presence

[lascalaboy]

I heard someone talk the other day about presence.. and how different tracks need to be in different places.. anyone able to give me a quick run down on this? and how you do it in Audacity?

Thanks heaps...

 

[Kevin Deschwazi]

Presence is used to describe the effect of boosting eq around 4-8khz (although this may vary depending on who you talk to).

Everything in it's own place? yes, this is acheived by panning (moving different tracks around in the stereo spectrum) and eq ing so frequencies of various instruments/voices don't "argue" with each other.

Blue bears mixing article will explain it better than I could:

http://www.mojopie.com/mix.html

 

[grinder]

Presence is used to describe the effect of boosting eq around 4-8khz (although this may vary depending on who you talk to).

Everything in it's own place? yes, this is acheived by panning (moving different tracks around in the stereo spectrum) and eq ing so frequencies of various instruments/voices don't "argue" with each other.QUOTE]


Also, use reverb, for placing instruments. No reverb=in your face, lots of verb= far away. Used in conjunction with Kevins' suggestions will help determine the placement of the musicians on your sound stage.

 

[Cloneboy Studio]

I wrote an article sometime back dealing with visualizing a mix, as well as some rules (that were made to be broken) about using space and depth in a mix.

http://www.darksonus.com/articles/mixing_intro.html

 

[lascalaboy]

thanks... I'll read those articles...

THe panning I understand, and the revernb thing sounds simple enough.. it's the freq and eq stuf that I'll need to get my head around..

 

[Cloneboy Studio]

thanks... I'll read those articles...

THe panning I understand, and the revernb thing sounds simple enough.. it's the freq and eq stuf that I'll need to get my head around..

Believe it or not the EQ stuff becomes really easy after awhile. The best bet is to train your ears a bit. How I did it was to take 100's of audio tracks or samples isolated and turn up the gain on a parametric eq with a medium bandwidth (Q) and see what 'lived' in each little freq area.

That is also useful for subtractive EQ--do a big 10db boost and sweep thru a signal and when you find the one place it sounds really, really bad in park the EQ and then reduce the gain to like -3db or whatever sounds good.

You can do the reverse with positive EQ--set a huge cut and sweep around and when you find the aspect you want to boost curiously absent, boost the eq there.

 

[lascalaboy]

unfortunately, I'm running a pc based multi-track software.. so that will mean lots of 'undo'... unless there's a way to play on a copy of the original track?

 

[4-Man Takedown]

Hopefully your doing nondestructive editing, you can play around all you want on the original as long as you save it at some point. I would think DAW's would actually make experimenting like this easier.

Read lots, experiment more, repeat... Takes tim, but you'll start to get the hang of mixing when you have some experience under your belt, kinda like playing an instrument.