psychoacoustics

[Sennheisersucks]

the biggest problem bothering me lately is that I just can't seem to make my mixes sound like a band playing in front of you. I have several reverbs that I use but to no avail it just sounds like someone took a boombox into a large room and played my one-dimentional mix. What's the deal? I listen to commercial cds and the drums sound behind everything, but it's not a volume thing. The vocals sound up front but not necessarily louder than anything else. How do I put things in their places? I'm going off a whim here and assuming you do this with reverb so here are my verbs, Cakewalk FX3 soundstage, Lexicon Pantheon and it's surround counterpart, RealVerb, TrueVerb, T.C. Electronics Reverb, and a handful of others I've accumulated over the past years of never deleting old apps and ending up with 5 million plugs to choose from in the newest one(Sonar 4). Anyone know what I can do?

 

[soundchaser59]

You'll have a hard time trying to play psycho-acoustic tricks just by toying with reverb.

As much as we all diss Behringer, they did actually make one piece of gear that is a lot of fun to play with......the Edison. It does some real psychoacoustic manipulation, probably with phasing tricks and stuff......all with 5 easy to use knobs!!

I've toyed with one, and I've heard other home made mixes done with one, and the result is actually quite effective at focusin and imaging sounds within a mix.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your opinion of Behringer) the Edison is not made any more. There is a place in Canada that has some left, but good luck getting them to ship it across the border.....

 

[Ford Van]

Try adjusting the pre-delay times on your reverb.

For faster, purcussive sounds, use pre-delays around 9-30ms.

For mellower, smooth sounds (vocals, strings, etc...) try pre-delays starting around 30ms, but could go as high as 100ms!

Try it.

 

[Sennheisersucks]

Aha!

Yessir, playing with the predelay is doing something nice. Since I posted my question I tried sending my different tracks to different instances of cakewalk soundstage with the only thing different being where I had the sound source in my room and that's OK, but I never have it 100% wet usually somewheres between 8 and 15% wet. So the end result is a slight nudge in the direction I want things spacially. From what I understand, this is one of the hardest things to accel at. I don't want my songs to sound like a bunch of tracks playing together at the same tempo, ya know? I'm forever comparing my work to Floyd when I get stumped. Not much of what I do sounds like Floyd, but I want that convincing feel. Anyone else wanna speak up?

 

[Chibi Nappa]

I listen to commercial cds and the drums sound behind everything, but it's not a volume thing. The vocals sound up front but not necessarily louder than anything else. How do I put things in their places? I'm going off a whim here and assuming you do this with reverb

Reverb won't put vocals up front. It will push them (and anything else) to the back.

 

[tkingen]

Have you played around with eq? Carving a space out for each track with eq can help achieve better separation. Then when adding reverb or delay the reflections will also be clearer in the mix as they are reflecting the prominent carved out frequencies for each track.
Hope this helps.

 

[scrubs]

Keep in mind that most of your sound is going to be determined at the tracking stage. The quality of the source, room, mics, preamps, converters, etc. and utilizing appropriate miking techniques (close miking and distance miking) can greatly help you getting things to sound "right" when it comes to mixing. EQ, panning, compression and reverb at mixdown will put the finishing touches on, but if you didn't track it right to begin with, you will have a hard time fixing it.