer" and "the beat" has little to do with time signatures.)
As we have seen lately, there are a lot of regular people on this board that inhabit just about every planet in the musical system from Stravinsky to movie scores to space rock to gospel and everything in between.
We all somehow need to do a better job - IMHumbleO - of IDing where we're coming from when we post. When someone comes on asking "how should I pan my guitars?" and does not ID the music style or describe the arrangement, there is no good way to answer the question. And when we all come back with our own assumptions that their style and arrangements are just like ours, this poor poster is going to get bombarded with a dozen different opinions, and often a thread hijack ensues with a couple of the responders start debating a finer point of disagreement amongst them. We see this happen all the time here
.I'm not sure just how to fix it, and I can be just as broken as the next guy sometimes, but I think if we all got a bit more specific as to just what we're talking about, made a few less assumptions that everybody else was recording, mixing and playing the exact same band we were, and gave more varied answers that A will work for this stuff, but B will work for that, etc. that we'd have a big inprovement in the S/N ratio in these forums
G.
